Issue 31: Star Trek Adventures, film fests, and more comic updates!
It’s still 2026?
But this year has been crap!
Why is it not over yet?
NEW STUFF
As you might have guessed from this newsletter’s main image, because you’re very smart, the Star Trek Adventures TTRPG released its 23rd Century Campaign Guide, for games set around the first two seasons of Discovery, up to and including Strange New Worlds and The Original Series.
We wrote some stuff for this book, and we’re always delighted when we get to contribute more materials for this fabulous game. Get yourself a copy!
Modiphius Entertainment
Comic Book Resources released their list of the top 100 comics of 2025, and Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming made the list! Which, again, is wild to us, as the story isn’t even done yet! Amazing.
Brian Cronin
In other Voyager Homecoming news, the finale, issue 5, is actually releasing on February 11 (and not February 4 as we previously mentioned). We’re not sure if the date got changed for some reason, or if the original date was misreported to websites who listed it. Nobody tells us writers these things! In any case, you’ll have one extra week to wait for those reunions.
You already waited thirty years, what’s one more week, right? Right?!
We did get another very kind review of issue 4 from Temporal Star Chronicle on YouTube, if you wanna check that out.
Tilly was recently interviewed for a book that’s crowdfunding soon, Trans in the Machine: Chronicling the New Cyberpunk Canon. It’s about the intersection between transness and the cyberpunk genre, which is obviously right in Tilly’s wheelhouse given her work on The Matrix. Check it out!
Long Away made it into the Hollywood Shorts Fest, where it screened online for free, from Jan 22-25! It’s very weird though, because they gave us login and password information… and said to just give that to everyone who wanted to see the film. And they did the same for all the other films (it was the same login and password info for all of them). So what you ended up with was thousands of people logging in to watch short films… all with the exact same account.
This makes zero sense to us, but nobody asked us, soooo… thanks to everyone who dropped by to watch it, though! So many of you left really lovely comments that we were sure to screencap and preserve. If you scroll down at the link below, you can see Long Away in the lineup for "Block 1."
As a reminder, we’ve still got copies of all three covers for Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming issue 4 in our ko-fi shop! And most covers from issues 2 and 3, too. Along with paperback and hardcover copies of Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix. If you want us to sign some stuff for you!
WHAT WE’RE WORKING ON
We had our marketing meeting for our upcoming graphic novel, and it went really well! The marketing team were the first people outside of our editors who’ve read the book, and they seemed to really like it and get what we were trying to do.
And it’s slated for release in August! They’re planning the official announcement before the end of January, which means… any day now! We just checked the lettering on the first nine (of ten) chapters, and got our notes in, so it’s chugging right along.
We fell in love with it all over again when reading it for the lettering check, which is a great sign. We expect you’ll be hearing a whole lot more about it really soon.
The nonfiction book agent Tilly was talking to about her next book officially passed, so a lot of time was spent researching and sending out more queries to other agents.
And speaking of agents, we’ve got a graphic novel agent who wanted to see some of our proposals and pitches with an eye toward representing us in that space, so that’s cool. Maybe they’ll like our stuff!
The other graphic novel (that’ll be out in 2027) is officially working on back cover text, and we’ve begun script revisions with an eye toward lettering. And a letterer was just officially hired, and we have an official logo! So that one is moving right along, too. We think they’re shooting for an early 2027 release (maybe March?) so it should likely be announced maybe this summer or fall.
We submitted one of our pilots to the Joy Who Lived theater festival, which started up last year as trans-focused counter programming to Queen Transphobe’s “magic school” play that came through L.A. It was a week of trans comedy and theater held at lots of locations all over the city, and it was really joyous.
Submissions are open now!
We wanted to be part of it this year, so we’re hoping they pick up a live, full-cast read of Robo Waitress Assassins (guess what it’s about?!). Though the festival expanded to two weeks this year, and will have its own home theater for most of its shows, they received over a hundred submissions. Obviously they cannot put on that many shows in two weeks, so we don’t know if we’ll get selected.
But we’re hoping! It would star Griffin Kelly (who starred in Long Away), and not only would people be able to get tickets to see the script read live, but it’d be livestreamed with virtual tickets, too. And 90% of proceeds from each show goes to the creators, which is amazing. They said they should have their selections made by the end of January, so maybe we’ll know if we got in by the next newsletter!
Outside of that, we’re plugging away on the new pilot, here and there between other stuff. It’s got a ways to go still, but act II (of five) is almost done. Well, done as in first draft “done.” But the first drafts are always the hardest.
TRANS TUESDAY UPDATE
Trans Tuesdays are finally back as of yesterday, and we’re kicking off the year talking about RADICAL TRANS ACCEPTANCE. And for Tilly, that took the form of roller derby! They’ve showed the absolute perfect model for how sports (a contact sport, no less), and indeed all organizations, can and should treat trans inclusion. It’s a wonder of acceptance, so do check it out.
RECOMMENDATIONS
We just recently watched Heated Rivalry, and what an incredibly great six episodes that was. It seems to have broken containment in the ways a lot of queer or trans stories sadly don't, in that lots of non-queer people are watching and loving it.
And we need that so much, because it helps normalize us to all the cisgender heterosexual people out there, and shows that we're just humans like everyone else. You don't need to know anything about hockey to watch, and in fact there's very little actual hockey in it.
There are some quite steamy sex scenes, but they're no more graphic than heterosexual sex scenes you'd see on an HBO show. And that's also important, because gay sex, queer sex, and trans sex is not any different from heterosexual sex in terms of content levels.
But it's a really lovely little romance that truly gets into what it's like for so many (cis) queer men, and the final episode also has what might be one of the best coming out scenes ever put to film. It's so real, and natural, and affirming.
It's a really special show featuring objectively attractive men (which helped confirm for Tilly that, in fact, she's just a huge lesbian and has no attraction to dudes at all).
THE DIRTBAG DISPATCH
Here’s Izzy being sweeter to Henry than he deserves, him turning it into the laziest fight ever (this is the thanks Izzy always gets for being nice to him)... until Izzy’s finally had enough of his bullshit.
Cats!
WHAT’S IN THE BIG TIME?
Big Time issue 31 goes into why first drafts are so hard for so many people (including us!), and how to deal with it. And there’s also the second part of the audio commentary on Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming issue 4!
Sign up for it at birdguestbroadcast.com and help us pay rent and eat food and stuff!
THE END
Surely 2026 is over already.
No? How about now?
Okay, how about now?
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http://birdguest.com
