John Tomlinson (3)

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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.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (meer)

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This collection spans the entirety of the tenth Doctor and Rose era of DWM, which initiated when "The Christmas Invasion" aired and ran all the way to "The Runaway Bride," and it also includes a (kind of) companion-free storyline from between "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones," making for a nice sizeable chunk of DWM. Like the comics collected in The Cruel Sea, these are definitely trying to ape the storytelling of the Russell T Davies era on screen, but I also felt there was a more concerted effort to play to the strengths of comics here: more stories that do things so big that they could never have been afforded on screen, or stories with lots of different locations. Overall, it's a pretty pleasing package.

I've read this collection before, way back in 2008 when it came out. This is what I wrote back in December 2008:

With the coming of the new series, DWM's comics lost the larger overarcing narrative they'd often had, moving to standalones-- a move that makes sense for a variety of reasons. But, I think, it also results in a weaker reading experience-- not that stories with plot arcs running through them are innately better, but a good plot arc can provide a bit of oomph to a weaker story. Or maybe what's weakened the stories in this volume is the loss of Scott Gray as head writer, and his replacement by a wide variety of folks, not all of them the best. Either way, this collection is a bit of a jumble. The title story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis is fine for the most part, though the resolution is highly disappointing. Tony Lee's "F.A.Q." is an absolute mess, and the usually-dependable Mike Collins isn't up to scratch with "The Futurists"-- it has some nice ideas, but they don't really cohere. Jonathan Morris's "Opera of Doom!" is too slight to be effective. Morris's other effort, "Interstellar Overdrive" is quite fun and mostly faultless, but something always bothers me about stories where our protagonists would have died but for a convenient time loop that lets them do things over (as in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Cause and Effect" or Deep Space Nine's "Whispers"). It's fun to see the Brigadier in Alan Barnes's "The Warkeeper's Crown", but as I write this review, I can't remember anything else about the story, good or bad. The story Barnes seems to think he told (judging by his author's note) about the Brigadier and the Doctor coming to a new understanding now that the Doctor has been a soldier in the Time War is apparently much more interesting-sounding than the one he actually did tell. The standouts of the collection are the two "comedy" one-parters: Gareth Roberts's "The Lodger" has the tenth Doctor moving in with Mickey for a week, with hilarious consequences, of course. And Nev Fountain's "The Green Eyed Monster" puts Rose on a reality television show exploring her jealousy of the Doctor's other women-- especially Jackie! But aside from the comedy, in both of these stories, the characterization of all the regulars-- the tenth Doctor, Rose, Mickey, and Jackie-- is exactly right, making me miss what was once such an effective team.

Now, in January 2023, I was curious to see how much my impressions of some of these stories shifted!

The Betrothal of Sontar
This sees the first appearance of the Sontarans in the DWM strip since 1993's Pureblood (and even reuses that story's title term); it's about a group of low-quality Sontarans who run a mining rig instead of getting glorious soldiering duty, a neat look into a different dimension of Sontaran society than we've ever seen on screen. The cosmic maguffin wasn't super interesting, but I liked the two principal Sontaran characters. I'm not sure why in my review above I called this story's resolution "highly disappointing." Like, rereading it I have no idea what my beef was at all.

The Lodger
This was fun; you can see why Moffat picked it up to make it into a tv episode, and though being a 45-minute story gave it more room to breathe, this version has the benefit of pairing the Doctor with a familiar character—and not having to work in an alien threat of some kind. More of a series of vignettes than a story, but a very solid series of them, and the kind of thing that (somewhat ironically) only DWM could do, I think.

F.A.Q.
I was dreading this one going in. I remembered my negative review from last time around, and having since suffered through Tony Lee's run on IDW's Doctor Who comic book, my opinions of Lee as a comic writer have only diminished. But... I actually kind of liked this? I wouldn't say it's a work of genius or anything—the stories on either side of it are better—but it's fun enough. It has the grounded sensibility of the RTD era, focusing on an ordinary family affected by alien powers, shades of "Fear Her" (a story that I really like). Rose gets some good spotlight moments. The main thing I don't like is the reveal about the teacher who didn't really exist, which seemed kind of pointless. Like, it's spooky, but it doesn't really seem to make a character or thematic point.

The Futurists
I really don't know what I was thinking when I wrote my above review, because this story was on fire. Good ideas, great visuals, neat contrasts (black Romans in Britain vs. a fascist Italian state), fast pace—four different key locations in three installments!—nice themes, and above all, good characterization for Rose and some genuine laugh-out-loud jokes. Loved gags about the Silurians, how many people were in the resistance, the use of the resistance, and especially the clever use of the psychic paper. "But Darius... you can't read..." "Oh." I can imagine it playing out perfectly on screen. Rose leading the captured Silurian women in revolt is great, and her voice is captured very well. Exactly the kind of story the strip ought to be doing when the tv show is leading, and the volume's highlight. I don't know how I got it so wrong fourteen years ago.

Interstellar Overdrive
I do love time loop stories. They're one of my favorite sf subgenres. TNG's "Cause and Effect," Groundhog Day, SG-1's "Window of Opportunity," Discovery's "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," Russian Doll season one, Palm Springs, I love them all. I am a total sucker for them. I even love the chronic hysteresis bit in Meglos.

Um, except this one. I think it's a noble attempt. But it has two things going against it, I reckon. One is that the repetition just isn't as interesting when it's solely visual. Here the scenes are all shown from a different angle, but that means you don't really get that uncanny echo that makes these kind of things work on screen. The second is that since it's only two parts, the loop only repeats once, and so it's less a time loop story, and more a story where something happens once, and then the characters get a do-over. It feels cheap, I guess, if it's that easy to get out of the loop. Seeing the iterations is what makes these kind of things fun!

But there are some good jokes and the part one cliffhanger is a good one.

Opera of Doom!
This story is a delight. Quick, fun, good gags. A little too quick, maybe—the fact that people were disappearing into the alien opera house maybe should have been set up better—but I really enjoyed it. The really terrible musician who becomes amazing is a fun character with lots of good jokes.

The Green-Eyed Monster
Rose's last appearance in the strip is a good one, bringing Mickey back again and also marking Jackie's only strip appearance. It's a kind of contrived story about an alien jealousy monster and a talk show, but it's all worth it for the incredible sequence where Rose thinks that the Doctor has settled down with her mother. The ending gag of Jackie wanting a second kiss is delightful.

The Warkeeper's Crown
Rose of course stopped appearing on screen way back in July 2007, but DWM seems to have considered "The Runaway Bride" her official cut-off point as the current companion—the first episode without her as a lead, I guess. So here we get a companion-less story to bridge the gap before Martha, and DWM brings back the Brigadier to serve as a temporary companion. Though the Brigadier appeared in the "past Doctor" early of the early 1990s, I think this is his first present-day appearance since The Mark of Mandragora.

It's okay. I liked the first part all right, which pulls the Doctor, the Brigadier, and the wrong Mike Yates together; I liked the last part, where the wrong Mike Yates tries to remake Britain. The middle part, though, lost me in the complicated exposition about the relations on the alien planet, and the whole story suffered as a consequence. I didn't really get the ending, for example. It seemed like things ought to have been simplified. The idea of the Doctor meeting the Brigadier for the first time after he himself fought in a war seemed squandered in a single panel. (Shades of Big Finish's own attempt to do this story, Way of the Burryman, which I read Warkeeper's Crown in the middle of, coincidentally.)

Other Notes:

• #367 is one of the rare issues from this era I actually do own; I picked it up to get the free Big Finish CD that came with it. I have no memory of reading The Betrothal of Sontar part three on its own, but I have to imagine it made no sense.
• John Tomlinson previously wrote for DWM way back in 1989, scripting Nemesis of the Dalek. (He also wrote two Who strips for The Incredible Hulk Presents and a prose story from the collection Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer.) At 210 issues, that's the longest gap between contributions for any DWM writer/artist as of 2014's strips. His cowriter here, Nick Abadzis, would go on to the primary writer of Titan's The Tenth Doctor comic.
  
• From #363 to 368, we have three stories, two of which were by Gareth Roberts and got adapted for television! Plus The Love Invasion inspires a scene in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" on screen. Quite a hit rate for him. The Lodger is, however, his last contribution to the DWM strip.
• I was all prepared to admit I was too hard on Tony Lee as a writer, and then I read his behind-the-scenes I comments. I don't know how one manages to write a bad creator's commentary, but somehow he does. Lots of very belabored jokes, with the kind of self-deprecating humour that comes across as false modesty.
• Jonathan Morris gives an incredible amount of detail in his creator's commentaries, down to entire lost scenes from both his stories. I can't think of another DWM graphic novel with this level of detail. Though I enjoyed Opera of Doom! the lost joke about the very slow gondola chase would have been amazing.
• The Green-Eyed Monster opens with a caption reading "Quite a while ago...", which confused me at first, but I guess it's meant to indicate that this goes between "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Rise of the Cybermen," which was broadcast many months prior. Placement notes aren't really the kind of thing DWM typically goes in for, and it didn't even occur to me we weren't going in chronological order prior to that, since I think every strip here could comfortably fit between "Tooth and Claw" and "School Reunion."
• At the time I read this volume in October 2022, The Warkeeper's Crown was seemingly Alan Barnes's last contribution to the strip, but he is the writer of the current fourteenth Doctor strip, Liberation of the Daleks, that began in issue #584. In between these points, he wrote one million Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish and script-edited ten million.
  
• David A. Roach works on literally every story in this volume except for one ten-page strip, more than any other writer or artist... and somehow does not deserve cover billing!

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (meer)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1453165.html

Somehow more sure of its ground than the collected Ninth Doctor which I read a while back, and surprisingly grownup in places. The title story, The Betrothal of Sontar, by John Tomlinson and Nick Abadzis, is an interesting retake on Colony in Space with Sontarans instead of human colonists; of the two protagonists, one is nasty even by Sontaran standards, the other somewhat unrealistically nice. Gareth Roberts' The Lodger, on which tonight's broadcast episode is rather loosely based, is a nice nine-page vignette of the Doctor turning up alone on Mickey Smith's doorstep and irritating the hell out of him (so who will be the Mickey character tonight?). F.A.Q., by the excellent Tony Lee, is a surprisingly dark tale of adolescent fantasies and repressed memories spinning out of control. The Futurists, by Mike Collins who is also the penciller for this and the three previous stories, combines some excellent one-liners with a thrilling combination of the Milan of 1925, Roman Britain, and sinister time-travelling jellyfish. Jonathan Morris has a space-opera pop group on its last legs in Interstellar Overdrive (the title doesn't quite say it all but does say most of it). He returns to music in the rather slight Opera of Doom, featuring aliens which absorb and also transmit musical talent. This is followed by an equally lightweight story, The Green-Eyed Monster by Nev Fountain, in which the Doctor snogs Jackie to save Rose's life (in Rose's last regular strip appearance). We finish with Alan Barnes bringing back the Brigadier in The War-Keeper's Crown - not one of Barnes' best efforts but since he is one of the best contemporary Who writers that is still pretty decent. All in all, strongly recommended.… (meer)