With the entire Star Trek multiverse under attack, and the franchise rewriting an entire universe in the dark, twisted image of Lore, Screen Rant is proud to give readers and fans an exclusive look behind the scenes. The Lore War is coming, and our latest instalment of Captain's Log calls upon the creative team behind the shocking event to do their best in preparing audiences for what lies in store.

For those die-hard, devoted, or casual fans who somehow missed word that the Lore War is about to reshape everything you thought you knew about Star Trek, the bold event now lies on the horizon, set to begin this March. Uniting the talents of the Eisner-nominated writers of Star Trek, Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly, alongside the acclaimed w riter of Star Tre: Defiant Christopher Cantwell, and soon-to-be household name artist Davide Tinto, Lore War #1 is erasing our heroes' memories, and planting them into a rewritten reality where Lore is God... but the Sisko remains. Read on for a full breakdown of the event from Lanzing, Kelly, Cantwell, and Star Trek group editor at IDW Heather Antos, including first looks at some of your favorite Trek icons, as you've never seen them before.

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ScreenRant: So we must begin with Star Trek #500, and the incredible two-page spread by your artist Davide Tinto. We'll get to that teaser art itself, but talk about setting the table for what is about to come. Readers got to see multiple failed attempts at rewriting the Trek universe, and ideas of what a universe designed by Lore would look like. a militarized redesign of the Enterprise, the list goes on. With so many returning and reimagined characters, how do you decide who's included, what are the factions, and why a hero or villain would be on one side and not the other?

Heather Antos: "We actually spent almost an entire day talking about this specifically when we did our writers retreat for Lore War earlier this year. That was one of the very first things we did, actually, was sitting down and dividing who's where, who all do we need to include?"

Jackson Lanzing: "It was a fun exercise, very similar actually, in some ways to how we broke our previous event Day of Blood. We did a writer's room, we all sat down for you know full day, and then another full day, and another full day... and really just broke out the story on a whiteboard as quickly as we could. Obviously Chris has enormous amounts of TV writing and writer room experience, Collin and I have some, and I think we were all able to come to the table and be like, "All right, we can we can cook a story real quick as long as we all focus, and we all do this in a relatively regimented way. We can break this in a way that feels really cool, really, really quick, and then give ourselves the time to make sure that it's all as impactful and exciting as possible. With Day of Blood, we listed every character who was going to be in the book, and made sure that each one of them had a really great moment."

Collin Kelly: "We had a heart attack looking at the 23 names on that list, and realizing that we had to do service to all of them."

Jackson Lanzing: "With Lore War we got to add this additional element, which is: 'Who are they in this universe? What is their context? What is their world? What are their responsibilities? What if their history has changed? What do they care about, what do they not care about?' How different is Worf for having grown up in a Starfleet that doesn't function on ideas of frontier, but rather ideas of empire? How much does that change Worf, or how much does that let him embrace the person that he kind of always was aching to be? And then what does that draw back from him, right? Some of his humanity, his empathy, those things that we expect that he's learned from the show, but what does he gain out of that? I think one of the most beautiful things that you can see in Lore War #1 is that there is a marked difference in his relationship with his son, Alexander.

Christopher Cantwell: "Yeah. Because of what he's been through in the previous arc, we didn't want to undo all of the beautiful dramatic character work we had done in our respective arcs leading up to this thing. If Lore plays 52 card pick-up with the universe, we didn't want to be like, '...and none of that mattered,' you know? It was more intrinsic to the characters' souls, for lack of a better word, that they had been affected by what they had been through. And they were carrying that forward, even if they were completely unaware of what Lore had done to them in this reshuffle."

"When we were trying to figure out Lore's universe, what was fun was there's probably been thousands of iterations, because he's trying to figure out a bunch of different things. And yes he's very smart, and so is Data, but they're not omnipotent."

Collin Kelly: "That's the really interesting thing for us: looking at these characters and asking, 'What can he change about them, but still allow them the freedom to develop in a way that he might not expect?' That was us saying, 'Yes, Lore has 70% of this, but then what's the 30% that's going to not only surprise him, but surprise our audience?'"

SR: Speaking of surprising your audience, the first glimpse of the USS Enterprise as remade by Lore made major waves. I fell like there's almost no image that can communicate the Lore War idea better.

Collin Kelly: "I think that's a really cool and important piece of the conversation. I think a lot of times people might see change for no reason other than change, and yeah, that is very irritating and very outrage-inducing. But I think for us, it always comes back to character. Because the captain of that Enterprise is Worf himself. In the way that we were talking about this new world, allowing him to be this version of himself. I know that fans out there, much like me, much like us, have always wanted to see Worf get that uplift. Worf is a born captain. And yes, the Defiant, as a small warship, kicks ass. But putting him in the role of the flagship, I think he has that potential."

"So being able to take that character and, in this dark reality, give him the thing that his heart most desires? That's the kind of 'twist of the knife' that I think Lore War, the Lore Universe, really thrives on. It's something that Lore says, like "I''ve given you the monkey's paw. I've given you what you've always wanted, but it's something that will twist your soul." I think that drawing that from character, it's not just a redesign because it kicks ass. It's a redesign because it's going to emotionally hurt, and fuel story, is the key of everything we do. There's a reason for everything within Lore's universe, because even though he is a chaos monster, he is meticulous in his design."

Jackson Lanzing: "That brain work of like, 'Let's make sure that everyone's got a great beat, a great moment, a great thing.' When you're talking about an event comic, you're trying to put that on every page... I genuinely think that we achieve that in Lore War #1. Every page has some big reveal, some big moment, some big cool thing that also is set up for big payoff... I think knowing the full clockwork of it, I can't wait for people to see 'redacted, redacted, redacted.' I can't wait for people to see what it is like as some of these characters start to become aware of their circumstance."

"When you enter a world where everyone has been effectively tortured by being turned into either their worst self, or their happiest, most complacent self, or their most loyal self, or their most disloyal self, or whatever. Everybody's been turned into people who, if you were to go to Star Trek's original characters and say, 'Do you want this?' They would most likely either say, 'Yes, I want that, but it's a devil's bargain I'll never take,' or 'No, I'll never do that.' These are alignments these characters would never achieve, if it weren't for Lore being God. As they start to become aware of that--and I'm not saying that everyone will, but as certain characters start to become aware of what could be--I think it's going to be really interesting to see how that then reflects on the world that they're in.

"Again, I go back to this idea of Star Trek as rebel fiction, which is something you don't get to do a lot. Star Trek: Insurrection is almost as close as they've ever gotten, or Star Trek: Into Darkenss, where you have the idea of, 'Starfleet's gone bad, how do we stop them?' This is so much bigger than that. This is like the very fabric of the universe is wrong. How do we deal with that? I think that's going to be a really exciting challenge to give to people who up until now, have been tasked with the very core responsibility of keeping that fabric of the universe together, and understanding it, and keeping it sacrosanct. The museum that Starfleet has built, they're about to have to burn. And that's going to be really interesting to see what that looks like."

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SR: Now that we're years into this new era of Star Trek at IDW, the ongoing stories would suggest that a build-up to Lore War was the plan all along. Comic fans know that's rare, but given how Heather previously spoke about the initial ideas formed with this creative team, I might but it. At what point did you decide that Star Trek and Star Trek: Defiant would both be paving the way to do "House of M meets Secret Wars," but with Lore as the villain?

Jackson Lanzing: "I think I can start by maybe correcting the record a bit, to say that the idea of a culminative event and these books swinging together and slamming together and using all of Star Trek, that was always on the table. It wasn't until Chris put Lore on Defiant, which was a decision Chris made when he took Defiant and ran with it, that we all looked at each other and said, 'Oh, okay, well, that gives us a really important piece on the board.' I think Lore was something we left out of our pitch, in large part because we have a lot of affinity for him as a character. And I was a little afraid he would take over the book. L-o-l-o-l.

"So we instead placed a lot of emphasis on Kahless and the Godkiller Array, and the various initial mysteries that Defiant and Star Trek were playing out. But what I think was brilliant about Chris's casting of Lore on Defiant was that he started him in a place of wanting redemption, which meant that the most exciting place to go would be one where he had fully turned around on that, and decided that it was everyone else who needed to be redeemed. That sort of set a seed at least a year before any of us said the words 'Lore War.'"

Christopher Cantwell: "Yeah, and I would say that when I was putting the cast together for Defiant for that first arc, I ran it by Collin and Jackson and Heather, and said, 'What about Lore? I think this would be interesting,' just to bring in a few more rogues. But I do Jackson saying that could be great if we were able to build out more of a character story for him. Because in success, if this goes as long as we want it to go, which is never a guarantee in comics, Collin and I flirted around with the idea that Lore eventually becomes the big bad of everything. So it was great to start two years earlier, on everything I was writing in Defiant was building towards the turn of that character. Then we finally get that turn, we get the inflection point of him in Day of Blood. Let's take him and have him try to be good, try to have a redemptive arc, and then pivot him hard in Day of Blood in a way that then he's parked out there for us to play with in the future.

Collin Kelly: "And especially aboard the Theseus, so much of our storytelling focus has been on Data, and Data's own journey of humanity, and discovering kind of where he fits within that crew and within that found family. Then Chris was over there being able to flesh out Lore, his actual family, we knew what we had there is a brother story, with two guys who are really desperate to understand each other. Much like Sisko and Worf, they have this deep internal connection, and they have the opportunity to truly be each other's equal and opposite. But instead because of their unfortunate natures, find themselves at odds.

So even though yes, it is 'Secret Wars in the Star Trek universe,' at its core, it is a personal story between two men. And once we realized that that was the spine that we could hang this incredible event on, we knew that it was cooking with gas.

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SR: Heather, the last time we spoke you mentioned how much Paramount was giving. When you say, "We're going to have Lore nuke the entire Star Trek multiverse," that apparently didn't bother them?

Heather Antos: "Yeah, working with Paramount has been quite the interesting journey in all of this. Because what we're doing in these comics is quite bigger and bolder--no pun intended--than a lot of things done in the comics previously. And with every single pitch I've done, it's constantly been this, 'is this the one? The one where where they say no, this is the one where you go too far?' When we got to the issue when Lore hits hits the big red button, and everything goes to shit, that was where I was like this is definitely it, this is definitely where they tell me 'you're fired. You can't do this anymore.' But every step of the way it's been like, 'okay cool. Here's some suggestions on, different characters, and things to throw in there.' It's been honestly great that the working relationship with Paramount has been so much fun, and how excited and into all of this that that they have gotten."

Jackson Lanzing: "I feel like working with them has really been them getting used to us, and us getting used to them. But all of that coming down now to an effective trust, where we say we all know that these books are swinging for the fences. We know that readers have have noted that, journalists have noted that, Eisner Awards people have noted that. People have been willing to look at Star Trek comics differently since this crew came on. I think that's been a real testament to what Heather's done, what Chris has done, to what everyone along the line has done here. But it also is a testament to Paramount trusting us to do it, and be willing to say, 'these books should break through, they should be more ambitious, they should be like what Star Trek was on TV when it first showed up.' Something that's existing in a very pop culture space, but is breaking those rules, and is changing things, and trying to break the mold in a medium where breaking the mold is the norm, right? I feel like we're very lucky to have such trust from them, and it's been a lot of work to get there."

Heather Antos: "I just want to give a quick shout out to the return of a fan favorite character from Day of Blood and earlier arcs of Star Trek, who we haven't seen in a while. He is on that double page spread of 500, and that is everyone's favorite Bajoran, Shaxs. Except in this time, instead of hating fascists, he's kind of working for the biggest one, which is horrifying, his role in all of this. To see the cold hard cruelty that we get out of Shaxs and Worf in this world, it's almost... I don't know, between that and Lore's evil glee of what is going on, it truly brings it into horror. There's some really scary moments in Lore War, for sure. He makes quite an entrance into the story."

Collin Kelly: "Yes, there's going to be some incredible huge things in this book. But it's going to be challenged by the smallest of moments that are going to really once again stab you in the heart. We haven't talked about our man, Benjamin Sisko, who obviously, you know, in much like in Day of Blood and much like our series, he's really holding this thing in a lot of ways together along with Worf. We start with Benjamin Sisko not to get into any details, but Jack mentioned some people get everything they want. Ben Sisko has a family. Ben Sisko is happy.

"But there is a moment when much like in DS9, he goes from goatee to no goatee. And it's the smallest of changes, right? It's just the changing of facial hair, but it is going to break your heart. And that moment, and it's such a small moment that Davide just absolutely crushed. That's the kind of stuff that... Yes, we're going to blow your socks off with the scope and spectacle. But that's the kind of character moment that the entire thing is going to hinge on. And if you understand the importance of 'goatee, no goatee,' you should have just felt a little tingle from your head to your toes."

Jackson Lanzing: "And if you don't, ideally, the beat teaches you. If I can end this interview with anything, I want to say this, because I really think it's always worth saying: these books are not just for Star Trek people. That was the whole goal of this line: take Star Trek comics and make Star Trek comics that are just great damn comics. And if you want to know about Star Trek, you can start here. Any given arc, certainly the beginning of this, and certainly Lore War as a culmination, is I think this way to walk people into all the best stuff Star Trek has to offer. And give them like a tasting menu of just everything.

"So that if you have a thing where you're like, 'Oh, I really loved that particular character, or that particular ship, or that particular arc, or that particular idea,' that there's some Star Trek for you to dive into after that. So our hope is really that any person comes out of this, whether they're a huge Star Trek fan, or somebody who's just encountering it for the first time here, they come out with a working knowledge and understanding of Star Trek that they can then, you know, barrel forward in their lives. So we hope that anybody who's come along the journey with us here for the first time goes and checks out the wide variety of incredible Star Trek stories that are out there, because there's there's a lot of inspiration to be had there."

Star Trek: Lore War begins in March 2025 from IDW Comics. Call your local comic shop today to reserve your copy, and stay tuned for more Trek coverage.