Scott Gray (1)

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

The Warmonger
So the caveat to everything I am going to discuss here is that I am not really a fan of the Jodie Whittaker era on screen, as the writing and direction make what are—to me at least—frequently baffling choices that eliminate the possibility of drama and character development. I struggled with Titan's Thirteenth Doctor comics, which I felt emulated the parent show very well... by being sort of boring and aimless and not knowing how to handle having three companions.

Which is to say, that I like what Scott Gray does here and in the volume's subsequent stories, which is tell the same kind of entertaining strip stories he always tells, just with a new set of characters. I always liked the potential of the thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan, but the show rarely delivered on it. Gray, though, is always good at incorporating strong character beats into his writing, and as ever, we get that here, as the TARDIS delivers the four of them into a warzone. Yaz is strong-willed and idealistic; there's a great scene where she stares down some looters. Graham and Ryan are well-meaning but a bit comic; they get some fun material here when they're separate from the Doctor, especially when Ryan flirts with a robot news reporter. (Gray is good at splitting the fam up into different combinations across these stories.) The Doctor is impish, impulsive, steely, and radically compassionate. There was this idea nascent in early thirteenth Doctor stuff that she would be compassionate to the point of being dangerous but I'm not sure it always worked on screen; I actually reckon that aside from Gray, the two stories to capture the thirteenth Doctor best are Paul Cornell's lockdown tales "The Shadow Passes" and "The Shadow in the Mirror." In the latter, the Doctor extends a very dangerous but ultimately successful forgiveness, and we see something like that in her solution to this story's crisis.

The place where this story clearly diverges from its screen counterpart is in its use of a returning villain. While series 11 very much eschewed any returning elements at all, this brings back Berakka Dogbolter. While she only appeared for the first time back in The Stockbridge Showdown in #500, she's the daughter of long-running foe Josiah W. Dogbolter, taking us all the way back to DWM's 1980s "golden age." It's a nice move, I think: the Doctor may be different, the set-up may be different, the screen version may have a very different style, but the reader of the DWM comic knows that it's still the same story that began with The Iron Legion.

Of the new series Doctor, three were introduced by Mike Collins and a fourth by Martin Geraghty, both of whom have a very realistic style. Here, we get the dynamic John Ross on art, and he very much nails it: his likenesses are less direct but also very strong. He juggles a lot of elements in this story, and the reader is kept on top of all of them. I've liked his stuff all long, but his material in this volume is surely him at the top of his game.

So yeah, like a lot of Scott Gray's stories, there's not something I can point to that makes it a work of genius, but it is a well-executed piece of strong Doctor Who. Good characterization, neat worldbuilding, dynamic ideas.

Herald of Madness
This is a fun historical story about the Doctor and fam crashing a gathering of astronomers and such, focusing on Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. I don't have a lot to say about it that I didn't about the previous story, but again, Gray does a great job of putting together an interesting story with good reversals that splits up the regulars to strong effect. Yaz gets a good bit, where she pretends to steal someone's soul with her phone, but really they all across strongly.

Mike Collins is always good, but after reading this I kind of wondered if they didn't give him Jodie's debut because his likenesses for women are not quite as good as his ones for me (he always kind of struggled with Amy in particular), and now the lead character is a woman.

The Power of the Mobox
Scott Gray takes on his first multi-part story as an artist. The Mobox have appeared in a few previous DWM stories, most notably Ophidius and Uroboros, but they've never looked better than they look here, as somewhat Kirbyesque creations... but one of their strengths is they're not monsters, they're people; I came to really like R'Takk, the grumpy but well-meaning Mobox captain the fam encounters. The Kirby tone for all tech here really works; honestly, more Doctor Who artists should do this, because it's a good fit for the sensibilities of Doctor Who.

There's a great cliffhanger where it looks like the Mobox disintegrated Graham and Yaz, but long-time DWM readers will remember that Mobox store what they de-materialize inside them and can bring it back. When I first read this story in DWM in 2019, I did not remember that fact from the earlier Mobox stories almost two decades prior, but this time I did (having read the relevant stories less than a year ago), so nicely done, Scott. As always, each character gets a moment to shine, and Gray puts them in a different combination every time.

Mistress of Chaos
The finale to this set of stories brings back Berakka from The Warmonger and the Herald of Madness from, well, you know... The Doctor discovers that the Herald of Madness wasn't a reflection of her... but actually her.

Again, filled with strong moments; I like Gray's steely thirteenth Doctor, who goes after Berakka when she realizes Berakka is trying to ruin her reputation. There are creepy baddies and a good role for Graham and excellent art from John Ross once more. Clever stuff as always, and James Offredi is on fire here as a colourist. Of course, the realms of logic and chaos are distinguished from each other, but they're also very distinct from the real world too.

My main issue is that "evil Doctor" stories are always tricky: the bad Doctor has to convince as the Doctor, and this doesn't always happen. Gray gets closer than most, but one never really feels like the chaos Doctor and the logic Doctor are possible future Doctors. The idea that they reflect different key aspects of the Doctor's personality comes through better in the commentary than in the actual story, where it feels more abstract. I did really like the resolution, though, and the story's closing moments—a montage of people highlighting the good the Doctor does, complete with Sharon cameo—is a fitting one for this particular Doctor, who is often positioned as a source of hope in the darkness.
Like I said above, this set-up for Doctor Who never worked for me on screen, but Gray reveals the potential that was there all along and really makes it sing.

Stray Observations:

• If you're the kind of person who cares about these things, note that The Warmonger, The Power of the Mobox, and Mistress of Chaos all take place during the same time period, which must be what Ahistory calls "the mazuma era," around the time of Dogbolter and Death's Head in the 82nd century. I don't think there was ever any kind of even loose dating given for Ophidius and Uroboros, but the presence of the Mobox empire here would seem to place them in the same era as well.
• Surely it ought to have been The Power of the Mobox!, right?
• Three different versions of Jodie Whittaker in a series finale? Whatever the tv show can come up with, Scott Gray always gets there first!
• Three of the four stories feature a mysterious "Mother G," who knows the TARDIS; she tells the Doctor what the "G" stands for in Mistress of Chaos, but we don't get to hear that answer ourselves... and the Doctor doesn't believe it. Well, I look forward to seeing where Scott Gray goes with this in what will surely be a key thread to his long run on the thirteenth Doctor's comics for the next two-and-a-half years!
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: David A Roach Appreciation Society triumphant! That's right, he finally garners cover credit for a volume where he is a "mere" inker. We did it!

Okay, Panini, where's my The Everlasting Summer collection? #549-52, 559-72, 574-77, and 578-83 would add up to about the right amount of content for a graphic novel. And then I think Monstrous Beauty would go well with Liberation of the Daleks.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (plus d'informations)

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

The twelfth Doctor's run comes to an end with this somewhat odd collection, which includes just one twelfth Doctor story as well as a number of outstanding uncollected color stories from various sources, basically everything color that was left except for a few strips that made their way into The Age of Chaos.

The Clockwise War
This story caps off the twelfth Doctor era with a story that pits the Doctor and Bill against erstwhile companion Fey, who's out for revenge against the Time Lords after suffering through the horrors of the Time War. I think there's a lot to like about this story but it didn't totally work for me. I like the return of Fey, I like the installment told from the perspective of the War Doctor, I like the reveal about Shayde, I like the return of Jodafra and the use of his death to prove the situation is serious, I like the stuff with Wonderland and especially Annabel Lake. John Ross probably turns in his best-ever DWM work here, it's propulsive and beautiful to look at. On the other hand, the black-and-white monsters are too similar to what we just saw in The Phantom Piper, and while it's nice to see some of the supporting characters from The Parliament of Fear return... I'm not actually sure why they're there! Ultimately I think it's at least partially a victim of the sudden page cut: there's little room to breathe, and just like in the last story, Bill feels a bit forgotten in the middle of it all. This is her last story, but she doesn't get the kind of moments or send-off that Rose, Donna, Amy, and Clara got in theirs. Lots of moments to love but I didn't love it altogether.

A Religious Experience
In this first Doctor story from 1994, he and Ian watch a religious ritual on an alien planet. I didn't care for this at all: overly talky and nihilistic, I felt. Plus, John Ridgway's art usually doesn't benefit from being colored, especially coloring this crude.

Rest & Re-Creation / The Naked Flame
These are both fourth Doctor stories from the 1990s where he re-meets old monsters: the Zygons in the first and the Menoptera. They're by a young pre-"Scott" Scott Gray, and I found both kind of boring and confusing.

Blood Invocation
The fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa take on Time Lord vampires in this story that's almost but not quite a prequel to the Missing Adventure Goth Opera; in the extras, Paul Cornell explains that he doesn't know why they aren't consistent. I didn't find much to enjoy here; again, I think I'd be more into John Ridgway drawing vampires if it was all in black and white.

The Cybermen
This was a series of one-page strips published in the magazine across about two years; even before reading the commentary it was obvious to me that it was based on the old Daleks strips: it focuses on the Cybermen on Mondas in the old days, encountering weird threats, where we're usually meant to identify with the monsters, not the people trying to stop them. Like those old strips, they're kinetic and weird and fascinating, and I kind of felt like reading them all in a row wasn't doing them justice. They're very visual stories, and I often didn't know what exactly had happened, and felt I ought to have spent the time working through the art of the (as always) brilliant Adrian Salmon, but instead I went on to the next. But still: where else can you get Cybermen battling dinosaurs, Cybermen with blimps, Cybermen battling Cthuluoid menaces. The use of stuff like the Silurians could be overly fannish, but Barnes and Salmon make it work; I don't know how this actually fits with previous Cybermen stories, not even The Tenth Planet, but I don't really care.

Star Beast II / Junk-Yard Demon II
It would be easy to attack to self-consuming nature of DWM pre-TVM: the best it could come up was two sequels to Steve Parkhouse strips? But actually these were my favorites of the various yearbook stories collected here. Fun, straightforward stories with good artwork. Beep the Meep is always good fun, of course, and it's nice to see Fudge again. I don't know that Junk-Yard Demon demanded a sequel, but if it had to get one, this one is suitably grotesque.

Stray Observations:

• Branding this collection "Collected Multi-Doctor Comic Strips – Volume 2" is one of those things that's technically correct but seems a bit confusing. Far better to brand it as the fifth and final of the "Collected Twelfth Doctor Comic Strips," since that's the series it actually ties into.
• I liked the return of Jodafra, but on the other hand I didn't remember who Gol Clutha was at all even though she appeared much more recently, in Hunters of the Burning Stone and The Stockbridge Showdown!
• I know the name came from Moffat (it debuted in this comic, but Scott Gray e-mailed Moffat to find out if the character had a name), but I find "Kenossium" as a name for Ken Bones/T'Nia Miller's General character really really stupid.
• In the extras, Tim Quinn complains that editor John Freeman added a reference to the planet Quinnis from Inside the Spaceship to A Religious Experience. He seems to think the name "Quinnis" is intrinsically dumb-sounding but I'm not sure why.
• These are Charlie Adlard's only Doctor Who contributions, and he seems faintly bemused by the whole things in the notes. He also did a lot of Vertigo work in the 1990s, but most notably went on to be the penciller on 187 issues of The Walking Dead, making him the person in this volume with the biggest non–Doctor Who comics career.
  
• Star Beast II picks up from the end of The Star Beast; when Big Finish eventually did its own Beep the Meep story (2002's The Ratings War), it would actually pick up right from the end of Star Beast II, with Beep escaping Lassie.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (plus d'informations)

I got twelve pages of new-to-me content in the previous Daleks collection... here just eight, and all the reprints here already had extras. Good value for money!?

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!

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (plus d'informations)

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

The introduction of Bill to the comic strip (but, alas, not Nardole) brings a new consistent writer—our man Scott Gray of course—and with it, another ongoing story arc. It's interesting: though a number different writers have had ongoing runs since Johnny Morris, I think Gray is the only writer to have an ongoing run concurrent with tv episodes. Is this easier to do if the strip's editor is the actual writer? Probably.

The Soul Garden
Bill makes her debut in this story, where the Doctor reencounters Rudy Zoom (of the twelfth Doctor's own debut story) on Titan... alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge!? This one has isn't great but it is solid: good interplay between the characters, somehow Coleridge fits right in, great surreal sequences (I often hate "dream logic" in stories, but it actually works here). I think the plant stuff lost me a bit, to be honest, but overall this one is fun.

The Parliament of Fear
It's interesting to see a writer retrod old ground with the benefit of development. Scott Gray last took the Doctor to the American West way back in Bad Blood, almost twenty years ago. This is similar in some ways, but the Doctor no longer goes around making insensitive comments about native peoples, and there's an interesting bit where it's a "celebrity historical" where the Doctor himself doesn't know the celebrity, because he's the kind of person left out of most history books. I am a bit skeptical of Doctor Who plots where I am supposed to think someone's gone "too far" in trying to not be genocided, but overall this one really works: good jokes, good characters, a serious topic well covered, great art from Staz Johnson. I don't think Bad Blood was awful or anything, but this was a nice return to old ground with good results.

Matildus
Not only can he write and edit... he can draw! Scott Gray makes his DWM art debut after over two decades as writer in a decent one-part story. Good capturing of and focus on Bill, and I'm always down for a return to Cornucopia (sorry Stockbridge, but it might be my favorite DWM recurring setting), but the story itself is a bit slight even for twelve pages. Great aliens, though, and a good sense of place.

The Phantom Piper
If The Stockbridge Showdown gave us the bright side of DWM's long history, The Phantom Piper gives us the dark. Both in the sense that Showdown revisited happy times and places, while Phantom Piper takes us to an era of conflict and despair, but also in that returning to the setting of The Child of Time, the strip struggles to maintain forward momentum. Child of Time was a complicated story, and Phantom Piper has a lot of exposition about it to communicate: about Chiyoko, about Alan Turing, about the Galateans. Plus it also needs to fill you in on the Phantom Piper itself, and I found that there were rather a lot of characters here that I struggled to keep track of. So while I'm usually glad the strip mines its own history, this attempt to do so felt like a lot of backstory and explanations more than an actual story of its own.

Part of the reason is probably that the strip, having gradually extended from eight pages to ten to twelve, abruptly drops back down to eight, leaving little room for moments of characterization. Bill in particular feels a bit pointless here. The Piper is a creepy-looking villain, and there are some neat sequences where it shows the lost war (which we saw in Apotheosis before the Doctor changed the timeline)... though its look isn't too far off the villains of The Eye of Torment. The first Scott Gray epic I struggled with, alas.

Stray Observations:

• James Offredi, who's been coloring the strip all the way since #356 with only a few breaks here and there, becomes the first colorist to pop up in the commentaries. It's great stuff! Coloring is one of those things I never really notice as a reader, it's not in your face like writing and pencilling/inking, but it clearly has a significant effect on the reading experience, which is well-discussed here. (I am not sure I would know a fine coloring job from a great one without someone explaining it to me.) Offredi is good, and it's neat to hear from a different voice.
• I can't remember the last time a DWM artist didn't finish out a story they started drawing, it's been so long. Was it The Stockbridge Horror way back in #70-75? Surely not! Staz Johnson illustrates part one of The Parliament of Fear himself, gets inked by David A Roach for part two, and then is replaced by Mike Collins for part three. Johnson and Collins are both good artists, but they have very different styles, though Roach's inks ease the transition.
• There's no mention in the commentary of why we went down to eight pages, or even that it happened at all, but this is the era where the magazine as a whole lost word count and changed focus. Not even two years since the extravagant celebration of the comic, and now it feels like it's under attack.
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Oh, sure, give the colourist cover credit... but not the inker of ten strips out of twelve!

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