Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Welcome to the first episode of my third blog, The Star Trek Journal. With Star Trek being one of my favourite franchises of all time, with the other being Star Wars, I wanted to give it the attention that I haven't been able to give it on Josh's Geek Cave. Especially because season 3 of Strange New Worlds is starting next week and like I did for the first two seasons on Josh's Geek Cave, I will be reviewing every episode after I've watched it. Today though I'm going to be going over the history of the officially licensed magazines that Star Trek has had over the last 43 years. I did a broad overview style post like this on Josh's Geek Cave two or three years ago, but I wanted to do an updated version since the most recent magazine, Star Trek Explorer, ended its run a few months ago, making this the first time since 1982 that we haven't had a Star Trek magazine available to us to read. Engage!
In 1982 Dan Madsen, under his company, FANtastic Media began publishing Star Trek: The Official Fan Club Magazine as a way for fans to keep up with news on the latest Star Trek movies that were coming up. Dan had actually started publishing the newsletter style magazine in 1979 just before Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released, but 1982 is when Paramount officially licensed the magazine.
This was before the internet and Star Trek was a much smaller franchise at the time, being that there was only one TV show, one cartoon series, and one feature film at the time. Not to mention very little merchandise. And of course the licensed version of the magazine began publication the same month that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was released.
I remember the first issue I ever got. It was the September/October 1992 issue that had the Enterprise-D and the entire main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation on the cover. I remember looking through it endlessly. I was five years old at the time, so I wasn't actually reading the articles. What I was doing though was looking at the pictures and looking at the toys, books and other items in the merchandise catalogue in the middle of the magazine. I still have my original copy of it too, and actually reading the magazine now in 2025 is awesome. The episode, "The Inner Light" had just come out three months earlier, but given the lead time of magazine publication, the magazine was only just printing letters sent in by the fans in this issue.
In 1994, Star Trek: The Official Fan Club Magazine ended publication and a new magazine, Star Trek: Communicator began publication. This wasn't really a new magazine, it was just a revamped version of what had come before. By 1994 Star Trek had expanded to include DS9, Voyager was about to start or had started already, and TNG had transitioned to the big screen with Star Trek Generations. So the franchise had come a long way in the 12 years since the Official Fan Club Magazine had begun publication.
Unlike Star Wars Insider, Star Trek: Communicator, and every other Star Trek magazine that has been published, wasn't consistently available in my area. So I didn't get an issue of Communicator until 2000. The crew of Voyager is on the cover, and the issue itself had a review on the show's sixth season and a preview of the upcoming seventh and final season.
With Enterprise being cancelled in 2005, Communicator was also cancelled. But unlike with Star Trek Explorer's cancellation earlier this year, the cancellation of Star Trek: Communicator wasn't planned. In fact in the final issue, which has Seven of Nine on the cover, the people who wrote the magazine were talking about the next two issues. I remember picking this issue up at the store not long after it came out and got excited because the next issue was going to be talking about the making of the two part Enterprise episode, "In A Mirror, Darkly" and then the issue after that was going to be the "Farewell Enterprise" issue. But I guess Decipher, the company who owned the Official Star Trek Fan Club and published the magazine, decided to cancel it after what ended up being the final issue had been published, or at least had gone to the printers, because no further issues ever came out. At first I just thought it was because the magazine suddenly wasn't available again in my area.
From 1999 to 2003 another magazine, published by Midsummer Books Ltd, was running concurrently with Star Trek: Communicator. The magazine was called Star Trek: The Magazine and contained a combination of real-world articles, interviews with cast and crew members, and in-universe information on starships, technology, characters, uniforms, and history. This information was taken from the Star Trek Fact Files, which was a magazine series published in the U.K., Europe, Asia, and Australia that focused solely on the in-universe information. I've only ever had three issues of Star Trek: The Magazine. All of them were from 2000, 2001 and 2002. One had Chakotay on the cover, one had Tuvok on the cover, and one had Archer on the cover. They're still really fun to read.
Speaking of the UK, Star Trek Magazine began publication in 1995. Published by Titan Magazines, this was essentially the overseas version of Star Trek: Communicator even though the content was vastly different. For example, unlike Communicator, Star Trek Magazine contained excerpts from DC Comics's Star Trek runs. Though that ended after the first 20 issues or so.
In 2006, following the announcement that a new Star Trek movie was in the works at Paramount, Titan Magazines began publishing a North American version of Star Trek Magazine with its own numbering, separate from the British version. I got this first issue and by this point I was 19, going on 20 so I was able to buy the magazine on my own. I remember reading everything in the magazine. Including the rumour that JJ Abrams would be directing the new movie, not just producing it.
For whatever reason, I was able to get Star Trek Magazine pretty consistently when it first started coming out. I missed the second issue but got just about every issue from issue 3 to issue 11 and then I ended up not getting a bunch of issues because I was busy with college and didn't have a whole lot of time to keep up with any of my fandoms. During the summer of 2009, well, during my summer in 2009, I was able to get the issues that covered the release of the first film in the Kelvin Timeline film series. Then throughout 2010 I was off and on with the magazine, because, again, I was finishing up college and by 2012 I'd dropped off it because it was really difficult to find again. Even though it had been consistently available in my area between 2006 and 2011. The last issue I got was in 2014.
Then in 2021, Titan Magazines began publishing an entirely new Star Trek magazine, titled, Star Trek Explorer. This magazine was exactly the same as previous iterations, though its layout mirrors what Titan Magazines currently has for the official Star Wars magazine, Star Wars Insider. I stumbled upon this issue by accident because, like with all the other Star Trek magazines before it, the consistency of availability of Star Trek Explorer was bad. Especially because I don't go to my local comic book store very much anymore, it was harder to get at Chapters, and the grocery store and drugstore that I go to regularly didn't carry it.
As I mentioned before, the cancellation of Star Trek Explorer seems to have been planned because they announced in issue 13 that issue 14 would be the final issue, and they treat the final issue like a final issue. The problem is that I can't seem to find any reason for its cancellation. I can't find any information on the cancellation of any of the Star Trek magazines that I've talked about here. With Star Trek: Communicator it made sense, since Enterprise had been cancelled, the plans for a fifth Star Trek movie produced by Rick Berman (11th movie in total) had been scrapped, and there weren't any plans for Star Trek to continue on TV or in theatres. Yes, there were novels coming out, but IDW wouldn't get the Star Trek comic book license until 2007, so there really wasn't anything on the horizon for the franchise in 2005.
For Star Trek Explorer it doesn't make as much sense, because while Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy have all ended, Strange New Worlds is going to be around until the end of the fifth season, and Starfleet Academy is going to be starting probably in 2026, if not late 2025. Though with Section 31 having flopped earlier this year, I doubt we'll see any further big event streaming movies from Star Trek. I also doubt we're going to see a big Star Trek theatrical feature film anytime soon either. Mostly because Paramount still wants to do a fourth movie set in the Kelvin Timeline even though the cast of those movies are so busy these days that getting them together for a fourth movie seems to be difficult currently. Even still there's still plenty of Star Trek to write about in magazine form, so it makes less sense to cancel Star Trek Explorer.
This is the first time in 43 years that there hasn't been a Star Trek magazine anywhere. During that year between the cancellation of Star Trek: Communicator and Titan Magazines bringing Star Trek Magazine to North America, UK fans at least had Star Trek Magazine to read. But, now, in 2025, this is the first time since 1982 that we don't have a Star Trek magazine to look forward to every month or every two months, however often the magazines of the past came out. Which is actually a bit sad, because these magazines are a chronicle of Star Trek's history.
The first magazine initially started publication, before Paramount officially endorsed it, when there were only two Star Trek shows, the original series from the '60s and the animated series from the early '70s, and a movie was about to come out. And while the magazine would only be available to members of the Official Star Trek Fan Club until 1988, when it started selling at newsstands and in grocery stores, bookstores etc, a Star Trek magazine has not only documented the evolution of the franchise, but of the Star Trek fandom too. As I mentioned earlier, in the very first issue that I ever got of any official Star Trek fan club produced magazine, the letters written by the fans that were published in the letters column, talked about "The Inner Light", which had just aired at the time the letters were written. That was back in 1992. And in that same issue, as well as the next issue after that, we were getting updates on DS9, including a breakdown of the cast and who they would be playing, as the show hadn't premiered yet.
That's going to be it for me for today, but I've got plenty to talk about on this blog, as well as on The Star Wars Journal, and Josh's Geek Cave. Until then, Live Long & Prosper!
