Lee SullivanKirja-arvosteluja
Teoksen Rivers of London, Vol. 1: Body Work tekijä
Kirja-arvosteluja
I enjoyed the little vignettes in the end of the album, but would have wished the kind of whimsy had been included in the full length story.
The story read like a novella that someone decided to make into a graphic novel without considering about why. It would have been nice if the creators had taken advantage of the media and format to create something more, instead of just something else.
If you are a completist this will add texture to the River of London universe - for example in this album we get the back story of Maxim, a minor character with no origin story in the novels.
...Perchance to Dream
The last (by titling convention, anyway) multi-part story of the UK comic strip begins the transition into what would be known as Earthforce. Many pixels have been spilled on this topic, but basically Simon Furman decided to stop having the UK strip tie into the US one at all, not even the sense of the UK one having small side stories to the bigger US stories like he'd been doing since issue #240 or so. Instead, he would split the characters up: since the US strip was focused on Optimus Prime and company in space, the UK strip would follow a set of different characters back on Earth.
This story sets that up by reviving five classic off-line characters so that they can star in the new strip. Galvatron is infesting their dreams, so we get five parts of flashback adventures, and then in part six they all wake up and defeat him. It's a fine enough set of vignettes, but Galvatron is defeated absurdly easily for someone who had once been a powerhouse of the strip.
The Big Shutdown! / A Small War!
These two stories are united in being about Thunderwing, who is rising to power as Decepticon leader on Cybertron. (I think there is a power vacuum because of the events of Two Megatrons!, which was actually published later!) The Big Shutdown! is a delightful hardboiled pastiche, as the Autobot detective Nightbeat must stop Thunderwing from committing a series of murders on Earth as part of a test being administered by the Decepticon leadership back on Cybertron. The end confused me, but I greatly enjoyed the rest of it, and I hope we get more Nightbeat in this series.
A Small War! jumps ahead to when Thunderwing does lead the Cybertronian Decepticon forces, and it introduces the Micromasters, a group of Autobots who are tiny (i.e., human-sized). The Micromasters get captured, but escape anyhow—only the Decepticons, led by Thunderwing, now also have the secret of their construction. This is fine; it mostly seems to exist to set up the Micromasters' first US appearance in a story I haven't read yet. (It appears in Classics, Vol. 5, but I've only read up through vol. 4.)
"Rage! / "Assault on the Ark!"
These two tales jump back a bit to explain more of how Thunderwing ascended to power, following up on The Big Shutdown! They're fine but I kind of didn't really care.
"Inside Story!" / "Front Line!" / "End of the Road!"
And here it all comes to an end, with honestly a pretty mediocre set of stories about a journalist trying to write a story about the Transformers. You'd think the giant robots tearing up the Earth would be bigger news than this story implies.
Transformers and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »
Emperor of the Daleks! / ...Up Above the Gods...
Previously reviewed as part of Emperor of the Daleks here.
Bringer of Darkness
Previously reviewed as part of Land of the Blind here.
Daleks versus the Martians
Fun fact: I have only seen the first Peter Cushing film as a Rifftrax installment, and I have never seen the second at all. This is a prequel to the second, I guess, setting up the Dalek invasion of Earth. Lee Sullivan draws good Daleks, of course, but otherwise there was nothing for me to be found here.
Fire and Brimstone
Previously reviewed as part of End Game here.
Children of the Revolution
Previously reviewed as part of Oblivion here.
Stray Observations:
- Early reports were that this volume would include Return of the Elders (a follow-up to the old Dalek strips from TV Century 21, reprinted as a standalone DWM special in 2020), which was published as a back-up in DWM #249-54. This did not come to pass. Alas, as it would have brought this volume's newly reprinted content up to a whole fourteen pages!
My favorite part of this one was how Beverly Brook deals with home invasion.
I really liked the artwork for this one-the dark colors and the clear depictions of the action. Peter looked great. Nightingale and Molly looked more severe than I had imagined them but were still drawn well.
The main story was good, and the short stories at the end were great fun.
This book made me eager to get caught up on the novels.
Already reviewed as part of a different collection here.
The Big Broadcast of 2006 / Space Pirates!
You can read a version of the below that includes illustrations here.
"The Big Broadcast of 2006" was actually a US story (reprinted in Classics, Vol. 4), set in the future era of The Transformers: The Movie. But while the US comic never did anything with the future era other than this story and the movie adaptation, the UK comic had by this point depicted a robust and detailed future history—which was completely contradicted by this tale. UK writer Simon Furman solved this problem by writing a two-page frame to "Big Broadcast" that established it was a story being told by Wreck-Gar, full of lies to mislead his Quintesson interrogators: "Wreck-Gar's whole account is full of absurdities and contradictions." As the Quintessons point out, by this point in the UK continuity, Galvatron, Cyclonus, and Scourge were all in the 1980s, not the future. And besides, the UK continuity was up to 2008, not 2006. It's a clever conceit, though I imagine it will have more impact if I ever read it where it "goes"; this just reprints the two UK pages.
It leads into the next UK future epic, Space Pirates!, one of those future stories that actually doesn't intersect with the present-day timeline. I wasn't really convinced this one held together, to be honest; the maguffin that everyone is chasing after didn't make a ton of sense to me, and the story requires seasoned warriors to make dumb decisions for everything to hang together. I do like a bit of Rodimus angst, but I feel like such angst was done much better in IDW's original continuity two decades later. Now, arguably a lot of Simon Furman epics probably wouldn't make sense if you delved into them, but this one didn't grab me the way some of those others did, so I'm less apt to forgive it its mistakes.
"Ark Duty"
Already reviewed as part of a different collection here.
The Transformers and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »
I think at the time, this surely must have been an abrupt transition. From the dangerous and moody seventh Doctor in #211, straight into the fourth Doctor and Romana gadding about in #212. Ace and Bernice are gone without a word; the strip of course has had to write out TV companions before (i.e., Peri) but usually at least says something about it. We get nothing like that this time. For me, though, it reads a little less abruptly because of where I included The Age of Chaos, which caps off the VNA era with The Last Word and eases us into the "past Doctor" stuff with Under Pressure and The Age of Chaos itself; plus, in publication order, Bringer of Darkness opens this volume, which is sort of a second Doctor story in a seventh Doctor style, giving another transitional point.
Unfortunately, the backmatter doesn't include anything from Gary Russell, who was strip editor at the time, and thus the one responsible for the sudden, unprecedented change in the DWM comics format. No longer is the strip one ongoing story; it's now a nostalgia tour. Thankfully, Gareth Roberts does explain a bit in his notes on The Lunar Strangers: there was no longer a television programme to follow, and so the mag became a celebration of Doctor Who's history, driven in part by the VHS range, which randomly dipped into the show's history, "So he was going to follow a similarly randomised pattern in DWM." I'm not sure this would have been my choice, but it has a good logic behind it.
First, it makes sense to uncouple from the NAs: why should one range of tie-ins be beholden to another, when the other clearly doesn't care about this one? Had the strip kept following the books, Ace would have had to disappear again around the time of #223, and then two new companions would have appeared out of nowhere in #227. But if you're going to uncouple, it makes sense to do so in a strong, distinctive way: continuing to do seventh Doctor adventures, just without Benny and "Spacefleet" Ace I think would have raised questions as to why the strip wasn't consistent with the NAs (a range the mag promoted every month with the preludes!) if it was featuring the same characters. Going into the show's past gives a clear reason for the strip to be unconnected to the novels, even if I don't like the loss of the strip's ongoing nature.
Bringer of Darkness
This is a neat little story, very effectively done. We begin our "past Doctor" adventures with the second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria, and the story follows on from The Evil of the Daleks in having the Doctor investigate if he really did kill off all the Daleks or if he needs to finish the job, and in examining Victoria's emotional reactions to the Daleks, who killed her father; Victoria narrates the story in retrospect from some time shortly after she leaves the TARDIS. Add the dark, moody art of Martin Geraghty, and it all works rather well: a story with some darkness, but also some emotional depth, and it does a neat job of foreshadowing the NAs in a plausible, interesting way. (This came out during Emperor of the Daleks!, so arguably at the height of DWM's VNA era.)
Victims
The fourth Doctor and second Romana investigate murders on a world known for its high fashion. The best part of this is the repartee between the Doctor and Romana; Abnett captures season 17 perfectly in that regard. No, strike that; the best part is the joke about the Doctor trying on Colin Baker's coat, which made me laugh out loud. The story is a bit darker than a real season 17 story, which works; what works less well is that it's kind of a mystery... but it has exactly one suspect, who turns out to have done it. I felt like it fizzled out by the end despite a strong start. Colin Andrew does a reasonable Tom Baker, but his Lalla Ward likeness is very inconsistent; if you're going to go for this retro/nostalgia approach, though, I think you need artists who are good at likenesses.
The Lunar Strangers
The very first page of this one is genius, stuff only the DWM comic could do: cows in spacesuits on the moon. Nothing else here quite lives up to that. The evil space cows' evil plan didn't strike me as wholly plausible, even by the standards of reading about the plans of evil space cows, and I didn't buy the human base administrator's actions either; it turns out she's been pretending, but 1) a good fake-out needs to be plausible, and 2) if she was suspicious, she could have just locked up the evil space cows and every subsequent problem would have been avoided! Gareth Roberts does capture the voices of the fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough well, though, and Martin Geraghty draws a good evil space cow, even if I struggled to distinguish the two.
Food for Thought
In his notes, Nicholas Briggs says this wasn't his first comic strip, but it was his last. We can be thankful for this, I guess, because it feels like a first attempt, full of awkward, confusing transitions and unclear action, though perhaps a good artist could have saved the script somewhat. At least Briggs correctly notes that the characterization for Polly is downright awful.
Change of Mind
This third Doctor and Liz Shaw story is, I believe, Kate Orman's only comics work, though I gather one of the characters here recurs from her novels. She has a good handle on Liz; the throughline of the Doctor trying to figure out why Liz left (this is set some time later) works very well. It has some good set pieces, such as where the Doctor and Liz use a sit-in to distract the villain, and the climax. Unfortunately, there are two mysterious men in long coats, and as Orman herself points out, some sequences are hard to follow the action of.
This leads me on to a different point: there are three different writers in this volume who were new to comics (essentially, as far as I can tell) in Roberts, Briggs, and Orman; contrast this against Dan Abnett, by this point highly experienced, and Warwick Scott Gray, gradually amassing a body of quality DWM work. For most of its run, the strip has been written by experienced comics writers from outside the Doctor Who world, but that's been slowly changing since the late 1980s. We've seen fan writers with little comics experience come aboard before, of course (e.g., Paul Cornell, Marc Platt), but this is the first volume where I've read a couple strips and thought to myself that the writers were clearly inexperienced comics writers. Orman mentions making mistakes of the medium: but addressing this kind of mistake the exact thing an editor ought to have been on top of! My inference would be that, say, John Freeman and Richard Starkings knew how to nurture a new comics writer in a way that Gary Russell does not. Which, if you've read any of Gary Russell's comics work, is entirely to be expected.
Land of the Blind
Thankfully, the volume closes out as strongly as it opens, with another well put together second Doctor story (this time with Jamie and Zoe) from Scott Gray, now paired with Lee Sullivan. This is a clever, inventive story about a city cut off from the outside universe, with some neat turns, good villains, and one really good joke. You could have stuck this in the Dave Gibbons era and no one would have batted an eye: not crazy ambitious, but the exact kind of thing the strip ought to be doing. I breezed through it in the best of ways.
Stray Observations:
- Surely the story should have been called Fashion Victims. It's so obvious it boggles my mind that it's not.
- After a pretty substantial run on the writing roster, Dan Abnett finally exits the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. It's not his final Doctor Who work; he also wrote a couple Big Finish audio dramas and the Christmas novel The Silent Stars Go by. He has also been a pretty prolific writer in American comics. My favorite comics work by him is the excellent Legion Lost, but he's also the kind of writer who will reliably churn out tie-in issues to crappy "events," so I've actually read quite a lot by him, with things like Flashpoint and Convergence. Oh, and he also invented something called "Guardians of the Galaxy"!
- Enid Orc has got to be a pseudonym, yes? But for who...
- I always like to imagine what my hypothetical knows-Doctor Who-only-from-the-comics reader is thinking. In this volume, it's "Who the heck are Romana, Tegan, and Turlough? Where are Sharon and Gus?"
- It is not clear to me what comics Nicholas Briggs has written other than Food for Thought; not Doctor Who ones at any rate. You may have heard of him, though, for going on to voice the Daleks on tv, and for writing a couple Big Finish audio dramas. (I have 79 releases written or co-written by him, according to iTunes!)
- A hard-bitten space freighter captain going, "I ain't waitin' up here to get what's due! I don't care what the hell's goin' on down there! We're goin' in now, or we'll frazz the atmosphere!" (about which another character thinks "...hell's going on down there...") is surely one of the most Nick Briggs pieces of dialogue to ever Nick Briggs. I'm sure he put his heart and soul into it.
- How do they decide who gets cover credit on these collections, anyway? Poor Colin Andrew contributes to more strips than anyone else in this volume (he draws six of them) but is shut out by Scott Gray (writes four), Lee Sullivan (draws three), Gareth Roberts (draws three), Martin Geraghty (draws four), and Dan Abnett (writes three). Well, I'm sure it's about who is famous, either to comicdom at large, or to Who fans, but it does seem unfair.
The Age of Chaos
Already reviewed on its own here.
Under Pressure
The seventh Doctor tells Ace a story of the time the fourth Doctor (on a submarine) secretly helped the third and Jo (on a surface vessel) avert a crisis with the Sea Devils. It's pretty charming: Abnett captures the voices of both past Doctors pretty well, and the ways the fourth Doctor helps the third are fun. There are some good moments, such as the fourth ingratiating himself with the submarine's captain. My main issue is the Sea Devils never feel like much of a threat, as we barely see them. I did really like the panel of them all swimming around the sub, the kind of thing you could never afford to do onscreen, but it comes after they've been neutralized. But it's enjoyable enough.
Metamorphosis
The seventh Doctor and Ace battle (spoiler) Daleks on a space freighter. As Cornell says in his notes, this is pretty generic action-adventure stuff, but it's good anyway, lifted by some cool ideas (there's a reason Steven Moffat stole the "eggs" bit, and the Doctor becoming a Dalek is good, too), some horrific ones (human embryos mutated into Daleks!), and some excellent artwork from Lee Sullivan. Sullivan draws great Daleks, but also a strong Doctor and Ace, capturing their facial expressions well, and clear action sequences. Generic... but solid. The last line is a groaner, in the most delightful way.
The Last Word
And here, the comic strip adventures of the seventh Doctor, Ace, and Benny come to an end. For reasons I didn't understand, this is framed as the Doctor writing up an account (in the third person) of a recent adventure the TARDIS crew had. The adventure itself is somewhere between a parody and a pastiche of the Virgin New Adventures: Gareth Roberts lists all the tropes in the notes at the end, but I picked out most of them myself. Journeys into 1970s pop culture, overcomplicated plots, a voyage into "puterspace," and the Doctor being mentally tormented by all the people and planets he's let die. I had fun, and it mostly comes across as good-spirited. It's funny, though, that despite being a DWMification of the VNAs, it doesn't feel anything like the actual DWM strips that tied into the VNAs! I feel like it makes a better finale to this era than Cuckoo/Uninvited Guest, so I'm glad I read it here. With a wink and tounge-in-cheek, it's time to switch to something completely different!
Stray Observations:
- Since all these are outside of the usual DWM context, there's no clear chronological placement; what I can see online (from the "Interweaving with the New Adventures" article and various fan sites) disregard the clues in the stories themselves. Under Pressure's Ace seems to be pre-Spacefleet, while Metamorphosis's is afterwards (though Benny is not around). The Last Word could go pretty much anywhere during Ace and Benny's travels, as long as enough time has passed for Ace and Benny to become aware of the clichés of their own lives.
- I found Vincent Danks and Cam Smith's art on Under Pressure kind of flat, but looking at the uncolored pages in the back, it seems that this is down to the coloring eliminating some of the finer linework.
- Gareth Roberts in the notes: "imagine a world where you could not even know what a minority of random noisy strangers were saying on the internet, and where nobody cared about them, took them seriously, or reacted to them." Gee, why would you hope for such a thing, Gareth?
Now we're knee-deep in the Virgin New Adventures: this volume weaves in and out of them, with companions coming and going and changing, with little explanation. The strips in Evening's Empire at least had some explanatory footnotes, but if you don't know why Ace is suddenly wearing sunglasses and leather... too bad for you! This volume also embraces the style of the NAs a bit, with lots of seventh Doctor masterplans that the companions moan about. On the other hand, every story here bar one features an old villain from the tv show, which does not feel very NAish to me—nor, actually, very DWMish.
We also see a new regular writing stable emerge: Paul Cornell and Dan Abnett continue on, but Andrew Cartmel is gone, seemingly replaced by Warwick Gray. Lee Sullivan, Colin Andrew, and (thankfully) John Ridgway dominate art.
Pureblood
The Doctor and Benny come up against a Rutan plot to use a group of pre-cloning Sontarans (isolated from the rest of the species) to destroy the Sontaran species. I found it interesting to see Sontarans as a group to be defended, something the tv show rarely does with its alien monsters, but they really are the victims here. It's decent stuff, undermined by a pretty contrived scene where Benny gets the Rutan to spill its entire plan and admit that the "pureblood" Sontarans are going to die as soon as the Rutan have finished using them, which felt a bit kids' tv to me.
This is, of course, the comic strip debut of Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield, who had recently become the Doctor's companion in Love and War. I was going to comment that the companion appearing out of nowhere is a thing DWM strip readers should be used to... but then I realized that's not actually true. New Doctors might appear without explanation, but in the previous decade of the strip, K9 is the only companion to appear without an introductory story. Obviously strip-original companions Sharon, Frobisher, and Olla all got introductions, but when Peri and Ace made their DWM debuts, in both cases, the strip maintained its own continuity by doing a story that brought them aboard the TARDIS, even if in both cases, it was back aboard. So Pureblood is actually the first time in DWM history a companion appears without explanation... which is a bit odd, as DWM readers were much more likely to have seen Planet of Fire and Dragonfire than read Love and War. I am not sure why this books-centric approach was taken, given the extent to which the strip had previously been determined to carve its own way, sometimes acting as if even the tv programme didn't exist! I don't know if it bothers me per se—I know well who Benny is by this point, so it's not like I was thrown—but it does kind of ruin the conceit of the DWM strip as a standalone narrative. Not even a helpful footnote to explain who she is!
Flashback
Not even John Ridgway can save this rather uninteresting plod into the supposed history of the Doctor and the Master.
Emperor of the Daleks! / ...Up Above the Gods...
Cornell, Freeman, and Sullivan provide a six-part Dalek epic that brings back Abslom Daak and the Star Tigers, and also plugs in between Revelation and Remembrance of the Daleks on screen, establishing how Davros went from prisoner of the Daleks to emperor of his own Dalek faction. It's fun, but it's not really about anything: this doesn't tell us anything about the characters involved, it doesn't really have any interesting themes. Daak's love dies for good finally, but it's not like it's a story about dealing with loss (I think Cornell could write a good one, but he's not trying to); it's more interested in plugging a continuity gap, but one never feels like the Doctor's manipulations might go awry. Still, it has its moments: I liked the sixth Doctor's role in the story, and Daak himself is always fun of course, and Lee Sullivan is the man you want if you want armies of battling Daleks. His reveal of Davros on top of the ice pyramid is excellent stuff.
I violated my usual rules (reading the strips in publication order within each volume) by reading the interquel story written two years later, ...Up Above the Gods..., between parts 2 and 3, where it would fit for the sixth Doctor and Davros. This had the effect of reducing the mystery somewhat, but it was kind of interesting. The story itself is fine; I think it would be fun to listen to Colin Baker and Terry Molloy perform this.
Final Genesis
The Doctor, Benny, and Ace cross over to a parallel universe where ...and the Silurians went much better, and the Doctor forged peaceful coexistence between humans and Silurians. I like that basic idea, but the story doesn't do much with it: swap all the Silurians here for humans, and it would pretty much be the same story; the villain is a very generic mad scientist.
Ace is suddenly back, again without explanation, and she's a bad-ass space solider. I think the awkwardness of this is less forgivable than Benny's non-introduction.
Time & Time Again
DWM's 35th-anniversary story is a fun one, probably my favorite story in this volume. It's pretty simple: the Doctor has to find the Key to Time again, only each segment is hidden in the Doctor's own history. So we get a series of quick one-page encounters: Benny in the Land of Fiction, Ace sword-fighting the third Doctor, the seventh Doctor fishing with the sixth, Ace watching the cricket game from Black Orchid, and so on. It's nostalgic, but also a bit cheeky, which is a good balance to hit. I particularly liked the development of the relationship between the sixth and seventh Doctors from Emperor of the Daleks!; I can't think of another time Doctor Who has done something like this.
I will say that though I do love John Ridgway, he's not great with likenesses, so I don't think this plays to his strengths.
Cuckoo
I think there's a good idea here that doesn't come off. The Doctor takes Benny and Ace to see a famous nineteenth-century woman paleontologist, clearly a fictionalized Mary Anning, only he wants to stop her from discovering something. But she's barely in the story, and her main contribution is to run off crying when a man is mean to her. I like the idea that Ace and Benny are disappointed with the Doctor's treatment of her... but she hasn't even been in the story yet when they get mad. This would work better if we met her and saw her discovery, and then the Doctor revealed his plan to undermine it.
I don't think Ridgway does a very good Benny, and his Ace has been better, too. On the other hand, I feel like this was the first Benny story where I could imagine Lisa Bowerman reading the lines. The scratchy lettering for the alien requires way too much work to read.
Uninvited Guest
I think that after the Sontarans, the Master, the Daleks, the Silurians, and the Black Guardian, we probably didn't also need the Eternals, but this is the best returning-villain story in the book: a neat, creepy tale, which really plays to Ridgway's strengths. The Doctor at his most dangerous and most potent, using time itself as a weapon. I liked it.
Stray Observations:
- These days, once every couple years some writer reads Paul Cornell's Bernice Summerfield character description and remembers she's supposed to be amazing at reading body language, and so some audio drama plot point will suddenly hinge on this. I always find it unconvincing. But it happens twice in this volume, so it's a venerable tradition!
- The art of part 2 of Pureblood is credited to Colin Howard. Is he the same guy as Colin Andrew, or did someone get confused? Or did he draw just a single part!? I'm guessing confusion is the root cause here: there is a Colin Howard that drew some DWM covers, and I can't find any evidence he produced interior comics art other than this.
- I buy the way Cornell brought Daak back, but the retcon for why the Star Tigers aren't dead is pretty unconvincing. They were definitely dead back in Nemesis of the Daleks, so the "oh you didn't have time to check the bodies thoroughly" excuse doesn't quite wash. Still, I felt that story did them dirty, so I appreciate the retcon's intent, though they didn't do a ton in this crowded story.
- This is, I believe, Daak's last DWM story. Emperor of the Daleks! ends Daak's obsession with Taiyin, which Titan would ignore when it brought back the character two decades later.
- Emperor of the Daleks! part four is the first all-color DWM strip. I get it was the 200th issue, but I'm not sure it was the best choice.
- As someone who just read The Daleks from TV Century 21 last month, I appreciated that Cornell's Daleks kind of felt like those ones at times; I wish he'd leaned into it more, actually.
- This volume is the end of an era (after this, the DWM strip takes a very different approach), so it represents the last DWM work of a lot of people. ...Up Above the Gods... is, I think the last DWM writing of Richard Alan, a.k.a. Richard Starkings. I'm not sure if he continues to letter for the mag or not; I guess I'll see. Since writing for DWM, he's also wrote one comic for IDW, collected in Through Time and Space. Paul Cornell doesn't write for DWM again, either, but goes on to write much more Doctor Who, including more novels, comics for IDW and Titan, and of course several tv episodes. He also goes on to have a real non-Who comics career, including Captain Britain and MI13 for Marvel and Action Comics for DC. John Ridgway also finishes as a regular DWM artist here; I'm not really sure what he did post-DWM, except that he illustrated Cutaway Comics's recent Omega miniseries.
- Final Genesis does make sure to give us that NA staple, a journey into someone's mind, and even namechecks good old "puterspace."
- It's interesting seeing all these pre-Lisa Bowerman illustrations of Benny. I like how Colin Andrew draws her, but she doesn't really look like my mental model of the character. I also struggle to imagine Bowerman performing some of this dialogue.
- In his notes, Cornell claims that the fishing sequence in Time & Time Again is that one that precedes The Two Doctors... but Frobisher is there! Does this suggest that Frobisher's run of DWM strips is interspersed with Peri's tv episodes? Seems convoluted if so. If Peri and the Doctor leave Frobisher behind when they go to Space Station Chimera, they must come back for him later in time for The World Shapers, then drop him off again for The Trial of a Time Lord.
- Also, what's with the little robot fishing with Frobisher?
In any case, I am deeply delighted to see my favorite paranormal writers using graphic novel supplements to tell shorter stories as we eagerly anticipate the next installment. Excellent in its own right (good pacing, good art), this is a marvelous development, and a story better told with the visual interlocking the text.
Normally, it seems to me, that the DWM strip transforms pretty slowly. When Steve Moore first took over for Mills & Wagner, he wrote one last Mills & Wagneresque epic, and of course Dave Gibbons stayed on art. When Steve Parkhouse took over from Moore, his early stories were done-in-one-or-twos with little stings at the end, like the majority of Moore's, only more downbeat, even though soon enough he was writing big Time Lord epics, and he also had the benefit of Gibbons continuing. When the artists began changing during the fifth Doctor era, the writing stayed the same, and when Parkhouse left, the artist stayed the same, and so on. Parkhouse and Ridgway is very different from Mills & Wagner and Gibbons, but there was no sharp demarcation between them.
But the strips collected in The Good Soldier mark, I would argue, one of the more abrupt transitions in DWM history. Most of the McCoy-era strips so far have felt "kiddie" or disposable, or both, even if you discount the ones originally published in or intended for The Incredible Hulk Presents. Suddenly at the beginning of this volume, the strips feel denser, making more use of the way the comics medium had evolved as of the early 1990s. They feel more like the tv show, too; not the tv show as it had been some time ago (I feel like some of the McCoy strips-- Claws of the Klathi! for example-- were trying to emulate Tom Baker stories), but as it was in its last two years on screen. This is especially true in the characterization of the Doctor. Plus the strips suddenly become interested in creating a continuity; there are lots of references to both recent strip adventures (something the strip did a lot in the Parkhouse/McKenzie era, but which had largely vanished since) and recent tv adventures (something the strip has never really bothered to do before).
This era is the one and only time that the DWM strip was the main source for ongoing Doctor Who adventures. The tv show was seemingly over, the Virgin New Adventures had not yet debuted. If you wanted new Doctor Who, this was it! Never again would the comics be at the forefront like this. (Of course, it has acted like it was the only form of Doctor Who going before, and would do so again, but for a brief moment, that was actually true.)
Scream of the Silent
I actually have no idea how many prose stories DWM has run over the years. It could be hundreds; it could be none up until now. (The Tardis wiki lacks a handy category for them.) If there have been some, none have ever been collected in the DWM graphic novels. That said, I have never really cared for the prose Transformers UK stories I have read; something about them just doesn't work for me. It's like they're not really prose stories at all, but transcriptions of comic strips, not really making use of the medium they're supposedly designed for. They are sparse on interiority and on visuals, just lots of dialogue. Scream of the Silent is no exception; I very easily lost track of what was going on here and why it mattered. I am not entirely sure it all hangs together, but maybe it does and the story just doesn't interest me enough to figure it out. There is a nice Lee Sullivan picture of the seventh Doctor looking in a mirror and seeing the first; it doesn't much have anything to do with anything, though, and I assume the moment was put into the story because it was originally published in an anniversary special issue.
Teenage Kicks!
This, on the other hand, is a prose story by a prose writer, and it feels like it. This short story was published in the first-ever DWM issue with no comic strip, no even a rerun or backup. It features Ace, who rejoined the Doctor (after her sojourn in the Cretaceous) in a story published in the previous issue (which for some reason is not collected until the next graphic novel). This is kind of a weird story; the Doctor takes Ace to confront some gang members she used to run with, and also there are aliens. It felt to me like Cornell was trying to do more than the space allotted really allowed for... but Freeman, say, was probably trying to do much less! Cornell, of course, has a great handle on the character of Ace, and a great prose style, and I really enjoyed reading this, and I'm glad DWM has made Cornell's first Doctor Who prose fiction more readily available.
Fellow Travellers
As I mentioned above, suddenly the tone and style of the DWM strip is all different. It's atmospheric, with interesting and unusual cuts; there's narration boxes with internal narration from Ace. As confirmed by the backmatter, it's a clear indication of influence from Alan Moore; for the first time, we're obviously reading comics written and illustrated by someone who has read Watchmen. I occasionally found some of the transitions here tough to follow (Cartmel was a first-time comic scripter), but I really enjoyed this. Clever twists, good engagement with cultural issues, strong characterization for Ace, spooky atmosphere, nice pop culture references. This feels like it came out of the same Doctor Who universe as Ghost-Light and Survival (which is, in my book at least, a good thing)-- but playing to the strengths of the comics form, not tv.
Darkness, Falling / Distractions
These are two three-page stories setting up the "epic" Mark of Mandragora which followed. The first is a brief horror vignette about a UNIT soldier dying, with a one-page Brigadier cameo; the second is about the Doctor and Ace in the TARDIS, realizing that the Mandragora Helix is behind it all, and that it's infected the TARDIS. These are okay; as I'll get to in a moment, I found Mark a bit disappointing, and I think I would have liked these more if they were leading up to something more epic and satisfying than they actually were. Together, they total six pages, less than the normal length of a single issue's worth of comics, which feels a bit cheap, though I guess that matters less in a collected edition than it would have at the time. Lee Sullivan, though, does an excellent job with things like the futuristic cityscape, the secondary console room, and the time vortex-- plus he really nails likenesses. Surely one of DWM's best art finds.
The Mark of Mandragora
I wanted to like this, and for the first three parts I did. Like the tv show did before it was cancelled, it feels very "now"; I like the attempts at near-future slang ("child") and fashion, and I like our new UNIT commander, Muriel Frost. There's some great stuff here in terms of ideas and art, especially the scene where the TARDIS merges with Earth, and so the Doctor and Ace running down a corridor suddenly find themselves crashing into Frost in a London nightclub. I also really liked the bit where the Doctor and Ace whiteout, thinking they've lost. It's got good stakes to it, and a good sense of threat. It all comes crashing down in the resolution, though, as the Doctor wins without even doing anything! This would almost work, because the Doctor has to sacrifice the TARDIS... except of course the TARDIS is back right away, so the Doctor wins with no cost and no cleverness.
Party Animals
The Doctor (with Ace) finally makes it to Maruthea for Bojaxx's birthday party. Everyone who's everyone is there, so mostly what follows is a series of cameos. Some are from the DWM universe: Beep the Meep, Abslom Daak and the Star Tigers, Ivan Asimoff, the Freefall Warriors, Death's Head, and the little penguins John Ridgway liked to draw are among the ones I noticed. Many are from outside it: Sapphire and Steel, Worf, Emma Peel, and Bart Simpson! I was going to put Captain Britain in the second group, but I guess he technically goes in the first. (I don't think he ever met the Doctor, but I am sure they have mutual acquaintances.)
The big appearance is from a future Doctor, based on the Doctor performed by Nick Briggs in the Audio/Visual fan audios, which Gary Russell worked on himself. They bicker a little bit, and then leave. Like, why? I appreciate that in this era, DWM was pulling its history together again, but I have no idea what the point of this was, and art aside, I didn't find much to like about it.
The Chameleon Factor
I found this one pretty inexplicable, to be honest. Ace and the Doctor climb a tree in the TARDIS; a new console room comes into existence; the Doctor gets his ring back. Okay, but why is this a story as opposed to part of a story?
Seaside Rendezvous
The Doctor and Ace encounter an Ogri (from The Stones of Blood) on the beach. It's all rather pointless. Because I jump around in the book on account of reading the strips in publication order, I actually missed the first page, showing the ship in the nineteenth century, until I got confused by what Paul Cornell was talking about in the backmatter. It's funny, I haven't got on with any of Cornell's DWM strips so far, but he's gone on to have one of the most successful comics careers of anyone working on the mag in this era, and I absolutely love most of his work for Marvel.
The Good Soldier
The Mondasian Cybermen make an initial foray of Earth in the 1950s, scooping up a bit of desert outside Los Vegas with a diner, some soldiers, and the Doctor and Ace on it! I didn't totally get the Mondasian plan here (why did they scoop up the Earth?) and found the resolution, like the one to The Mark of Mandragora a little easy (though nowhere near as bad). But the rest was great. Awesome visuals of the type Doctor Who could largely only do in comics, great characterization, some thematic complexity, and yet another strong artistic turn from Mike Collins. Again, it shows some influence from comics outside the strip with some collage panels when Ace's mind accesses the Cyber computer network and some good use of narration boxes. (I am pretty sure DWM will never have a consistent artist again like it did in the early days, but alternating between Collins and Sullivan pretty much is, and it's much better than the hodgepodge approach of the last couple volumes. It really does give a unified feel to the proceedings when the writers are always changing.)
A Glitch in Time
This is a throwback to that kind of DWM done-in-one I often don't like, the ominous sci-fi story. But actually this one had a pretty fun concept and some good art. Instead of saving the twist for the end, it has twists throughout, which in my mind is much more interesting, and I wish more writers of short sf realized that.
Stray Observations:
- The Tardis wiki claims that Fellow Travellers is when the strip began intertwining its continuity with the NAs... but this surely is not true given the NAs didn't begin publication for another eight months!
- Fellow Travellers is the debut of Smithwood Manor, the so-called "house on Allen Road" used as a base and a refuge by the seventh Doctor and companions in many NAs.
- "Glib" is the pseudonym of Gary Gilbert, who had a prolific run as a letterer on Marvel UK's Transformers title. According to the paratext in The Transformers Classics UK, "Glib" was a nickname his wife gave him based on his name, but there was a joke that it stood for "Greatest Letterer In Britain," which caused fellow Transformers letterer Gordon Robson to one-up him by adopting the pseudonym "GLOP" for "Greatest Letterer On the Planet."
- Given the reference to Battlefield in Mark of Mandragora (which takes place a couple years later, in 1999), it bothered me that there was no explanation for why Alistair is back on active duty and why Bambera is not present.
- Darkness, Falling draws together a lot of the recent continuity of the strip, and weaves it into the tv show. The Doctor says, "Something's been troubling me for weeks.... Recently, I haven't been able to take take [sic] the TARDIS away from Earth. Whilst there, we've met creatures and forces that never should have appeared on its surface—at any time! Those Kalik butchers I told you about, Morgaine, even the Hitchers..." The explicit references here are to Train-Flight, Battlefield, and Fellow Travellers. So this would seem to indicate that all of Season 26 (where the TARDIS is Earthbound) takes place recently, and that the Doctor's solo travels in recent strips also take place in such a range. (Train-Flight and Doctor Conkeror! were the first inklings we had the Doctor knew something was up, and there's also hint of in in Teenage Kicks!) And maybe the Doctor is listing those enemies chronologically? On the other hand, most of the pre-Train-Flight strips or the IHP strips can't go within this gap because the Doctor isn't stuck on Earth in those.
- In Party Animals, the Doctor finally makes it to Maruthea, where he's been trying to go since Echoes of the Mogor!, way back in DWM #143. It took him thirty issues to get there! That said, it hasn't been brought up since Nemesis of the Daleks (#152, twenty issues prior), so maybe he gave up for a bit after that.
- With both those things in mind, I might suggest the following sequence (though I'm sure there are some wrinkles here I've failed to account for):
- DWM #130-56 / IHP #1-12 / DW25AS: The Doctor travels with Frobisher, Olla, and then by himself, trying to reach Maruthea. (Probably during Mel's tv tenure, if we care about this; there's no evidence that Mel exists in DWMland!)
- Season 25: The Doctor meets and travels with Ace.
- The Doctor drops Ace off in the Cretaceous.
- DWM #159-62: The Doctor travels by himself again, and begins to have inklings that the Mandragora Helix is affecting his life. The TARDIS stops being able to land anywhere other than Earth. He then picks Ace up again.
- Season 26: The Doctor continues to travel with Ace, only making Earth landings.
- DWM #163-73: The Doctor encounters more effects of the Helix, confronts and defeats it, and then finally reaches Maruthea.
- The exact sequence doesn't really matter; what I like here is how the strip is not only weaving its own events together again, but it also has the audacity to claim that things that happened on screen are part of its continuity, too. Similarly, The Mark of Mandragora cites both the events of Invaders from Gantac! and Battlefield as being so big that the public has become aware of unearthly threats. Plus there's a small cameo from Magog, the villain of DWM's very first story, The Iron Legion! Since Parkhouse left, the strip hasn't really used its own history much, so it's nice to see that back in play again.
- The Mark of Mandragora establishes that Foreign Hazard Duty began as a UNIT off-shoot; once UNIT went public, it needed a top-secret branch to take care of stuff.
- This volume contains the only DWM work of Mark Farmer, who would go on to the kind of career where I couldn't point to a specific title and tell you he did something amazing, but where I do know that whenever I see his name, I am going to see solid, dependable work. Future work that sticks out to me includes Batman: Year Two, the Alan Davis Killraven revival, Paul Cornell's Wisdom, and Justice League Detroit.
- In the backmatter, Gary Russell says that Bonjaxx is a Dæmon who originally appeared in a backup strip from DWM #49. I haven't read this because it hasn't been collected; the Tardis wiki claims that story features Azal from The Dæmons, however.
- Russell also says, "writing comic strips is darned difficult. So many people think, 'Oh, I can knock one of those out,' but they can't. I'm a prime example of that." Despite his self-professed lack of ability, he would go on to write several more DWM strips and an IDW miniseries!
- The Doctor says he and Ace need a holiday at the end of The Chameleon Factor, which links nicely into Cornell's own Seaside Rendezvous, where they are on holiday. Surely this is intentional? I guess it could also lead into The Good Soldier, though.
- Seaside Rendezvous is the only DWM work of Gary Frank who, like Mark Farmer, would go on to a career as a solid artist in American comics. He illustrated the first-ever Birds of Prey story, for example, and he even teamed up again with Paul Cornell during his Action Comics run. The story's inker, Stephen Baskerville, would do no more Doctor Who work, but did ink a million Transformers strips for Marvel UK, and also went on to do some for IDW.
- In the backmatter, Mike Collins says the convertible that the Doctor and Ace drive in The Good Soldier is the TARDIS. Am I just dense, because I totally failed to notice this if so! I thought it was just a car with some Doctor enhancements; when does the strip establish it to be the TARDIS? Rereading the first page, I can kind of see it, but I assumed that Ace's comment in a narration box ("I'm not sure I like the TARDIS looking this way") was something she said earlier, in the recently reconfigured TARDIS.
This is sort of an odd hodgepodge volume: only four genuine DWM strips! Everything else is a back-up, or from another magazine entirely. (And one of the DWM strips was supposed to be in that other magazine.) Yet, despite that, I felt like there was a slight uptick here in terms of quality since A Cold Day in Hell! As always, I'm reading these in original publication order, so that's not quite the order they are organized in in the actual book.
This covers a pretty narrow slice of the monthly; not even a whole year of comics, given the inclusion of twelve strips from a totally different magazine! I remember a lot of moaning about this at the time, but it feels like the right thing to do: that have the same creators and same publisher, some were printed in DWM, and where else would they be reprinted if not here?
Abslom Daak... Dalek-Killer
At four four-page installments, this isn't exactly an epic. I'm not particularly sure it's good, either. Abslom Daak is sentenced to being a Dalek-killer, which means he's teleported to a Dalek-occupied planet and expected to take out as many as he can before he dies. He's so successful, though, it feels like maybe the Daleks ought not have humanity on the back foot as they apparently do?
But there's a purity to this, it's so completely itself, that it's impossible not to enjoy it. Daak is an uncompromising character and thus an utter delight to read about. What really elevates it is the artwork of Steve Dillon, which reeks of power and violence. Why does this lady fall for Daak? I don't know, but Steve Dillon makes me believe it. Having already read Daak's storyline in Titan's Eleventh Doctor comics, it was interesting to come back to this and see how little of a relationship he actually had with Taiyin. So it actually works just fine; it was a total blast to read, and left me wanting more...
Star Tigers
Alas, the more that we got, I think, strays a bit too much from the pure essence of Daak. I want to watch Daak do ridiculous action, not connive on Draconia; Steve Dillon may be a great artist, but he's not up to the task of making Draconians visually distinct enough for me to follow any level of political machinations. Most of this story is about Daak putting a team together... which would be fine if we ever got to see this team do anything, but seven installments was all the Star Tigers ever got. Putting Daak on a team moves him a bit away from the pure rampage he was in the original story. Which, I get it, that couldn't last forever, but this is a bit duller than he deserves.
Nemesis of the Daleks
The Star Tigers might detract from the Daak concept, but I can't help but feel that Nemesis of the Daleks does them dirty. They have one adventure together in Star Tigers, and then they apparently all die... off-panel! They deserved better, surely? Anyway, Daak might live in the universe of Doctor Who but he's not a good fit for a Doctor Who story, not right out of the box anyway. By using the Time War and the War Doctor, I thought The Eleventh Doctor made great use of him... but it by necessity, I think, had to make him overtly comedic and somewhat pathetic. I can imagine a good seventh Doctor story where the Doctor manipulates Daak as part of some masterplan of his... unfortunately, this story is more like the Doctor just stands there a lot while Daak does his thing (and then dies). This story features some absolutely gorgeous art from Lee Sullivan, including some great two-page spreads, but aside from that is not up to much. Pretty generic action, without the vigor of the original Daak story, or the cleverness of a good Doctor Who one.
Once in a Lifetime
This is the first of a set of twelve five-page strips published in the Marvel UK anthology mag, The Incredible Hulk Presents. It has a cute idea at first (the Doctor trying to dodge a nosy reporter, leads him into a bar of his enemies), but quickly goes too far to be plausible (why does the Doctor maroon and ruin this guy when he could just fly away in the TARDIS himself?).
Hunger from the Ends of Time!
John Ridgway is back! And so is Dan Abnett's future space police/military, Foreign Hazard Duty. I think probably there's a fun idea here about bookworms in a digital library, but the story's technobabble is far too muddled, and the whole thing (despite being one of only two two-part IHP stories) is over too quickly to make any sense.
War World! / Technical Hitch / A Switch in Time! / The Sentinel!
I've never been a big fan of DWM's occasional foray into the a spooky sci-fi Twilight Zoneesque thing happens and the Doctor doesn't really do anything genre, and it turns out I like them even less when compressed down to five pages. Plus, maybe I am stupid, but I didn't even understand what was happening in A Switch in Time! (the Doctor materializes in a holo-tv, so every time the viewers change the channel, he's in a new situation) until I read the behind-the-scenes material.
Who's That Girl!
This was my favorite of the IHP stories, and one of my favorites in the volume. The Doctor regenerates... into a woman!? The best part of the story is that the Doctor's old friend, the warlord Luj, pretends he's going to make a pass at the Doctor but then immediately lets it go and acts the same toward him. But the female Doctor is really a mercenary named Kasgi hired to sabotage an interdimensional peace conference-- and Luj is really a bad guy, so Kasgi is on the side of right, despite the questionable method of hijacking and kidnapping the Doctor! I liked Kasgi a lot, and I see potential in a reappearance, but I guess not at this point. This was a fun story that made good use of its ten pages.
The Enlightenment of Ly-Chee the Wise / Stairway to Heaven / Slimmer! / Nineveh!
DWM #156 has a cover date of Jan. 1990, but it was released 14 Dec. 1989, putting it between IHP #10 (9 Dec.) and #11 (16 Dec.), so that's where I read Stairway to Heaven. It reads well in that context, actually; as a done-in-one story of weird sci-fi happenings, Paul Cornell's first piece of licensed Doctor Who fiction feels like a slightly longer IHP story. And if that sounds like damning with faint praise, it kind of is; I didn't really get it, though I think mostly down to some awkward storytelling in the art, which often left me confused as to what was actually happening. I didn't think the joke of Enlightenment was very well executed, but Slimmer! was decent fun, and Nineveh! had some good ideas, even if it wasn't much of a story. So the volume was on an upswing here overall.
Train-Flight
The best part of this is the idea that would be reused two decades later on tv in Planet of the Dead, the public transit that accidentally takes you into space. Unfortunately, the story doesn't really do much with that idea, pretty much abandoning the people on the train right away, unlike Planet of the Dead, which is built around them in classic RTD fashion. (Though, that's not one of RTD's better-characterized scripts.) It also features the return of Sarah Jane Smith... but it doesn't do much with her, either; she could be any old companion, so why bother? That said, you say, "John Ridgway, draw a train in the space-time vortex," and he draws it like none other.
Doctor Conkerer!
I might have got more out of this if I knew what conkers was. But it was cute enough.
Stray Observations:
- With #13, the The Crimson Hand graphic novel, these collections got a visual redesign, but reading in original strip order, this is the first of the new-look volumes I've gotten to. It makes me pretty grumpy that part of this redesign means removing the credits from the table of contents-- the actual strips were not very good at including credits during this era (I assume they were printed somewhere else in the mag), meaning it takes more work than it ought to to figure out who wrote and drew any particular strip. (And some letters go completely uncredited.)
- In part six of Star Tigers, we hear a human colony has rebelled and is using Kill-Mechs to invade other planets, and we see them in a couple panels. In the next installment, though, Daleks burst out of meteroids and the Kill-Mechs and their emperor are immediately forgotten. "The Kill-Mechs don't matter!" Apparently DWM was unsure it had the rights to the Daleks and hastily redid part six, but a month later, it was all sorted out. (I gather that the 1990 Abslom Daak graphic novel edits out the Kill-Mechs, but here the strips are printed as they originally appeared, not as originally intended.)
- David Lloyd never illustrated the main DWM strip, I believe, but he did draw a number of back-ups across the first few years of the mag. Star Tigers is the only one to be collected thus far; a couple years after Star Tigers went out, he would begin illustrating his most famous work, V for Vendetta, with fellow DWM back-up strip vet Alan Moore.
- As I stated last time, "Richard Alan" is a pseudonym for strip editor Richard Starkings, used because he was an editor commissioning himself. "Steve Alan" was writer John Tomlinson, used because was worried what he had written was a bit crap!
- I don't think Panini began including prose stories in these collections until later. Which is a shame, because Marvel UK published a Daak short story in the Abslom Daak graphic novel that would have been a good inclusion here. (Or so I think... having never read it!)
- Nemesis of the Daleks is, I think, the first time the distinctive "Dalek lettering" was used in DWM. Googling tells me it was first used in The Dalek Book back in 1964!
- Who's That Girl! is the last Doctor Who comic work of Marvel UK regular Simon Furman; I don't think he ever really "got" Doctor Who the way he did The Transformers, but he goes out with his best strip here. He would go on to do a lot of work for Marvel US, including a particularly mediocre run on Alpha Flight. (But then, is there anyone who had anything other than a mediocre run on Alpha Flight?) Two decades after reinventing the Transformers for the UK market, he would reinvent them all over again for the 2000s with, I think, no small amount of success. Gary Russell must have thought he wrote good Doctor Who, though, because he commissioned a fifth Doctor audio drama from him in 2004.
- The Enlightenment of Ly-Chee the Wise was Simon Jowett's only Doctor Who work for two decades, until he contributed a short story to the anthology The Story of Martha-- put together by fellow Marvel UK writer Dan Abnett. Mike Collins's co-writer on Slimmer!, Tim Robins, never contributed another Who strip to Marvel UK, but he did conduct a number of fanzine interviews later collected in Telos's Talkback series. Stairway to Heaven was Gerry Dolan's only DWM strip, and he left comics soon after this for "a successful if little noticed career as a storyboard artist," according to John Freeman.
- Train-Flight establishes that Ace is in the Cretaceous, her first mention in the DWM strip. Since the Doctor is still trying to get to Maruthea in subsequent stories, that seemingly means all DWM stories since at least Echoes of the Mogor! must take place in a gap during Ace's travels.
- Doctor Conkerer! was Ian Rimmer's only Doctor Who work, but he wrote a number of Transformers strips for Marvel UK, including two charming Christmas specials.
- Train-Flight has some forebodings that something is off in the Doctor's life; an extra piece of text in Doctor Conkerer! (replacing where the credits would have been if it had been printed in IHP) adds to this.
I had always intended to follow Death's Head out of A Cold Day in Hell! and into his solo series. If I had been smart, though, I would have picked up Panini's two-volume collection of his adventures; since Panini has (had?) the UK reprint rights to both Marvel and Doctor Who, they could include both Death's Head stories with Doctor Who elements and ones with Marvel elements. Alas, I did not, and that collection is now prohibitively expensive and/or just unavailable. Instead, I picked up this Marvel collection, which has to skip over, for example, Death's Head #8 because both the Doctor and Josiah W. Dogbolter appear in it.
So: in the Transformers storyline "The Legacy of Unicron!", Death's Head was lost in a time portal; in the Doctor Who Magazine story The Crossroads of Time, he emerged in the Doctor Who universe. At the end of that story, the Doctor sent him to Earth in the year 8162, setting up his appearances here. That means all the stories in the first half take place in the Doctor Who universe, and thus also Marvel UK's Dragon's Claws series must take place in the Who universe, though neither Lars Pearson's Ahistory nor the Tardis wiki seem to buy this argument. As I discussed in my review of A Cold Day in Hell!, the fact that Dragon's Claws is set in the 82nd century is actually what allows us to date a significant number of DWM stories: Dreamers of Death, The Free-Fall Warriors, The Moderator, The Shape Shifter, Polly the Glot, War-Game, the Kane's Story sequence, A Cold Day in Hell!, Redemption!, and many I haven't gotten to yet must take place in the 82nd century because Death's Head #8 established that Dogbolter was from the same era as Dragon's Claws. Yet, as far as I know, we never see Earth in DWM during what Lars Pearson calls "the Mazuma Era"; the status of humanity's homeworld in this time is only fleshed out in Dragon's Claws and in Death's Head #1-8. (I think? It may have appeared in passing in the Kane's Story sequence now that I think about it.)
Okay, okay, enough context, what about the stories? Reading this, at first I wondered if Death's Head could actually work as a solo character. What made him fun in The Transformers was the way he was above it all-- or rather, beneath it all. Here's this vast cosmic war happening, and especially in the 2006-set stories he originated in, it features titans of the universe. But Death's Head doesn't give a crap: he just cares about money, and if someone is going to call him a "bounty hunter" instead of a "freelance peacekeeping agent." The fun derives from the fact that Death's Head is basically operating in a totally different story to that of our usual protagonists and antagonists. But can that be maintained when he becomes the star of the show?
Most of the time, Simon Furman seemingly can't figure out how to do it. At first, this title really struggles because of Dragon's Claws. The first issue collected here is Dragon's Claws #5, and the story drops you right in, with no context for who these people are or why you should care about them. Which, okay, to be fair, it was their series and Death's Head was a guest star. Why should they be explained? But Death's Head was the breakout star of Marvel UK, and surely Death's Head fans followed him from The Transformers into this without picking up issues #1-4? Yet no concession is made for them. This is also true of some of the individual issues of the actual solo series once it gets started, especially #2, which really strongly assumes I understand who all these characters are and what they are doing when I just don't.
In issues #3-7, the series moves into its short-lived status quo, where Death's Head with his assistant Spratt set up a business in the Los Angeles Resettlement. There are two I particularly liked, two that make the format work. The first is #5, which brings back self-interested space trash Keepsake from the Doctor Who Magazine story Keepsake. Now, when I saw this, my reaction was, "uh, really?" because Keepsake wasn't exactly a noteworthy story where I was thinking, "let's bring back that guy." But when I read it, I finally saw what this series was doing and could do. In this one, Keepsake returns to L.A. to meet up with an old partner; between the two of them, they have a complete map to a buried treasure. Only Keepsake-- who now has a new girlfriend in tow-- ran out on his wife so that she wouldn't get part of his half, and so the wife hires Death's Head to get Keepsake. The result of this is a confusing panoply of Keepsake vs. ex-partner and Keepsake vs. ex-wife. But just like the Autobot/Decepticon war, Death's Head doesn't give a hoot, he just wants a payday. It's dumb, and it's fun because Death's Head agrees with us that it's dumb, and doesn't give the interpersonal dynamics any real thought if he gets his money.
Similarly, #7 is about Death's Head and Spratt chasing a mark-- but what they don't know is that two different bounty hunters are chasing down Death's Head. So these two bounty hunters are trying to kill him, which he doesn't know, and also trying to kill each other so that the other one doesn't get the credit. Again, this sense that Death's Head attitude means that he's just above it all is where these stories are the most fun.
But when they expect you to take these things seriously, they don't work, because much of the time, they are impossible to: a lot of macho early 1990s stuff, even though it's still the late 1980s. Too many stories are dependent on action, which I don't care about, or keeping track of a bunch of interchangeable nobodies. There are occasional flashes of wit and color, but overall the effect is drab.
(I did also like #1, where we get a series of flashbacks each of which ends with Death's Head laying down one of his principles of being a freelance peacekeeping agent.)
Still, I think the comic was getting somewhere and figuring itself out, which is why it's a bummer that #8 totally shifted the direction of the comic, though I'm sure there were good sales-related reasons for this. Due to rights issues, though, issue #8 can't be printed in this collection! Suffice it to say that the Doctor takes Death's Head out of the Doctor Who universe in 8162 and plops him in the Marvel universe in the present day; I will eventually read it when I pick up The Incomplete Death's Head. So now Death's Head is in his third universe thus far!
Issue #9 picks up with Death's Head on the roof of Four Freedoms Plaza, where the Fantastic Four live. At first they fight, of course, but then they must team up the Fantastic Four's security system goes haywire. At the end of this issue, the Fantastic Four try to send Death's Head back to 8162 (I guess no one knows he's in the wrong universe), but when Reed Richards realizes he's a paid killer, he switches it off, which ejects Death's Head in the far-off year of, um, 2020. (Iron Man 2020 had been a feature of some Marvel comics, so this was an established setting.) The set-up is a bit confusing, as Death's Head is already established, and trying to find money to fix up his spaceship... which didn't come with him... and which doesn't appear in 2020 until the issue's end!
These two issues are basically fine. There's some fun interplay between Death's Head and the FF, and the Iron Man 2020 has some great Death's Head moments, but on the other hand falls foul of the dull convolutions that bedevilled a number of the pre-time-jump stories. Overall though, one can sense a comic frantically searching for a new direction... and getting cancelled abruptly, as an obviously hastily final two pages in #10 sum up a lot.
After this, Death's Head doesn't have a status quo. The graphic novel The Body in Question (which has three parts; book one is set between the antepenultimate and penultimate pages of #10, and then books two and three after #10) makes the mistake of delving into the history of Death's Head, though it does reunite him with his supporting cast from his ongoing. No one cares about where Death's Head came from; what makes him interesting is what he does. Unfortunately this story gives us very little of that, instead spending time on a lot of cod mysticism. There is one good joke, though.
I don't know why Furman bothered bringing the supporting cast back, because they never appear again. We next follow Death's Head into Fantastic Four #338, when he's starting freelancing for the Time Variance Authority. This is not much of a Death's Head story; it's just a Fantastic Four one he happens to be in. Better use is made of him in Sensational She-Hulk #24; he's back in New York 2020... but in a grave for some reason. (He still has his TVA time-bike, though, because he never returned it.) The story is goofy, but enjoyable, and actually makes good use of the 2020 setting in that something She-Hulk does in 1991 has repercussions thirty years later... and vice versa. Then in 2011, he's being hired by aliens to fight on their behalf (against the Hulk, as Earth's champion). (I assume because of time travel again, but I don't think anyone says.) Each of these is probably fine as a guest appearance, but it is a pretty disappointing way for the character to go out. He's brought into the Marvel universe... and promptly amounts to nothing!
Part of the reason was that in 1992, he was killed off and replaced by Death's Head II, an "extreme" 1990s character. So Death's Head makes it into a new universe, and is killed off for his troubles. Simon Furman got the opportunity to kind of undo this in an issue of What If..., which has him uniting a team of 1992 superheroes to take down a villain in 2020. It probably would have been much more interesting if I was familiar with the story it was rewriting... but I also can't imagine I would enjoy reading that story either! Geoff Senior's usually solid art seems compromised in pursuit of the mediocre 1990s aesthetic, to boot.
So, I wish Furman had left Death's Head in Los Angeles 8162 and perfected that set-up instead. This was a pretty dismal way for a once-great character to go out. (Though, in my marathon at least, there is more Death's Head to come.)
(Also it seems like a bummer that this doesn't contain the 2011 Revolutionary War: Death's Head one-shot... I haven't read it, though, so maybe there's a good reason for that.)
Death's Head and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »
This is the first DWM graphic novel (in strip order) that has bonus features beyond an archival interview; it contains a new introduction by Richard Starkings (the strip's editor for much of this era) and a set of interviews with the writers and artists put together by John Freeman (the magazine's editor for much of this era). This means I have more insight into the production decisions behind the strip than in previous eras.
The big difference between this run and previous ones is that it has neither a consistent writer (as the strip did from #1 to #110) nor a consistent artist (as the strip did from #1 to 69 and #88 to 133). Starkings explains the decision: "it had often occurred to me that the strip should reflect the series and feature a different writer and director for each story" (p. 6). But I think this neglects a way in which television is a different medium than tv. On screen, the writer and director might always change, but the performance stays the same. Every episode has got Sylvester McCoy in. But in a comic, the artist isn't just the director, they're also every actor. This means that even when the strips are good, there's no throughline, and the lack of consistency leaves it all feeling like less than the sum of its parts. From #70 to 87, you had a consistent tone and style from Steve Parkhouse even if the art was always different; from #111 to 133 you had a consistent tone and style from John Ridgway even if the writing was always different. Here you have neither. And no companion! (The strip was last companion free from #49 to 77.) I cannot think of any other ongoing non-anthology comic that took an approach like this.
Now, this might all be rubbish, because I read this all in one go, whereas it would have come out across two years. Maybe it reads fine when you have a month gap every time the creative team changes? But this is how I read it!
A Cold Day in Hell! / Redemption!
These two strips transition out of the trappings of the sixth Doctor era: Frobisher departs the Doctor; when he leaves, new companion Olla is introduced, but she's gone within one more strip herself! The actual stories here are so-so, the Doctor running around after Ice Warriors and such, and doing a lot of goofy stuff that makes you suspect all Simon Furman had to go off was the script for Time and the Rani. Frobisher's writing-out is pretty perfunctory, as is Olla's.
The Crossroads of Time
So I've been reading the Marvel UK Transformers comics in parallel with the DWM strips, all because here they collide. At the end of the Transformers story "The Legacy of Unicron!" (in Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five), the robot mercenary Death's Head is tossed into a malfunctioning time portal; here we find out where he went, as he emerges in the Doctor Who universe. I don't object to this on principle; indeed, it strikes me as one of the USPs of reading the strip, and I was curious to see how this whole crossover thing would shake out.
Alas, in practice, it's freaking terrible. Death's Head, who in Transformers was a "principled" freelance peacekeeping agent in that he killed for money-- and not for pleasure-- here attacks the Doctor for no real good reason, just an accidental collision in the Time Vortex. The Doctor fights him with lethal force! It doesn't kill Death's Head, but he doesn't know that; I get that Death's Head had to be shrunk down to human scale if he was going to interact with other Marvel UK characters, but maybe the Doctor could have done it on purpose? And then the Doctor sends this homicidal bounty hunter to Earth in the year 8162 and is just like, "Ah, oh well, I'm sure it'll be fine." I think there could have been a great story about a clash of values between the Doctor and Death's Head... but this is manifestly not it. I can only hope that Death's Head's solo feature, which I plan on following him into, is better than this.
Claws of the Klathi!
This is a decent piece of Victoriana by stalwart DWM contributor Michael Collins. It feels to me like it has a bit too much going for its three parts: a freakshow escapee, a pair of alien refugees, a giant robot, a gathering of men of science, and the Crystal Palace struggle for space. The men of science, for example, kind of feel pointless. But it's certainly the best story in this volume thus far, and Kev Hopgood is one of DWM's better post-Ridgway artists.
Culture Shock! / Keepsake / Planet of the Dead / Echoes of the Mogor! / Time and Tide
This run of strips reminded me a lot of Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse's run from #46 to 60 (back in Dragon's Claws): it's all one- and two-part stories, often hinging on some kind of highbrow science fictional concept taken to a depressing conclusion. In Culture Shock!, the Doctor discovers a sentient race of bacteria who need his help; in Keepsake he (accidentally?) bullies a mercenary into helping him out; in Echoes of the Mogor!, he finds a long-dead species who embody their memories in crystal; in Time and Tide, he comes upon a dying species on a water planet. They are all varying degrees of fine, and the artists all have varying degrees of command over Sylvester McCoy's likeness. Culture Shock! had a cool hook, but I didn't really buy the Doctor's depression; I liked the idea of Keepsake but thought the humor didn't quite come off; Time and Tide was crazy depressing, and am not convinced it really fits the character of the Doctor. (There's a lot of standing around watching people die!)
Planet of the Dead has the Doctor encountering first dead companions, and then his own previous selves. I didn't think John Freeman really captured the voices of the companions and Doctors enough to pull this off, but Lee Sullivan was an excellent choice for illustrating it.
Follow That TARDIS!
The Doctor is forced by the Sleeze Brothers, a pair of private investigators, to chase the Monk's TARDIS throughout a series of historical disasters. I am convinced this could be funny, but I did not think the joke actually came off.
Invaders from Gantac!
Going into this, I was like, "Oh no... another comedy story." But it turned out to be the best story in the whole volume! The Doctor lands on Earth in the far future year of 1992 to find out that it's been taken over by aliens, and his only ally is a homeless man named Leapy. In its mix of big events and light comedy, it very much felt like something I could imagine Russell T Davies putting on screen as a big, bright two-parter in the Aliens of London/Rise of the Cybermen/Daleks Take Manhattan/The Sontaran Stratagem slot. There's some good comedy, but also a serious edge: more than any other story, I could imagine McCoy doing this on screen. It's pacey and twisty, and the only thing I didn't like was the kind of perfunctory ending. That said, Griffiths and Smith don't exactly nail McCoy's likeness. (But then, who does!?)
Stray Observations:
- If you were a hypothetical reader who never watched the show, I think you would imagine that after The World Shapers, the sixth Doctor, Frobisher, and Peri all went on an adventure where Peri left with Yrcanos and the Doctor regenerated. There's no indication here that, say, Frobisher was dropped off or anything.
- I read The Age of Chaos, even though it was written many years later, between The World Shapers and A Cold Day in Hell! Doing so revealed an inconsistency; the way Frobisher mopes over Peri in Cold Day makes it clear he hasn't been visiting her and her descendants as Age of Chaos established, and wound of her departure is obviously quite raw. But if you wanted to get quite convoluted, I think you could solve it by imagining that for Frobisher, Age of Chaos takes place after A Cold Day in Hell!! The sixth Doctor and Peri drop off Frobisher and experience the events of Trial of a Time Lord. Frobisher is then picked up by the seventh Doctor, who tells him what happened, and then he gets dropped off again on A-Lux. Then he gets picked up by the sixth Doctor, who takes him to Krontep and meet Peri again, along with the kids. Easy!
- Poor Olla: I am reasonably sure she is the only DWM-original companion to never appear or even be mentioned again. The Doctor doesn't call her up for help in The Stockbridge Showdown!
- I did notice that in A Cold Day in Hell!, Furman did something he also does in his Transformers strips: so that reading the recap isn't dull, it usually also includes new information. But that means if you only skim the recap, you might miss the new information! However, I am used to it now, and it doesn't throw me as much.
- Richard Starkings says the first thing he did when taking over as editor was fire John Ridgway because he cost so much... but back in the introduction to Voyager, Ridgway said he quit when the strip switched to McCoy so that he could focus on the steadier income from drawing DC's Hellblazer.
- Fun fact: In The Crossroads of Time, the Doctor sends Death's Head to the year 8162. This is because that was the setting of Marvel UK's Dragon's Claws series, but because Dogbolter showed up in the Death's Head solo series that span out of Dragon's Claws, that means a significant chunk of the DWM mythos must also date to the 82nd century. If that's when Dogbolter is from, it must also be when Frobisher is from; we know the Free-Fall Warriors are from the same era as Dogbolter; and we know Ivan Asimoff is also from that era. It also seems likely that Olla is from the era. Abel's Story and War-Game also go in this era. Much much later, The Stockbridge Showdown would place Sharon's new home era in the same time as all the others as well. All because Marvel UK wanted to spin Death's Head into his own series! Plus, this means Dragon's Claws takes place in the Doctor Who universe...
- Claws of the Klathi! commits one of my neo-Victorian pet peeves: there is no way a man of means who dabbled in science would call himself a "scientist" in 1851 as the gentlemen do here. It sounds like a job one might have!
- Culture Shock! was the last Doctor Who Magazine contribution from Grant Morrison, who is arguably the most famous person to have worked on the strip other than Dave Gibbons. (Alan Moore only wrote for the back-ups.) He would write creator-owned stuff like We3 (Homeward Bound with killer cyborgs) later on, but I know him best as a prolific DC contributor, writing things like JLA, Seven Soldiers of Victory, All-Star Superman, 52, Final Crisis, and The Multiversity.
- Bryan Hitch illustrates just one strip, but still gets cover credit; he would do some genre-redefining work in the 2000s on The Ultimates for Marvel and The Authority for Wildstorm.
- Doctor Who tie-ins often like to do a thing where the Doctor remembers his companions who died while travelling with him, but are hamstrung in this by the fact that on screen, that amounts to unmemorable and/or terrible ones like Katarina, Sara, and Adric. So DWM gains a slight boost from the events of The World Shapers in that stories like Planet of the Dead can now use Jamie, a dead companion who is both good and memorable.
- Echoes of the Mogor! is the first story to establish that the Doctor is trying to get to the planet Maruthea; in Invaders from Gantac! we learn he's attempting to attend the birthday of someone called Bonjaxx, but he doesn't make it within the confines of this volume.
- It also introduces the Foreign Hazard Duty team, a sort of future space police; evidently we will see them in future volumes.
- "Richard Alan" is a pseudonym for strip editor Richard Starkings; so is "Zed."
- Follow That TARDIS! is, I believe, the only DWM contribution of Andy Lanning, who would become a prolific contributor to Marvel and DC in the 2000s. My favorite work of his is a run on Legion of Super-Heroes, but he also contributes to basically every DC event, including Infinite Crisis, 52, and Flashpoint. He strikes me as one of those guys who is capable of great work, but will also happily contribute to drek if that's what you need.
- So far the Master has never appeared in a DWM strip; the Meddling Monk has appeared twice. Who is the real Time Lord nemesis of the Doctor?
- This volume contains the only Doctor Who Magazine contributions of Kev Hopgood, but he must have made a good impression on someone for his Sylvester McCoy likeness, as twenty-five years later he returned to Doctor Who to illustrate the seventh Doctor segment of Prisoners of Time! I liked his art here, but in my review of that volume I called it "stiff."
- The Sleeze Brothers went on to have their own comic series from Marvel. The Tardis wiki doesn't count it as part of the Doctor Who universe, but who knows why. Their rules for "inclusion" are typically pretty asinine, anyway. You can get it pretty cheap on the secondary market, but I am not sure I am motivated to do so...
- Alan Grant never contributed to DWM again, and hilariously he doesn't even remember that he did this strip. I know him best as the co-writer of L.E.G.I.O.N. from DC, with fellow Marvel UK contributor Barry Kitson. But of course his greatest contribution to comics was the seminal and influential Bob the Galactic Bum.
- Yes, that's a lot of "where are they now?" updates in this one! If your comic collection has twenty-one individual contributors (not counting letterers), I guess odds are a lot of them will go on to be famous.
While this can work for someone who had never read the Rivers of London series, it works a lot better if you are reading the non-graphic series as well. Sitting between novels 4 (Broken Homes) and 5 (Foxglove Summer), "Body Work" is an original story and not an adaptation. Its scope is smaller than that of a novel in the series but it is still an enjoyable story.
A man drives his car into the river. When the police arrives, they do not suspect anything unusual - until Peter shows up and tells them that not everything is what it looks like. The car is haunted - not with a ghost (they do not exist after all) but it is still haunted by something and unless someone does something about it, more people will die. And one of the victims can be Peter.
The 5 issues of the limited series do not allow for a lot of depth to the story but it is not entirely shallow either - there are twists and turns and we even get a glimpse in Nightingale's history. And in the last panels made me smile - the magicians may think they know everything but Molly is Molly after all :)
At the end of the collection are included 6 short stories (5 of them are a page long; the 6th is 5 pages). They are quick snapshots of life in the universe and I really enjoyed them being added here.
Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä palvelujen toimittamiseen, toiminnan parantamiseen, analytiikkaan ja (jos et ole kirjautunut sisään) mainostamiseen. Käyttämällä LibraryThingiä ilmaiset, että olet lukenut ja ymmärtänyt käyttöehdot ja yksityisyydensuojakäytännöt. Sivujen ja palveluiden käytön tulee olla näiden ehtojen ja käytäntöjen mukaista.
It's DWM's longest story! By issue count, at least; I think The Glorious Dead still has it beat out by approximately ten pages. Picking up from the end of The Power of the Doctor, this leads right into Destination: Skaro... though I am unconvinced that its events really could squeeze into the sixty minutes the Doctor states have passed between the two stories in Destination: Skaro. I am pretty sure it took me longer than sixty minutes to read it!
It's a bit bonkers, and it's not very deep, but it is fun. One of Alan Barnes's strengths as a writer has always been rearranging pop culture iconography in interesting ways: here the Daleks attack the World Cup Final in 1966, only it turns out that it's all a simulation from the future, an amusement park where people go to experience Dalek wars... and the park enslaves real Daleks to make it all work. When the Doctor escapes from the simulation, he brings real Daleks with him.
It's not very deep, but it is deep enough; the story does some fun stuff with the disjunction between how we perceive Daleks as viewers (fun, goofy) and how they function in the narrative of Doctor Who (purveyors of genocide); probably the best of the many strong cliffhangers is the one where a bunch of tourists began chanting "EXTERMINATE," hoping to be exterminated! As you would, of course. It casts a lens on Doctor Who's own story, but also reflects the way that, say, Nazis come across in real pop culture. Alan Barnes amps it up as the story proceeds by even bringing in the TV Century 21 Daleks, contrasting their even more goofy iconography with the brutality of the "actual" Daleks.
It does give a feeling of being made up as it went along. Mostly I don't mind this (so does, say, the original Star Beast) but it does seem like the whole story could have ended with part eight but keeps going with a whole new subplot.
Lee Sullivan does a great job with Daleks of course, but all throughout; he captures new series Daleks, classic series Daleks, TV21 Daleks, all of them. James Offredi matches him on coloring with some good work, especially on the TV21 stuff.
If you thought this would be a deep plunge into the mysteries of the fourteenth Doctor (and I can see why you might have, though the story itself discards this pretty quickly), this isn't it. But it is a solid piece of DWM fun.
Other Notes:
- For those of us who keep track of such things, these fourteen strips tie Alan Barnes for the twelfth-longest run as writer of the DWM strip with Steve Parkhouse (#86-99), and tie Lee Sullivan for seventh as artist with David A Roach (#451-64). For total written, it moves Barnes from fifth to third (at 41 strips, a bit below Steve Parkhouse's total of 46), and Lee Sullivan from eighth to seventh (at 44 strips). But I believe there's more to come after this for both, so their numbers will move even further up.
- This is Barnes's first contribution to the main strip since #380, a gap of 204 strips! This would place him in second for largest gap (if we discount the returns for issue #500), behind John Tomlinson's record of 210... except that Lee Sullivan makes his first contribution since #317, setting a new record of 267!
- I'm given to understand that the conceit of TV Century 21 was that it was a news magazine from one century after its time of publication. Because of that, the humorless pedants of the Tardis wiki have counted all sorts of weird stuff as "valid" because it was printed in TV21 alongside the Dalek strips. Like, they'll count Thunderbirds... but (up until recently) not Scream of the Shalka or Death Comes to Time!? Anyway, if they are paying attention to Liberation, they need to take all that stuff back out, because Barnes establishes the TV21 comic strips are an in-universe 21st-century children's fiction.
Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »