Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

This is an era of the strip I actually remember fairly well from reading it in the magazine as it originally came out. Three of the four stories here I could have told you the premise of before cracking the book open, and the fourth (The Instruments of War) came back to me as soon as I got to the last page of Part One. I guess I was receiving and reading the magazine fairly regularly. We're into Peter Capaldi now, and as always the strip just keeps on trucking along; there's no attempt at anything like a story arc yet, just a series of individual stories as the new Doctor beds in. I will say that Capaldi's face seems a bit easier for the artists to capture than Matt Smith's was.

The Crystal Throne
In the gap between Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi on screen, the strip gave us this story featuring the so-called "Paternoster Gang." We've had a few Doctor-less main strips in our time (Darkness, Falling in #167, Conflict of Interests in #183, Unnatural Born Killers in #277, Character Assassin in #311, Me and My Shadow in #318, most recently Imaginary Enemies in #455), but this is the first time that one ever goes multiple installments, I believe. The Paternoster Gang does their thing in defeating a plot to replace the Queen with an insect Queen; shenanigans at the Crystal Palace are included. It's not high art, but it's good fun; Scott Gray of course has a good handle on the character voices, especially Strax. He manages to thread the needle of making Strax funny without making him dumb. I also appreciated the first-person narration from Madame Vastra.

Instead of pencils, Mike Collins supplies just layouts for David A Roach to ink over, and on some pages Roach does the layouts himself. (And he's not credited, but according to the backmatter, Scott Gray did the layouts on one page, too.) The story of how this one came together is perhaps more interesting than the actual story! I had a feeling photographs were traced for some of the Vastra images, and I was right, but all those scales sure would be pretty fiddly to draw!

The Eye of Torment
The twelfth Doctor makes his DWM debut in a very enjoyable story about a spaceship exploring the sun being attacked by creepy aliens. As is often the case with Gray/Geraghty/Roach stories it's not so much that the story does anything spectacularly innovative as that the story does everything spectacularly well. Great visuals (get a load of those panels of the sun, and there's an amazing one of the Doctor outside the ship in the final part), good dialogue especially for the Doctor, sharp guest characters, creepy aliens, fun wrinkles and complications, even the narration captions are perfect. The icing on the cake is that Scott Gray is always so good at characterization that he picks up on stuff only nascent in the show: the bit where Clara manipulates Rudy Zoom into going what could be his death is totally in keeping with where Clara goes in late series eight and series nine, but was just barely hinted at at this point in the show. Both writer and pencil artist express reservations about their capturing of Capaldi in the notes, but I didn't notice any issues at all.

The Instruments of War
The Doctor and Clara team up with Rommel (!) and the Sontarans (!!) to stop the Rutans from destroying Earth with a Sontaran weapon; Mike Collins writes and draws, as he sometimes does. Not as good as last time he did this (The Futurists, also about fascists, strangely), but good stuff. Captures the voice of the Sontarans well. Kirby-style technological sublime on the North African front is a great visual juxtaposition. The musical motif (so to speak) is a good one.

Blood and Ice
One thing I have found interesting about the Moffat era of the strip is how it picks up loose character threads from the show; this is something the strip had not previously really done when the show is on. That trend is continued here, with a story that actually looks at the idea of Clara's splinters, which was a mystery in series seven, but promptly forgotten about once it had been explained. What was it like for there to be thousands of you born across time and space for the purpose of saving one man? Jacqueline Rayner finally lets us find out as Clara bumps into one of her splinters in Antarctica. It's all very well done in terms of art, story, and character. So well done, in fact, that one wishes Jenna Coleman could have played this on screen. On the page, it's obvious that Winnie is only pretending to betray the Doctor and Clara... on screen, I reckon Coleman could have made us believe it for a moment!

Stray Observations:

• Way back when reading stories collected in The Flood graphic novel, I complained that both the Doctor and Destrii make racist comments that they don't actually get called out on, the effect of this being pretty uncomfortable. Haha... racism? That happened again in Crystal Throne, where Strax makes fun of a Sikh's headgear. But in 2014 this kind of thing is seen differently than in 2004-5, and DWM got a letter complaining about it, and the offending dialogue was changed for the graphic novel.
• The backmatter is always such good value. I enjoyed Gray's comments on the decline of third-person captions in comics, and his exploration of how to introduce a new Doctor. When he read the debut scripts for David Tennant and Matt Smith before actually seeing them in the role, he could only hear the voices of their predecessors... not so with Capaldi! Geraghty says he didn't like how the aliens in Eye of Torment weren't colored at first, but he came around to it in the end.
• Gray and Geraghty "cast" Lenny Henry as self-aggrandizing amoral tech mogul Rudy Zero; Gray bemoans that he hadn't been used in the show yet. Lenny Henry eventually did turn up on the show in Jodie Whittaker's era... as a self-aggrandizing amoral tech mogul!
• Capaldi's Doctor doesn't appear until the very last page of Part One of The Eye of Torment, in a really great moment. I guess this was because of release date constraints (the issue came out just before "Deep Breath," and they didn't want twelve pages of the twelfth Doctor running around before he had had a real adventure on screen), but it works very well on its own terms as a way to debut a new Doctor in the strip. It would be a good surprise for our hypothetical reader who doesn't follow the show!
• With The Eye of Torment, Scott Gray brings an end to an astounding 39-strip run as the writer of the comic, beating out Steve Parkhouse's previous record of 32.
• Blood and Ice was designed to work as a strip exit for Clara, since no one involved knew if "Last Christmas" was going to be her exit or not.
• Revisiting the events of The Tenth Planet with Peter Capaldi's Doctor? As always, DWM beats the tv show to it.
• In The Eye of Torment, the Doctor and Clara go to a frozen spaceship; in Instruments of War, they go to a frost fair; in Blood and Ice, they go to Antarctica. It's a very cold collection! Fortuitous that I read it in December, I guess.
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Our man David A Roach gets cover credit yet again! Of course, this is again a volume where he is more than a "mere inker."

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