The final volume of DWM's eighth Doctor comic strips was definitely my least favorite of the three I recently read. After the climax of Oblivion, Gray opts to do some light, standalone, companion-less stories, and unfortunately, none of these (aside from "Where Nobody Knows Your Name") have much to recommend them. They're not bad, but they're not much to make them exciting, either. The Nightmare Game, Gareth Roberts's contribution, is particularly dull/pointless. Fortunately, things get a little better with the return of Destrii in Bad Blood (though I feel the return of Jodafra was bungled; the one-dimensional villain here is nothing like the enjoyable fop from Oblivion), and things become absolutely magnificent with The Flood, which again, beats the new series to its own game, providing a gripping, world-shaking conclusion to ten years of the eighth Doctor. (And how can anyone fail to like the melancholy whimsy of "The Land of Happy Endings"?) The endnotes are also on top form this time, as we see just how the return of Doctor Who to the telly impacted the strip-- for the worse, I'm afraid. I want my Ninth Doctor: Year One featuring Christopher Eccleston and Destrii! (originally written February 2008)

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

And here we come to the end. Not just the eighth Doctor, but the end of an unprecedented era in Doctor Who Magazine history.

Something I've tracked in this project is for how long the strip functions as a self-contained narrative. For example, you can read from #1-60 and it all makes sense... but then the Doctor changes appearance between #60 and 61! Peri spontaneously disappears between #129 and 130. Benny appears suddenly in #193, and Ace disappears; Ace reappears in #203; and then Ace and Benny disappear after #210. The tv programme and other external factors prevent the strip from working as a totally self-contained story, even if it almost gets away with it at times. (The Shape-Shifter picks right up from The Moderator even though the Doctor changed his appearance!)

But from #244 to 353, we have a continuous story (side-strips like The Last Word or Character Assassin aside): over a hundred strips, not quite ten years' worth, that you can read without interruption. The characters, the themes, the ideas, develop from story to story. It had never been done before in Doctor Who Magazine history—no one prior to Alan Barnes, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, and company had ever had such a canvas to work on, and thus far, no one has ever had one again. Even more amazingly, it's clear this could have kept on going. This volume introduces Destrii as a new companion, only to immediately wrap up the narrative of her and the eighth Doctor. The universe where Doctor Who didn't come back to tv is probably a darker one overall, but its DWM strip could have kept going for another five years at least, I bet.

Where Nobody Knows Your Name
The eighth Doctor, a bit mopey after the events of the Ophidius/Oblivion arc, ends up in a bar that is—unbeknownst to him—run by Frobisher—who doesn't recognize the Doctor either. It's a great one-off, with some good character moments and strong comedy and heartfelt writing. The idea that they don't recognize each other is good; as Gray says in the end notes, "it avoided becoming a cosy, nostalgic reunion then and made it a bit more poignant." Not to spend my time here complaining about Big Finish, but compare this to the obnoxious sentimentality of something like the eighth Doctor meeting the Brigadier again in Stranded: UNIT Dating.

The Nightmare Game / The Power of Thoeuris! / The Curious Tale of Spring-Heeled Jack
For me, the DWM strip is always a bit less interesting when it becomes continuity-light. These aren't quite a series of one-offs, but they are pretty close to it. We have a story of the Doctor involved in a goofy plot involving aliens and football, one about Osirians in ancient Egypt, and one about an alien acting as Spring-Heeled Jack in nineteenth-century London. The Nightmare Game didn't work for me; I think it wants to be The Star Beast, but it doesn't have the energy or inventiveness of that story, and Gareth Roberts's Doctor's voice doesn't feel like Scott Gray's—too stiff and old-fashioned. Even the usually reliable Mike Collins seems to be having a bad day. The Power of Thoueris! is fun if slight—hard to go wrong with Adrian Salmon—but Curious Tale is again kind of a plod.

The first and third stories here both try to fake you into thinking you're meeting a new companion. I guess, anyway; Roberts claims in the end notes it was his intention to make readers think the pointless kid character was going to be a companion? Goodness knows why he wanted to do that, or why anyone fell for it. Gray pulls off a similar twist to much better effect in Curious Tale.

I do like the recurring gag across #330 to #338 about the Doctor turning up everywhere in a new, often ludicrous hat.

The Land of Happy Endings
Has anyone had to come up with more "celebratory" strip concepts than Scott Gray? He certainly had to do it a lot of times, and in the end notes to these collections, he sometimes comes across as increasingly desperate. Here it's Doctor Who's fortieth anniversary, and he would still be doing it ten years later for the fiftieth! This is surely one of the better ones, a tribute to the pre-DWM comics framed as a dream of the depressed eighth Doctor. The actual story is bonkers and charming, the coloring is beautiful, and the end is poignant.

Bad Blood / Sins of the Fathers
And suddenly, the ongoing story is back. Bad Blood is the return of Destrii—who becomes a companion—and her uncle Jadafra—who becomes a villain. I remember this not sitting well with me the previous time I read this collection; way back in January 2008, I wrote, "I feel the return of Jodafra was bungled; the one-dimensional villain here is nothing like the enjoyable fop from Oblivion." Fourteen years later (!) I think I was wrong: Jodafra is an enjoyable fop if he thinks he can use you, but an awful bastard otherwise, and Bad Blood does a great job drawing that out, and establishing what makes him distinct from Destrii. A strong story with lots of great characters and concepts; after a minor slump, the strip is once again firing on all cylinders. This continues into Sins of the Fathers, which mostly is there to set up Destrii as a companion, especially the logistics of her holo-disguise, but is another solid story. Like the late Moffat/Smith era, Gray and his artists make it feel like a new movie every time.

The Flood
The end of the eighth Doctor's comic run is surely also one of its best stories. An amazing setting, a great use of the Cybermen, some real meaningful, human stuff from both the Doctor and Destrii, perfect artwork. So good that Russell T Davies cribbed from it two different times (the Doctor absorbing the Time Vortex in The Parting of the Ways, the Cybermen as ghosts in Army of Ghosts), but of course he did, because this is operating right in the same ethos as him, my preferred ethos for Doctor Who, where the fantastic crashes right into the ordinary. The Cyberman plan—to make people want to by Cybermen by making their emotions unbearable—has never been bettered. The Doctor's increasingly desperate plans and ploys are done amazingly well. The new Cyberman design is fantastic. Martin Geraghty is on fire as much as the Doctor is during the climax. The narration by Izzy is the icing on the cake, and the cameos from her, Maxwell Edison, and Grace are well-placed. The ending isn't a regeneration, but it could have been, and it works either way.

Even the coda with the cows is great. I'm sad it had to end, but it couldn't have ended better than this.

Stray Observations:

• There's never been much sign that DWM cares about the Big Finish uses of their concepts; the woman Frobisher is married to here is seemingly not the one he settled down with when he left the Doctor in The Maltese Penguin.
• #337 was, fact fans, the very first issue of Doctor Who Magazine I ever picked up, meaning The Land of Happy Endings was my first-ever DWM strip. I picked up that issue so I could get ahold of its exclusive Big Finish audio drama, Living Legend, written by Scott Gray himself! It would be a few years before I would become a regular purchaser of DWM... I own The Coup / Silver Living, which came free with #351, but the cover to that one doesn't strike a chord; I think I might have just bought the CD on its own on eBay in that case.
• Normally I think Gray does a great job capturing the Doctor in general and Paul McGann specifically, but I don't care for a Doctor who makes scalping jokes and thinks Native Americans went around saying "How!" and calls them "Red Indians." Ugh.
• One thing I don't like about The Flood: the bit where Destrii is inadvertently racist. It's just not what I want to read about a companion doing? I think the story might get away with it if Destrii or anyone else acknowledged it, but all the only reaction comes from someone who's been emotionally compromised by the Cybermen. Similarly, I don't quite buy that you could watch as much Earth tv as Destrii has and not know about money!
• Can I just say, Martin Geraghty has always drawn Paul McGann as kind of tall... but in reality, McGann's only a couple inches taller than the "short" Sylvester McCoy. I feel like this is surely because of those TVM promo photos where McCoy hands McGann the TARDIS key, where McGann is clearly way taller. Supposedly McGann was standing on a box! Can we assume that even if McGann is average height, the character of the eighth Doctor is tall, and thus Martin Geraghty draws him correctly?
  
• The "Flood Barriers" behind-the-scenes here, about how DWM almost got to do the regeneration, and their pitch of Ninth Doctor: Year One, is really fascinating to read. I totally see the reason neither panned out, but it does seem a bummer that DWM could be offered something so titanic yet not get to do it, and I bet Scott Gray and Martin Geraghty would have made The Ninth Doctor: Year One something special. But they made the right call—especially once Night/Day of the Doctor came along!

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

The best of the Paul McGann collections, by a small but important margin.

First off: the only real dud in this collection is "The Nightmare Game"; as an American born in the '80s, I don't have any special affection for 1970s footie and my guess is I never will. While I respect Gareth Roberts' attempt at a 1979 Doctor Who Weekly-style story, it all just falls a bit flat, and feels exceptionally inconsequential. The art is also the weakest in this installment, by far.

But the other strips included in "The Flood" are, by and large, exceptionally good. Scott Gray has proved himself the best writer for the Doctor Who strip since Steve Parkhouse left in 1985, and if his ideas aren't quite as wide-ranging and crazy as Parkhouse's, he's certainly better at pacing his strips. That's definitely the strong point of the later McGann strips, as seen here and in "Oblivion": Gray's work makes you feel like you're reading a continuous run of stories, an actual "season," and even the tiny, less event-driven stories have some part to play in driving the story forward.

It also helps that this is the first collection not to have one or more one-off strips - usually humor-based - separated from the main run of the story. "The Land of Happy Endings," a loving tribute to Neville Main's William Hartnell comics of the '60s, essentially fills that role, as does "Where Everyone Knows Your Name," the book's opener. They're both slight but they do contribute to the eighth Doctor's emotional journey.

The best in the book, without a doubt, is the eight-part finale "The Flood," which nicely caps off the eighth Doctor's nine-year stay in the DWM strip (far longer than any other Doctor). Like the earlier "Children of the Revolution," this one brings back an old enemy and makes them far more interesting than we've seen in years. Gray's Cybermen are far and away better utilized than Russell T. Davies' in the new series, and you can see how the strip may have influenced elements of both the Series One and Series Two finales. Except, actually, it's better. And kudos to Panini for finding the money to expand the last part and give the Cybermen a *real* metal breakdown.

Finally, there is the usual series of intriguing behind-the-scenes notes, complemented by a plethora of sketches and, this one time, the script for and story behind the infamous "eighth Doctor regeneration" version of "The Flood: Part Eight," which was never actually used.

Panini is already spoiling us with the very high quality of these graphic novel collections, but in terms of actual bang for your buck, this one may actually be the best yet. I still slightly favor the crazy science-fantasy of the Davison and Colin strips by Parkhouse, but this is the first time I've seen the later strips ever come *close* to giving that run competition. It's just a shame it all fell back down again, into child-friendly, easily-solved stories, once the ninth Doctor entered the scene. ( )