Star Trek manga is on the way, featuring a new look for the series set in the time frame of The Next Generation, in a new anthology from Tokyopop.

Newsarama reported in its forums that Tokyopop is planning an anthology "featuring five stories that will clock in at around 50 pages each", in a standard anime-sized volume that's "a very Japanese looking/feeling." Editor Mark Paniccia said that the material would be quite different from previous incarnations of Star Trek comics: "There might be a familiar face but this is a very unorthodox approach to the property."

Paniccia sought out stories "from the far-flung corners of the Star Trek universe", featuring little-known or original characters. He sought both writers familiar with Star Trek who had never written for the franchise before as well as writers with experience writing Star Trek, but he felt the latter produced stories that had "little or no Trek feel to them" while the long-term Trek writers "weren't thinking out of the box enough." The Japanese publishing partners wanted more of an emphasis on main characters, so the final collection will include a mix of first time writers and some familiar names from Star Trek comics.

“Licensed manga editor Jake Forbes and myself contributed to the on-staff portion of the anthology - two stories - and Jim Alexander, Chris Dows and Mike Barr provided the remaining three," Paniccia explained. “Mike Barr came up with this cool and creepy space spider story that features the main cast and Jake did a great holodeck story with Worf in Feudal Japan...Scottish scribe Jim Alexander provided a kickin’ Klingon battle story and I wrote a little tale that takes place in my favorite alternate reality, the Mirror Universe."

Thus far the manga focuses exclusively on The Next Generation, not Deep Space Nine and Voyager which are set during the same era. There is no release date set for this first anthology.

The original item and some of the concept art are at Newsarama.

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