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Rob Davis (1)Besprekingen

Auteur van The Motherless Oven

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Toon 17 van 17
Great book. Very funny. Beautifully drawn, with terrific comic timing. I think it's one that would repay a few rereadings. You can feel the amount of care and attention that went into this. Recommended.
 
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thisisstephenbetts | 1 andere bespreking | Nov 25, 2023 |
This was an enjoyable surreal story with amazing artwork. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I didn't find the story confusing or hard to follow.
 
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-Pia- | 4 andere besprekingen | Sep 3, 2021 |
Like Jan Svankmajer doing Grange Hill, this sets up a bizarre but kind of recognisable world that has its own internal logic and very little in the way of explanation. Scarper Lee is a schoolboy doing normal schoolboy things in a place where your dad might be a steam-powered boat on wheels and it rains knives on a regular basis. He's got three weeks to live and he knows this because everyone knows when their deathday is. Then things start to change when he meets new girl and agent of chaos Vera Pike. It's hard to explain where things go from here because it only makes sense if you read it (and you have to read all three books in the trilogy to get anything like a complete story), but the worldbuilding and character development are top notch.
 
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0ldScratch | 4 andere besprekingen | Jun 20, 2021 |
In the final book of this excellent trilogy, the surrealist world that Davis has dreamt up finally begins to make a kind of sense. This is thanks largely to excerpts from Castro's titular book, an encyclopaedia he's put together from his studies of dissected household gods. Events come to a head, things change, things carry on as they were, and maybe the future is a little brighter than it was. All in all a very satisfying end to the story.
 
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0ldScratch | Jun 20, 2021 |
While the first book was largely Scarper's story, this time it's Vera's turn, and we learn where she came from, where she came from before that, and start to get some explanations as to why Scarper's world is the way it is. The story and the worldbuilding continue to fascinate but it's the characters and their growing friendship that really hooked me.
 
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0ldScratch | 2 andere besprekingen | Jun 20, 2021 |
I just want to start off by saying that this book was super weird and I loved it.

Honestly, it was so bizarre and a little difficult to understand at first. It wasn't until I was about half way through reading this book that I began to understand the world and it's rules. But that is most likely because Scarper Lee is an unreliable narrator. He doesn't know everything that is going on and he easily misses out information because he's a very closed off character. By having him as the narrator it left me feeling like I wanted to know more about the world and I did feel a little frustrated that I didn't know what was going on, but it made me keep reading because I needed to know more.

This world has similarities to our own, kids go to school, they complain about their parents and sulk about homework. But the weather can be deadly, rather than rain they have knifes falling from the sky, or can send you mad, laughing winds that you don't want to get caught in outside. They have a daily wheel that they watch that tells them the weather, has shows, ect., a little like TV.

But one of the most intriguing things about this world and this story was people's mums and dads. Rather than the parents creating the child, the child created the parent. Parents that were like robots, animals, abstract shapes, none were like the other. You could tell that they had come from a child's imagination. I also like how they can't remember how they made their parents or even where they made their parents. It's adds a level of mystery to the story. Especially when Scarper, Vera and Castro go on the hunt to find Scarper's dad and the Motherless Oven.

I really loved how the events of this story was over the course of about 2 weeks. Each day meaning that it was getting closer and closer to Scarper's deathday. I really enjoyed the fact that there was a deadline (no pun intended) to this story. If Scarper didn't find his dad, or if they didn't find the Motherless Oven, or do any of what the 3 of them set out to do, then Scarper would never do any of it. And I thought that was such an interesting concept. I also loved that by the end you don't know if Scarper's alive or dead. Which makes me want to read the next book asap.

The art style I think is very interesting. The stark black and white art made me think of mangas rather than the usual colourful western graphic novel. I thought that it made it seem a little more creepy, as the story already is a bit creepy, I felt that the black and white heightened it. It's very visually appealing and highly stylistic.





I really enjoyed this graphic novel. It was fun and quirky, it was so different to other graphic novels I've read before and I would recommend this o anyone that likes graphic novels and want to try reading something different and a little unexpected.
 
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SarahsBookLife | 4 andere besprekingen | Jun 24, 2020 |
I enjoyed ‘The Can Opener’s Daughter’ by Rob Davis but it is one weird graphic novel. Mind you, men wearing their underpants on the outside to fight criminals in New York are weird, too, but we are used to super-heroes. Just as Radio can be used for the ‘Today Programme’ or ‘The Goons’, so comics, too, are a flexible medium with many possibilities. ‘The Can Opener’s Daughter’ is certainly different from mainstream comics.

In the opening scene, Vera Pike wakes up in bed to find her drunken mom leaning over her and demanding to know who she loves best: mother or father. This is unsettling for any child but even more so when mother is a big naked female covered in sharp spikes with a weather clock for a head and dad is a can opener. Not a modern electric one or anything, the old-fashioned kind that’s just a handle with a curved blade. Mother keeps him locked in a drawer in the kitchen most of the time.

He’s not very assertive. She, on the other hand, is the Prime-Minister and Vera lives with her in the vast Parliament building. Mum is usually busy, so Vera is homeschooled by three talking inkpots on pedestals known as the Ink Gods. She tends to bunk off school and spend time with the other Gods, the statues in the large garden. They give her advice, ‘Listen to the warm-hearted and dear departed. Listen to the loam strangling the bones.’

One day, Vera is taken to a psychiatrist, Dr. Goose-Kennington and regressed to her childhood. She recalls creating her mother in a sort of factory called the Motherless Oven and then moving to Bear Park where they lived in a small terraced house with a tiny back garden.

After the visit to the psychiatrist, Vera is sent to boarding school where she is despised for having only one surname. Everyone else has two, hyphenated. The girls work on suicide graphs which chart their future lives from career advancement to middle-aged disillusionment and suicide. They have textbooks on Cullcullus.

That’s a plot summary of the first fifty pages in a one hundred and fifty-page book. I wouldn’t normally give away so much but it seemed the best way to convey the content which is all very strange. I was tempted to put it down but, one facet of being a dutiful reviewer is that it forces you to persist with the difficult stuff. Often this is a good thing. Nowadays, with so much entertainment available, we are inclined to put away anything that doesn’t hook us in the first few pages, a bad habit. Keep reading and you get a chip pan with damaged Neo-Paganist filaments, a ‘Book Of Forks’ which is an encyclopaedia of all possible histories and a post-mortem of all possible futures. Hippies run a Gazette Nursery where they care for the souls of lost children. There are Errorists, hunted down by old people whose duty it is to uphold the Lore.

That’s the story. The art is more cartoonish than illustrative but perfectly acceptable and the storytelling is excellent. The layouts and camera angles work well to show Vera’s isolation at key points and to highlight dramatic moments, often with ‘silent’ panels containing no captions or word balloons. I had better make clear that it’s black and white lest some dimwit who only likes colour books should buy it in error. I would also like to mention that you get a lot of content for your money here. It’s a dense script, carefully drawn and a lot of work has gone into it. Too often, comic book fans are foisted off with a thin plot and some splashy poster panels. Not here.

The whole thing is perhaps best summed up by a quote from a printer on page 110: ‘Making sense is overrated. It’s just confirming what people already think. Making new sense is more important.’ Probably the best thing to do with ‘The Can Opener’s Daughter’ is to enjoy the inventive, original, inscrutable ride and don’t worry too much about sense. Somehow, it works. Vera has a couple of loyal friends and the story gallops down its own peculiar path to a dramatic and moving conclusion. Apparently, this is part two of a trilogy. I would like to read part one, ‘The Motherless Oven’,– and look forward to part three.

I recommend it to open-minded readers who fancy something different but don’t take whatever drugs Rob Davis is using. They obviously mess with your brain.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
 
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bigfootmurf | 2 andere besprekingen | May 13, 2020 |
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3112695.html

This is a collection of Tenth Doctor comics, mostly from Doctor Who Magazine (a couple from the Storybooks), four written by Jonathan Morris, three by Rob Davis, and one each by Dan McDaid and Ian Edgington; with art in three cases by Martin Geraghty, two by Rob Davis, and one each by Mike Collins, John Ross, Roger Langridge and Adrian Salmon. Of the nine stories, the two standouts for me were the title story, The Widow's Curse, by Davis and Geraghty, a creepy Caribbean story that brings back the Sycorax; and The Time of My Life, by Morris and Davis, a rather lovely farewell to Donna as a companion. I'll also note The Immortal Emperor by Morris and Davis, which I was a bit dubious about previously and remain dubious about; and Death to the Doctor, by Morris and Langridge, which features a bunch of second-rate adversaries getting together to exact revenge, including the vaguely Irish Questor who was defeated by the First Doctor, Stephen and Dodo, I think the only explicitly Irish character in Whovian comics continuity. The only way is up.½
 
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nwhyte | 1 andere bespreking | Nov 25, 2018 |
Vera lives with her mother (a weather clock) and father (a can opener) in a parliamentary mansion, where she is kept mostly in isolation, learning from the ink gods kept in little glass jars and enjoying the company of the garden gods. It's a strange, surreal world she lives in, one in which people have scheduled suicide days rather than unpredictable deaths. As she moves through this world, Vera begins to slowly rebel against her mother and the rules society has placed on the people who live there.

Although I was fascinated by this strange world and I liked the dark, detailed art, I was a bit confused by how some of the storyline unfolded — most particularly Vera's urgent desire to rescue of a boy who had not been mentioned in the first half of the book. It was only after finishing the book that I realized why I was so confused — The Can Opener’s Daughter is #2 in a series. Had I known that going in, I would have sought out the first book and made sure to read them in order (which would most likely have made reading this book more enjoyable), but there was no reference on the cover or inside the front of the book to indicate that this was part of a larger series. This is the second time this has happened to me, and it's incredibly annoying to the point that I almost don't want to bother with the rest of the series.

 
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andreablythe | 2 andere besprekingen | May 1, 2018 |
 
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blgriffin | 4 andere besprekingen | Nov 18, 2016 |
Weird and inconclusive but in a good way.½
 
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comixminx | 4 andere besprekingen | Oct 24, 2014 |
This is a comic book created by collaboration of 54 artists/storytellers. Yet it is one story impacted by their own experiences and contributions. It works because later contributors add to the twists, events written by their predecessors.

So it is one story but drawn in different styles, colours and font - yet all bound by same story. Characters are built very well built - Nelson and Tabby, Jim and Rita, the school teacher, Leslie, Chris etc etc.

Looking across 54 different comic styles, I felt it is also possible to differentiate between male and female designers, based on the style and colours they choose. Tho themes also give away sometimes, but I believe that kind of is no longer gender-centric. But style still is.

There are some eminent contributors - there is Woodrow Phoenix of Rumble Strip fame and Simone Lia who wrote Fluffy. Usually such ideas (credited to Rob Wilsom and Woodrow Phoenix) turn out to be gimmicks, but this one works.
 
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poonamsharma | 3 andere besprekingen | Apr 6, 2013 |
First of all, this looks gorgeous. I have the special-order hardback edition; it's a handsome thick-but-not-overwhelming book, the title text and image standing out nicely. It feels substantial and keepable; and thankfully, first appearances are not deceiving.

This is a composite graphic novel written and drawn by 54 different creators in the same overall way an exquisite corpse storytelling game works, but with slightly tighter control by editors Davis and Phoenix. The result is a story that works on its own terms, while surprising and enchanting you to boot. It follows one main protagonist through her life from her birth in 1968 through to the present day; though as with most of us, she has people who are more or less constant in her life and who form a dramatis personae we come to know pretty well. Again as with most of us, her life has its ups and downs; I went to sleep last night having put down the book at the stage where she was in the doldrums of the late 90s/early 00s, in her arid 30s, everything looking pretty bleak. Nothing suspiciously contrived happened to get her out of those doldrums, but by the end of the book the outlook, her outlook, is much more settled, more cheerful, and dare I say it more mature.

The range of comics creators was always going to make this a success in one way or another - there are lots of contributors whose work I would buy an anthology for without further questions asked. Many of the great and the good of UK independent and alternative comics are included (I note also in passing that there is no worry about gender-parity in the contributors). The only person that I really missed from the line-up was Terry Wiley, who would have fitted in brilliantly (though perhaps I'm thinking that because his character Verity Fair is also an over-imaginative woman who at times has fucked up her life). A particular standout was Jamie Smart's spot-on very silly two pages with Nel as a 3 year old, but if I try to list any more creators I will go on far too long.

There are some difficulties that must intrinsically arise from the cat-herding nature of such a project. The clarity of the story-telling varies from segment to segment and sometimes I had to backtrack to figure out where or when something that was referred to had actually happened. Likewise because the visual depiction of the characters is not always totally consistent it can be a bit hard to decide what is actually happening - I particularly felt that in the John MacNaught 1993 section, beautiful though it was in itself. Other segments make it clear again, though, and overall this is not an issue once you have assimilated one or two such small hiccups. (Apart from Simone Lia's 1984 section with its teen pregnancy bombshell never referred to again - imaginative myth-making on the protagonist's part or a slip of the storytelling game because no-one wanted to pick up on that point?) Nevertheless, by the end of the book I felt like Nel was someone I knew, someone like me or my friends; someone real.½
 
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comixminx | 3 andere besprekingen | Apr 4, 2013 |
Interesting collaborative work by 54 comic creators generating a graphic novel that tells the story of Nel. Each comic creator creates a day in her 54 years.

It makes for a very readable work, and gives us a window into the style of each artist as they provide an annual snapshot of Nel and the socio-political movements of the times she lived in, the music, the trends, and her relationship with her family and friends.
 
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cameling | 3 andere besprekingen | Feb 11, 2012 |
An enticing premise: for every year, take 1 day in the life of an ordinary person and get a different comic artist and writer to create it. Starting in 1968 until the present day there is a breathtaking amount of work here and I just had to see how they did and I admit I was surprised (and hugely impressed) by how damn good this book actual is.

Davis and Woodrow (adding their own tales) have kept judicious, tight editorial control but still managed to let the story twist and grow in unforseen ways and end up with one of the most natural life stories I have seen. It never turn out likes you expect does it? The eras of the 70s/80s are brilliantly captured, the angst of youth, the fears of middle age are all there and it's fascinating and gripping and still coherant even though each soupcon of a tale only a few pages long. That's even before we get to the amazing showcase of British talent on display, I can only think of 1 dud tale. The artwork is varied, some of it's simply too beautiful, the writing is funny, sad but amazingly none of it out of character. Some artists of course stand out like Kate Brown tragically funny tale of drunken epiphany or Alice Duke's stunning, beuatiful and sharp take of one of lifes hard decisions.

I can't imagine this working well in any other medium yet I can't believe someone managed to pull this off. Highly recommend to everyone, even comic newbies.½
1 stem
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clfisha | 3 andere besprekingen | Dec 31, 2011 |
A worthwhile effort of a graphic novel adaptation of the classic hidalgo. 2011 has seen already two graphic adaptations of the immortal novel conceived by Cervantes. In this case we owe the effort to British writer and artist Rob Davis (the second one is the adaptation for young readers done by Lloyd S. Wagner, a writer from the US, who had as collaborators Richard Kohlrus and Vinod Kumar for the illustrations). The adaptation by Rob Davis (Part I of Don Quixote) is a more complete, lengthy and detailed work, getting into the philosophical intricacies of the plot with a severe, realistic style of drawing that suits the narration very well. He incorporates Cervantes into the story as a narrator, unseen behind prison bars, to clarify and amplify on developments, a device that adds interest and scope to the graphic adaptation. Davis has been able to add a modern humourous touch to the dialogue which aptly lightens and speeds the reading. Hopefully, volume 2, which corresponds to Part II of Don Quixote, will be published soon.

Note: Part II was published in 2013 (ISBN 9781906838614)
 
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drasvola | 1 andere bespreking | Nov 23, 2011 |
Some nine complete comic stories are collected in this volume, and it's the usual mixed bag for Doctor Who Magazine of late, though this is stronger than the tenth Doctor's first volume, The Betrothal of Sontar. Rob Davis, who dominates this volume, has a great knack for setting up stories but a poor one for ending them; the Doctor is incidental to the ultimate resolution of "The Woman Who Sold the World", and "The Widow's Curse" would be an excellent story if it hadn't ended the exact same way as Dan McDaid's very strong "The First" four strips earlier. (Martha Jones has rarely looked as good as she does when pencilled by Martin Geraghty in this story, to boot.) Also very good is Ian Edginton's "Universal Monsters", which reverses some horror tropes to good effect, supplemented by some unique and fantastic artwork by Adrian Salmon.

The real standout writer of the book is Jonathan Morris. Though his "Sun Screen" and "The Immortal Emperor" are too slight to work, his "Death to the Doctor!", which features a poorly-run alliance of Doctor-hating villains, is very funny (and nicely illustrated by Roger Landridge) and his "The Time of My Life" is a moving tribute to the brief run of one of Doctor Who's greatest companions, the best temp in Chiswick, Donna Noble. As always for these collections, there is excellent creator commentary in back, and I do think that despite its weaknesses, this volume plays to the comic strip's strengths more than the earlier ninth and tenth Doctor strips. The stories are visual and unusual without just being goofy or weird, and the tone is much more level and less frantic.

Added February 2023; access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

This is my era! In spring 2007, I took a three-week trip to the United Kingdom. I was excited to get to see Doctor Who on the tv as it aired... but the person I was staying with didn't have a tv! I had to torrent it just like I was back home in the States.

But the thing I could do was pick up Doctor Who Magazine in any old shop. The three weeks overlapped with the on-sale periods of #382 and 383, if I remember correctly, and I picked up both in the bookstore while I was there. Once I was back home, I realized my local Borders carried the magazine, so I just kept going with it. Soon, I would switch to getting it through my local comic book shop, and I have continued to get the magazine ever since. (I am not sure where my first year's worth of issues actually is, though; the earliest one in my DWM boxes is #397. Did I... gasp... throw them away!?) For me, this was a real high period for the magazine. The covers from 2007 are fantastic; great publicity photos well used (#386 is iconic, I reckon), and I very much miss the in-depth set reports and episode features of this era. And Russell T Davies's "Production Notes" were so good!

This means I would have joined the strip as a regular reader with part two of The Woman Who Sold the World. I was probably very confused! To be honest, though I love reading the strip in collected editions, I often struggle with it in the actual magazine. I find it hard to invest in a story that I read in ten-page segments stretched out across months. Still, I do remember some of the stories of this era from my first read, particularly, Time of My Life from #399. (I also have negative memories of Universal Monsters in the actual magazine, but I enjoyed it both the previous time I read this collection and this time. Maybe I was just not yet an Adrian Salmon devotee?)

It was kind of weird to read this right after watching The Power of the Doctor and seeing the 60th anniversary teaser trailer... Tennant and Tate nostalgia rules the land!

The Woman Who Sold the World
This I found a bit tough to get into at first. It's one of those weird Doctor Who stories where at first there's a bunch of disparate elements and it's not clear how they relate to each other; you're sort of relentlessly thrown from bit to bit. I particularly found it hard to track how I was supposed to feel about Sugarpea and Sweetleaf, the old couple in the flying chair. But by the end of the story I had come around and was totally into it: great characters, so many great concepts packed in here, good jokes, and a real emotional ending like something that might have been done on tv at the time. Only this is so much madder and more expansive! In the notes, editor Clay Hickman says they were trying to get the strip to be like the Mills & Wagner days, and I can totally see it: it has that non-stop breakneck feeling, only with more of a genuine character focus. Only thing that doesn't work for me is the kid who accidentally kills his dad. Felt a bit too gruesome and dark.

Bus Stop!
A one-off gag strip, but a decent one. The Doctor tries to preserve the timeline from rogue time travellers by riding on a bus with a soup made from the Mayor of London, but it's all (mostly) told from the perspective of a passenger (we do have a couple cuts to what Martha is doing on Mars). The narration of the passenger sometimes lays it on a bit thick but overall it's an enjoyable conceit, well executed.

The First
The Doctor and Martha meet Shackleton... and of course aliens made of ice. This is solid: it didn't wow me, but it felt like a reasonably good pastiche of an RTD-era "celebrity historical." I found the ending a bit confusing and rushed, but I enjoyed the experience overall. Nice as always to see Martin Geraghty on the main strip.

Sun Screen
This story made me realize that I'm not sure one strip is really a good length for a Doctor Who comic if it's attempting to do the "traditional" Doctor Who story of the Doctor showing up somewhere, finding a bad thing, and fixing it. You can do a comedy story, you can do a character study, but eight pages for this kind of thing is so compressed that there's no interesting characters, no plot complications that aren't instantly resolved. Morris's other one-offs in this volume show better ways of handling it, though I guess a one-off adventure is what the context of the Doctor Who Storybook pretty much calls for.

Death to the Doctor!
Indeed, here we go. This one is fun: a bunch of old but rubbish foes of the Doctor get together, and are undermined by their own incompetence. Probably my favorite gag was the Mentor, totally not a knock-off of the Master.

Universal Monsters
Again, if not a great story, a very solid one. I like how the story plays into all the horror tropes in parts one and two, and then undoes them all in part three, but does so without feeling gratuitous or contrived. And of course giving this story to Adrian Salmon is a stroke of genius, one of the best-ever artists ever associated with Doctor Who, and this  plays perfectly into his wheelhouse.

One thing I do love about this story is how different it is in terms of tone. Since The Green-Eyed Monster in #377, I feel like the strip is reembracing that it is, well, a comic strip more. Though the two Rose volumes had some good and even great stories, I think the ones from #377 are more playful in tone and format in the way that only a comic strip can be. I don't think tv could do something like the shift from Death to the Doctor! to Universal Monsters to The Widow's Curse. Sure, you can shoot each episode like its own film (as the Moffat era did to good effect), but here you can even change how the characters look... but it's somehow all the same thing anyway.

The Widow's Curse
How good is this? Definitely the standout of this volume, except for maybe The Time of My Life. Great visuals, great concepts, great capturing of character. Westminster Abbey on a Caribbean island! Donna flying a Boeing 747! This is the stuff comics were born to do. On top of that, it's populated with a genuine cast of guest characters. This is actually something the strip doesn't do a lot, or doesn't do effectively; most stories I feel like just have one or two people in them who are fully developed. But we have a whole group of tourists and more here, each of which who gets a genuinely great moment. The way the title comes into play at the end is excellent. It's kind of weird to see DWM do such a close sequel to a screen story, but overall it works incredibly well. If Donna only got one multi-part story, I'm glad it was this one.

The Immortal Emperor
Like Sun Screen, this is pretty breakneck. It works a bit better, in that I love the stylized art of Rob Davis, and a bit worse, in that I'm a bit skeptical of the fact that in one of Doctor Who's rare forays into the history of a non-UK country, every significant character other than the Doctor and Donna is evil.

The Time of My Life
Again, how good is this? I love this style of storytelling, a number of quick one-page excerpts from unseen adventures that show off the Doctor and Donna at their best. Lots of great jokes and great concepts and beautiful moments. The page where they just have fun seeing the Beatles is probably the best, but they're all great. On top of that you get the amazing art and layouts of Rob Davis, which adds so much to each page.

In the past I kind of thought the early new series–era comics weren't very good... on this reread I haven't felt that way—they're good on the whole even if they're not great—but since #377 they've been on a definite upward trajectory, and I can't wait to see what happens next...

Other Notes:
  • Mike Collins's design for the space bank here (a giant space pyramid) is basically identical to his design for the Redeemer spaceships in the Star Trek comic New Frontier: Double Time.
  • My hypothetical "only-knows-Doctor-Who-from-the-strip" reader must have been very confused reading Death to the Doctor! "Who the heck is this lady in white? Where's Sharon!?" But it is nice to see Frobisher and Izzy again. I think this is the strip's first post-2005 reference to its pre-2005 history, right? Am I forgetting something? And then a few stories later we get the freakin' zyglots! Only thing that could have been better would be making the Dan Abnett–style space marines in Time of My Life the actual Foreign Hazard Duty.
  • Here we're back to a run with neither a consistent writer (there are four different ones across nine stories) nor a consistent penciller (six different ones). But unlike past instances of this, the strip still feels coherent. I think this probably comes down to 1) strong editorial work from Clay Hickman/Tom Spilsbury and especially Scott Gray, and 2) strong capturing of the voices of the regulars, especially David Tennant. All these various creators seem to be on the same page despite their varied styles, unlike, say, the early McCoy-era strips collected in A Cold Day in Hell!
  • Universal Monsters is Ian Edginton's only contribution to Doctor Who Magazine. He has, however, written a mediocre Big Finish audio drama, Shield of the Jötunn. Outside of the world of Doctor Who, he is a prolific comics writer: I know him best from his Star Trek work (an excellent run for Marvel on the Captain Pike series Early Voyages, plus an IDW one-off), but his best-known work is probably Scarlet Traces, a series of The War of the Worlds sequels.
  • This collection skips over Hotel Historia from #394, because it makes more sense to collect it in the next volume, The Crimson Hand, as we'll see. I guess because of when it was published, I always think of that story as featuring Martha... but it totally does not!
  • I usually read the strips in these collections in order publication order; this means I should have moved The Immortal Emperor to the end. (It would actually properly go between strips in the next volume by publication order.) But it was clearly sequenced here based on reading flow, and in this case, I made an exception and bowed to book's position, which was the right choice.
  • Both Martha and Donna had been written out of the tv show by the time their first comic story came to an end. At five strips, Donna has one of the shortest runs of any multi-story companion, tying Olla the Heat Vampire (#130-34). This is exacerbated by the fact that, as a tv companion, she just blips into existence... though she actually does kind of get written out.
  • Two of the writers here would go on to become the "main" writer of the strip in the future. Dan McDaid, writer of The First, would do the tenth Doctor and Majenta Pryce run (#400-20), while Jonathan Morris would do the eleventh Doctor and Amy run (#421-41). No offense to either writer, though, who have both turned out strong work, but the surprising thing to me—based purely on the quality of work in this collection—is that Rob Davis never got a run. Two excellent stories as a writer in this collection, one excellent story as an artist, and some other solid work as well. Able to do big stories and little stories in a variety of styles; knows how to crash weird things together in the best DWM tradition.
  • "YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: This collection has ten writers and artists. Nine of them get cover credit. The only one who doesn't? Inker David A. Roach, who works on thirteen of the nineteen strips. John Ross draws just one and still manages to snag cover credit. Indeed, he gets second billing!
Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »
 
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Stevil2001 | 1 andere bespreking | May 16, 2010 |
Toon 17 van 17