Second frame of third story:

Three stories of the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors separately, laying the way for the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan. To be honest I didn’t find any of them particularly memorable, though the art is pleasing. You can get The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor here.

Second frame of third part of Book One:

Second frame of third part of Book Two:

A bit of a romp featuring mainly the first four Doctors of New Who, but also vignettes of Old Who (including a fair crack of Fourth Doctor), with the comics-only companions being given a fresh lease of life as well. Inevitably a bit episodic, but the writers and artists have made very good efforts to portray the characters of the various Doctors as they appeared on screen. Worth hunting down. You can get Book One here and Book Two here.

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.

You can get The Terror Beneath here.

Next in this sequence: Time Trials: The Wolves of Winter, by Richard Dinnick et al.

Second frame of third issue of “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”:

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.

You can get Sonic Boom here. Next up is Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al.

Second frame of third part of first story:

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.

You can get The Twist here.

Next up: firmer ground with Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al.

Second frame of third story (“Robo Rampage”):

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.

Second frame of third issue:

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.

You can get Hyperion here. Next up is The School of Death by Robbie Morrison et al.

Second frame of third issue:

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.

Second frame of third section:

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

Second frame of third original issue:

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.

You can get it here.

Next in this sequence: The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al.

Second frame of third part:

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.

You can get it here.

Second frame of third part:

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.

Second frame of third part:

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.

Doctor Who: The Star Beast is Gary Russell’s second novelisation of a Doctor Who TV story, his first being of the TV Movie from 1996, 27 years ago. (He also did four Sarah Jane novelisations, and much else.) The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

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.

The novelisation of Wild Blue Yonder is by Marc Morris, who has done a bunch of other Doctor Who books and plays, some of which I liked more than others. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Brate”) is:

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:

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So, a good closing out of the brief Fourteenth Doctor era. (Though I haven’t yet read the DWM comic strip.)

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.