The Doctor: … Susan … Ian … Barbara … Vicki … Steven …
Next of the Twelfth Doctor comics published by Titan. The title story is a tremendous tale of Vikings, Ice Warriors and Fenric himself, also featuring Bill Potts as companion for the first time in this series. A really good example of what comics can do for Who. Though those fifth and sixth Ice Warrior troopers seem very pleased to see us.
The other story in the collection is “The Great Shopping Bill”, which features aliens in a futuristic supermarket (“Übermarket”, says Nardole, who also appears here) and a lost little girl, and works out as you would expect.
Second frame of third issue of first story (“Beneath the Waves”):
Compilation of two Titan Twelfth Doctor stories, a four-parter and a one-shot. “Beneath the Waves” by George Mann was an unexpected hit for me, in that I normally bounce off Mann’s writing, but this is a competently done tale of creepy alien seaweed monsters in an English town, with Hattie the future rock star pulled back into the Doctor’s adventures from the previous volume. “The Boy With The Displaced Smile”, by James Peaty, has an alien incursion into a Western American town, another standard enough story, competently done.
Second frame of third issue of “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”:
The Doctor: Woo-hoo-ha-ha-ha! / “We are the Darkness! You would do well to fear us!” / Well, sorry to burst that delusional bubble, but we don’t. Julie: We don’t?
Two rather well developed Twelfth Doctor stories here. The first, “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”, is a nicely set up adventure mainly in an alternative history 17th century France, with the historical opera singer and adventuress Julie d’Aubigny as a one-off companion. It’s true to the spirit of The Girl in the Fireplace, though obviously with different characters and a completely different alien threat. An affirming read.
The other story, “Invasion of the Mindmorphs”, has the Doctor going to confront the creators of a comic strip called Time Surgeon with an eerie resemblance to his own adventures. A bit more could have been done with this concept, but it’s a funny enough idea and executed very much as a Capaldi era story.
General Favalan: Viv-2 is infected by that most deadly disease… curiosity. She wrongly believes there is more than Paradise Towers has to offer. / But there is nothing that Paradise does not provide.
Another of Cutaway Comics’ Doctor Who-related slipstream graphic stories, these four issues (which I bought as a collection) include, first, a full four part story, “Paradise Found” set a few years after the events of the Seventh Doctor TV series Paradise Towers, but also an eight page prequel, “Paradise Before” explaining (a little) how Paradise Towers ended up that way, and yet more: a spinoff from The Happiness Patrol, “Terra Alpha Blues”. It comes with several DVDs, combining extra stories and commentary both on the comics and about the original series, and I felt it brilliantly captured the spirit of the original story, which I always liked more than was fashionable anyway. You can get Paradise Found here.
Jakob: You make it sound as though they’re being kind! I mean, what sort of choice is that – a life in prison or a quick, painless death?
Two more Twelfth Doctor comics, both by George Mann, featuring one-off (well, twice-off) companion Hattie, who is recruited during the first story and then gets to do the second story before going home in time for the next band rehearsal.
George Mann is not my favourite writer, and I found the title story here typically under par – an interesting concept, of a society based on a huge twisted metal structure in space, but let down by an implausibly hidden secret at the heart of it, and also a sudden yet inevitable betrayal at the end. Of course it’s nice to see the Capaldi Doctor doing music, but that was the best thing about it.
The second story, “Playing House”, was a bit better – the Doctor and Hattie encounter a family who are unwittingly storing a disintegrating TARDIS which is dangerously warping their reality. There were still some bits that didn’t really add up, but it hangs together as well as most Who.
The art by Mariano Laclaustra and Rachael Stott is very good.
“And my cells won’t renew in space. What would be the point? I’d only suffocate all over again.”
Another in Cutaway Comics’ explorations of unseen parts of Doctor Who history, this goes behind the backdrop of both The Three Doctors and more importantly Underworld. It is about the difficulties of the Minyan princess Malika, who tries to prevent Omega from destroying the planet Minyos and then leads a further attack on him from the planet Draktria in the fourth of four parts. I found it a rather right-wing narrative; Malika and her family have been elevated against the common people of Minyos by superior technology supplied by the Time Lords, and the rebellion of the Minyans against their oppressive rulers is stoked by Omega and an evil populist politician. The Draktria chapter is straight from the playbook of great powers recruiting loyal but doomed native troops from the colonies. The writer does not seem conscious of the tropes that he has put into the story… The art is generally good but Ridgway doesn’t always get his characters’ faces consistent.
You can get Omega here, along with a DVD and an audio version starring Brian Blessed; unfortunately I don’t have those as I bought it from the Cutaway stall at Gallifrey One.
Osgood: Sorry, babbling. / Uh, hope you’re not too busy, but we’ve got a little problem that we’d appreciate some help with… / Actually, it’s quite a big problem.
Starting Year Two of Titan’s Twelfth Doctor sequence, this is a compilation of three separately published stories. The title story starts with a character called Christel Dean, who is clearly an incarnation of well-known Doctor Who fan and writer Christel Dee, teaching at a remote Scottish boarding school with added Sea Devils. Oh, and the Doctor has a new companion, a stuffed swordfish called Sonny. The second story, “The Fourth Wall”, gets properly recursive with characters being absorbed into (and occasionally escaping from) comics, thanks to alien meddling. And the third story, “Robo Rampage”, is a sequel to the Fourth Doctor story Robot, featuring the twenty-first century UNIT. All three of these are above average; I particularly liked the art of Rachael Stott in the first two. You can get The School of Death here.
Next in this list is The Twist, by George Mann et al.
This is a nice idea from Cutaway Comics: what happened in the parallel universe of Inferno? How did Britain get to a state where it was ruled as a military regime by a dictator who looks just like the founder of the BBC’s Visual Effects Department?
This short comic, which I picked up at Gallifrey One earlier this year, has the answers. It’s a somewhat complex plot – Churchill allies with Oswald Mosley, who betrays and assassinates him, and then rules first in alliance with Germany and then against, before being in turn betrayed by the new leader. Meanwhile over in China, a Professor Keller is doing something odd with a mind-bending machine… It’s a well put together romp, though in our timeline Oswald Mosley would have been addressed as “Sir Oswald”, not “Baronet” (obviously a point of divergence there). But a resource-hungry country needs the potential power unleashed by Professor Stalmann…
Good stuff and you can get Inferno here (along with a DVD of extras which I didn’t get at Gallifrey).
A tale of two parts, a one-shot by George Mann with a twist punchline that you can see coming from a mile off (apology for spoilers, but you probably weren’t going to read it anyway):
And a much better four-parter by Robbie Morrison, picking up the story of the sun-like Hyperion creatures from Fractures, featuring also a heroic fireman and a very venal (“I for one welcome…” politician. I felt that the art sometimes din’t quite get the Doctor and Clara, but otherwise quite enjoyed it.
Second frame of third story (“The Body Electric”):
Two hours earlier… Clara: When you mumbled something about where we were going, Doctor, I thought you were taking me for dessert. Doctor: No time for consonant-based puns, Clara. Doctor: These are the quartz wastes of Asmoray.
Another collection of three Titan Comics stories featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara. The first is about a bereaved family trying to reunite across timelines but finding that nasty timey-wimey creatures want to get involved. The second has Sammy Davis Junior, Dean Martin and friends thwarting alien invasion in 1960s Las Vegas. The third has Clara reflecting on her own role as she helps ward off another alien threat to an exploitative human colony, and perhaps goes in the wrong direction. All decent enough. You can get Fractures here.
Next in this sequence: Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al.
“Your kindness touches my heart. Such thoughtfulness is rare these days. What, may I ask, brings such a beautiful couple out on the road? Not running away together, are you?”
Having finished the Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, I’m starting the Twelfth Doctor albums, beginning with this compilation of two two-issue stories, both of which I rather liked.
Terrorformer has the newly regenerated Doctor and Clara visiting a planet which should have been an ice world but seems to have become rather hot; it turns out that there’s an intelligent star behind it all (this made me look up the temperature at the core of the Sun). Clara gets some decent character moments too.
The Swords of Okti is set in both past and future India, and puts Clara aside for most of it to give the Doctor two temporary Indian companions – who I think are the first South Asians to have that role in any medium? The story was originally published as The Swords of Kali, but re-titled after a Hindu group in Nevada protested at the appropriation of the goddess. In any case, it’s a fairly standard aliens-pose-as-gods narrative but with the extra cultural wrinkles.
You can get it here. Next in this sequence: Fractures, also by Robbie Morrison et al.
(Various factors combine to mean that you’re getting a bunch of Doctor Who reviews this week.)
Second frame of third issue:
A collection of five Eleventh Doctor / Amy / Rory stories, of which the most memorable is the two-part second story in which the Doctor and Amy swap bodies. More could be done with that concept, but you’ve got to start somewhere! You can get it here.
Man on left: “No thank you Mr Kin. / Who’s the little girl? Your granddaughter?” Man behind desk: “Chiyoko. And no, my wife and I were never blessed with children. / Chiyoko acts as my … marketing consultant on the Goruda project.”
This is a compilation of comic strip stories from Doctor Who Magazine during the Eleventh Doctor era, all by Jonathan Morris; I had not appreciated it at the time, but they actually have a cleverly worked out arc (about, er, the Child of Time) which culminates at the end, shortly after we meet the killer Brontë sisters.
Charlotte: “Doctor, how delightful to finally make your acquaintance!” Emily: “If I may introduce myself – I am Emily, these are my sisters Charlotte and Anne.” Anne: “Together, we are the Brontës!”
Having been working through the IDW Doctor Who comics dating to the same era, it’s interesting to feel a very different dynamic to the DWM strips, which have much shorter episodes and also had to respond to the TV show in real time – there are some very informative endnotes from Morris and the artists about the creative process.
Also I particularly like the story with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
C.S. Lewis: “‘…And that was the very end of the adventure of the bookshop.’ / So, what does everyone think?” J.R.R. Tolkien: “Well, I thought it was a bit juvenile… a jumble of unrelated mythologies… all rather derivative, I’m afraid… / And I wasn’t convinced by the allegorical element at all!”
Three stories here. The title story by Andy Diggle and Craig Hamilton brings Lady Christina de Souza back for a space heist with the Doctor, Amy and Rory, and raised a smile or two. The second, “Space Oddity” by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Horacio Domingues, is an excellent tale of the Vashta Nerada and an early undocumented Soviet space mission. The third, “Time Fraud” by Richard Dinnick and Josh Adams, has bird-like aliens and fake Time Lords. You can get it here.
Next in this series is Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn
Two completely different stories in a single album here, both featuring the Eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory, both pretty firmly tied into the sequence of events in the TV series.
(And by the way, congratulations to Karen Gillan on the recent birth of her daughter Clementine!)
“The Hypothetical Gentleman”, by Andy Diggle with excellent art by Mark Buckingham, starts with a somewhat disconnected section fighting Nazis in London in 1936, and then takes the team to 1851 and a time-stealing monster. I found the pacing of squeezing two stories into the space for one a bit odd, but the 1851 bit of the story worked perfectly well as Doctor Who.
The second half, “The Doctor and the Nurse”, is written by Brandon Seifert with art by Philip Bond. I didn’t warm to Bond’s art which seemed to me cartoonish and not really looking like the characters. The story is a comedy about the Doctor and Rory having some guy time together, while Amy finds herself dealing solo with the Silents infiltrating the TARDIS. Comedy Who can go horribly wrong, but this one sticks the landing.
Back to a different sequence of Eleventh Doctor graphic stories, this unites a one-shot, where Rory’s spam emails come alive in the Tardis,with a three-parter, where the Doctor, Amy and Rory get mixed up with the police investigation of Jack the Ripper. It’s a bit dubious, frankly, to adapt the very real femicidal atrocities of the Ripper murders for a Doctor Who story and to make an anthropophagic alien the secret killer. Doctor Who doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or even Ireland much, and this isn’t so very different.
But Tony Lee (as usual) captures the characters well, and the first bit with living spam emails is sheer fun; and the Ripper story is superbly illustrated by the art of Tim Hamilton, who I don’t think I had otherwise come across, but I shall definitely look out for now.
This is the first of the three-volume second series of Eleventh Doctor comics from Titan, and I must say it’s a good start. We’ve kept Alice, one of the great comics companions, and we add The Squire, who claims to have been a companion of the War Doctor; and also, of all great comics-only characters, none other than Abslom Daak, Dalek Hunter. Meanwhile the Eleventh Doctor is being pursued by a bounty hunter called The Then And The Now for dreadful crimes apparently carried out by the War Doctor that nobody can quite remember. And there is a twist at the end bringing in another favourite character. Looking forward to next month when I read the next in the series. Meanwhile you can get this here.
Bechdel fail at the first hurdle, I think, it is a very Doctor-centric story where the only female-presenting character is Alice.
Second frame of third part (“What He Wants”, by Rob Williams):
First of the 2014 line of Eleventh Doctor comics by Titan, this introduces a new companion, Alice Obiefune from Hackney, as a regular Tardis traveller along with invisible musician John Jones and an alien entity called ARC. I like the new dynamic between the primaries, but the other two companions seem a bit superfluous, and the historical story set in the segregated Deep South pulls its punches. Pleasing enough, good art, and you can get it here.
Having finished the IDW Tenth Doctor comics last month, I’m into the Eleventh Doctor run; and rather than start at the beginning of a long narrative, I picked up this one-shot album from 2011 for a sample. The author, Lilah Sturges, is best known for collaboration with Bill Willingham on the Fables series and spinoffs; I was really into that, ten years ago or so, but drifted off once the main narrative ended.
This is an enjoyable enough fantasy-world-actually-a-theme-park story, with the Doctor and Amy liberating the oppressed. The art by Kelly Yates is seriously below par though, with Amy much more freckled than the real Karen Gillan and the Doctor often looking like someone else entirely. This was early in the Eleventh Doctor era, so perhaps the lead characters’ images were not well communicated to the artist, but it’s a barrier to enjoyment. There are some nice covers by Bill Willingham though. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass: Amy and Aurelia battle an evil robot together on page 48, and then review progress on page 56.
You wait five years for a new Doctor, and then two of them come along one after the other…
While we recover from the Fifteenth Doctor’s proper debut yesterday, you can relive the Fourteenth Doctor’s brief tenure in the three novelisations of his three stories, The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle, each published electronically a few days after the respective episodes were shown, and available in paper form next month. Spoilers: One of them is likely to be my Doctor Who book of the year when I do my roundup of my 2023 reading on Sunday. I’ve also had a listen to a relevant Big Finish audio adaptation.
Best thing to do, Doctor, he thought, is not get caught.
This is a good start to the new regime. (One of my personal complaints about the Chibnall era is that little attention was paid to the spinoff publications.) As well as faithfully transferring the on-screen action to the page, we get more characterisation for the minor characters, especially Sylvia and Rose, and some delightful tips of the hat to the comic strip on which the story was based – the steelworks is called Millson Wagner, in a tribute to the original writers, and the original new companion, Sharon, makes an offstage appearance as Fudge’s friend. Basically it’s what you want from a novelisation. You can get it here.
The Fourteenth Doctor TV story was not in fact the first adaptation of the original Star Beast comic. In 2019 Big Finish released audio versions of this and The Iron Legion, the first of the Doctor Who magazine strips, both starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, and for completeness I listened to both. They are quite long; The Iron Legion is almost two hours, The Star Beast 1h49m, and then there’s an hour of behind-the-scenes, and the material isn’t quite strong enough to bear the weight of it. But it is fun enough, a look at two old stories from a new angle, with some tidying up of loose ends in the plots.
NB in particular from The Iron Legion, Christine Kavanagh (who had a small part in The Diplomat) as June / Magog, the lead baddy, and Big Finish regulars Toby Longworth and Joseph Kloska as the robot Vesuvius and Morris; and from The Star Beast, Rhianne Starbuck as Sharon (she seems to have paused her acting career, which is a shame), Bethan Dixon Bate as Beep the Meep, and in a surprise twist, 1970s news reader Angela Rippon as herself. You can get it here.
There was no indication anything had been disturbed. The hover-buggy remained where they’d parked it; nothing had fallen over; nothing had become detached from the walls or roof and crashed to the ground.
Wild Blue Yonder was such a visual story, depending both on superb special effects and on twists in the plot, that the book version needs to be either a faithful screen-to-page adaptation or to take a completely different approach. Morris has (perhaps sensibly) gone for the first option, and the result is a workmanlike book that completists like me will want to have, but won’t be a gateway drug for anyone else. You can get it here.
It’s no secret that I rate James Goss as one of the best Doctor Who writers currently in business (eg here, here and here), so I awaited his novelisation of The Giggle with eager anticipation. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Move 3”) is:
London burned. Flames poked out of windows. People stood on roofs, howling. Cars smashed into each other over and over. Double-decker buses lay toppled in the streets, people thronged the bridges, sometimes diving off, sometimes falling off, sometimes pushed off. She watched two boats down there in the Thames, playing a slow and stupid game of chicken. Neither boat blinked.
I have to say that my high expectations were more than exceeded. Goss tells the story from the perspective of the Toymaker (first-person Doctor Who books are very rare and not always successful), smooths off the edges, throws in some extra pinches of emotion and also some shifts of genre and format – at one point the book becomes a choose-your-own-adventure for Donna, and there are other puzzles throughout. I suspect that the paper version will be even nicer and it’s the only one of the three that I plan to get in hard copy. It’s a real tour de force, and you can get it here. I enjoyed this so much that I made it my very first post on Threads:
Second frame of the third of the four issues collected here:
Two two-part stories here, the first being the titular “Breakfast at Tyranny’s”, where the Doctor with companions Gabby, Cindy and the deity Anubis are held captive with their memories being harvested; and a more exciting second half, “Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”, set in ancient China with Nestenes. The art here is not always up the usual standards, I’m sorry to say. You can get it here.
Second frame of third story (actually a full page):
Next in my sequence of Tenth Doctor graphic novels, this pulls together three very different stories, of which the first story is the best: the Doctor and comics-only companion Gabby end up on a world where some of th inhabitants are intelligent forms of music, a concept that is difficult to portray in any medium, but done very well here. There’s also a New York vignette with Jack Harkness, and an interesting aliens-at-the-dawn-of-time story which has a pretty overt anti-colonialist theme. You can get it here.
Next in the sequence of Tenth Doctor comics, this one published in 2015 but set immediately after the departure of Donna. The Doctor visits Brooklyn, and ends up with a new companion, Gabby Gonzalez, fresh from working at her father’s laundromat – where it is the washing machines that provide the terror of the title. I must say I’ve always thought of them as potentially a gateway to another dimension; there’s something primordial and strange about the rotational sloshing of the water. The opening three-part story is very good, the other two parts are a new story, “The Arts in Space” which is a bit sillier but still gives Gabby some more characterisation as well as just being fun. This series clearly had a lot of vim. You can get this here.
Next up is The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison with art by Daniel Indro and Eleonora Carlini.
This was actually the first non-Clarke book that I finished reading in March, so my blogging here is almost exactly a month behind my real-life reading.
Continuing my journey through my substantial backlog of Doctor Who comics, I’m now at this Eighth Doctor collection from 2016. I have generally rated George Mann poorly as a writer, and so I am glad to say that I really enjoyed these five linked stories, in which the Eighth Doctor finds a young artist squatting in his country house and takes her on a series of adventures. The third, in which sinister entities emerge from mirrors, is particularly good.
My one complaint is that artist Emma Vieceli’s depiction of the Eighth Doctor doesn’t look a lot like Paul McGann. (The cover is by someone else, I think.)
But otherwise this came as a pleasant surprise and I will give George Mann’s work at least a second glance in future. You can get it here.
Next up: the Ninth Doctor in Weapons of Past Destruction.
