Scott Gray (1)Critiques

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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.

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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.

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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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stray Observations:

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

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Here, we settle into what becomes the structure of the strip for the next several years: thirteen-strip arcs designed to fill out the new, smaller, graphic novel size. This one takes us up until the end of Matt Smith's run, and feels a bit like an appendix to the rest of it, picking up some characters and concepts from the previous volume, but not being as big as what had come before. Which, to be fair, is how Clara's tv run with the eleventh Doctor feels too!

Scott Gray, I think, keeps pushing himself here. It's interesting to read the backmatter, because he's always looking for opportunity to squeeze a bit more characterization; he notes, as I did as a viewer, that Clara feels like a bit of a nonentity during her first series, and so he tries to delve into her a bit more... coincidentally foreshadowing her transition into being a teacher that would come with "The Day of the Doctor"! He also zooms in on the eleventh Doctor's occasional bouts of mopiness, his relationship with the TARDIS as a character, and his self-doubts.

He also keeps on building up the DWM world. A lot of DWM fans say they like the comic's building up of its own world, but I think what they really mean is they like the way the comic did that when they were twelve: they like Maxwell Edison and Stockbridge and Dogbolter and the fact people say "mazumas" and the DWM version of Gallifrey. It would be easy for the strip to continuously go back to these things, as it did during the Izzy era. But Gray and his artistic collaborators (mostly Mike Collins here) keep pushing the DWM universe forward. Here, we get more about the Lakes from The Broken Man and Hunters of the Burning Stone, and more about Horatio Lynk and Cornucopia from The Cornucopia Caper, and we get the addition of Amy Johnson to the DWM recurring cast. It's great stuff, and I love that the strip keeps doing it instead of resting on the laurels of nostalgia. Cornucopia is a great setting.

A Wing and a Prayer
Like Rose and Martha, Clara is introduced into DWM with a fast-paced, lively story with some good moments for her character, illustrated by Mike Collins. It's the only way to do it, I guess! This is a good solid story that one expects from DWM at this point, which makes it easy to overlook how good it is. Good jokes, good characterization, neat concepts, and an excellent climax. An enjoyable take on the celebrity historical with a delightful ending. If they were all like this, we'd be in great hands.

Welcome to Tickle Town
Now, it pains me to say this, because normally I have nothing but praise for him (indeed, I own a piece of his original artwork, the only comics artist for whom that is true), but... I don't think Adrian Salmon was the right person to draw this story. Tickle Town is a Disneylandesque amusement park, only its inhabitants have been held captive for twenty years, kept in line by cartoon characters. Salmon of course draws great cartoon characters: the frog cowboy is a particular highlight. But it seems to me the power of the story visually comes from the contrast between the cartoons and the real people, but Salmon's style is sufficiently realist to make it work. Maybe with regular DWM colourist James Offredi it would have stood out more? But I can't help thinking there's a better version of this out there, where (say) Martin Geraghty draws all the human characters and Salmon the cartoons, and the contrast is striking.

But still, it's decent fun, particularly the song about the world being a nuclear wasteland set to the tune of "It's a Small World, After All."

John Smith and the Common Men
Back in the Paul McGann days, once senses Scott Gray tearing his hair out trying to come up with new premises for anniversary strips. In 2013, he had to come up with two! Hunters of the Burning Stone was a fiftieth-anniversary story, and now we have a one-off for the anniversary itself. I have fond memories of this one from back in 2013, a sort of sideways take on the concept: less about Doctor Who the show with its characters and aliens, and more about Doctor Who at its core: the values it promotes. John Smith is a government drudge who can't help anyone even when he wants to; the story depicts his slow awakening to something being wrong in the world and how he stops it. David A Roach excels on art, giving us an army of bow-tied bureaucrats, and an atmosphere of all-consuming drudgery. A clever idea for an anniversary story, not derivative at all, and well-executed.

Pay the Piper / The Blood of Azrael
Pay the Piper is a short, seemingly standalone story that ends up leading into a bigger story to come. In the backmatter, Scott Gray calls Pay the Piper a "Utopia"... but of course DWM was doing this kind of thing long before the television programme was (e.g., Stars Fell on Stockbridge, Darkness, Falling, The Keep, Me and My Shadow). Pay the Piper is fun at first: the Doctor and Clara at an auction in cyberspace complete with comedy alien cab driver, then kind of horrifying when the Doctor gets "erased" and it turns out genocide and cannibalism are on the menu. Then it shifts again and you learn that two different guest characters are members of MI-6's "Wonderland" project from Hunters of the Burning Stone... and there's a hell of a cliffhanger when the Doctor accidentally sells the TARDIS!

This all leads into The Blood of Azrael, another Cornucopia-focused story that brings back Amy Johnson, Annabel Lake, and Horatio Lynk, all becoming firm favorites, and gives Matt Smith's Doctor some really interesting stuff to do when he's rich but TARDIS-less. Gray shows real insight into the character of the Doctor, and the story itself is a decent one, with some good twists and nice themes about xenophobia and money and amazing visuals from Mike Collins and David A Roach. The bit where Amy goes to her death is genuinely emotional! She does not die, but I did not remember that.

The complaint I have is a bit unfair: it's just not as good as Hunters of the Burning Stone! I think this is down to the characterization of the climax; the Doctor apologizes, and... that's it, the TARDIS accepts it. I kind of wanted more of a reckoning... but that's probably outside the scope of what the strip can actually do. The last page, with Matt Smith dancing is celebration, is excellent.

Sometimes DWM is superior to the television programme. That was not the case during the Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant eras, even at the strip's best. But I think we actually got pretty close to that again during this latter-era Matt Smith run. It might be dancing in show's shadow... but boy can it dance like no one else.

Stray Observations:

• The relationship between Clara and Amy (not that one) had romantic/sexual chemistry in my opinion, Scott Gray picking up something that I don't think was really hinted at on screen until series eight!
• I like Cornucopia as I said above. One of the benefits of evolving a setting in a comics medium is that every time the artist changes, the world expands. Dan McDaid's Cornucopia is not Martin Geraghty's is not Mike Collins's. But they all coexist. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like Gray made a slight mistake in removing the "crime is legal" schtick from Corncuopia's first appearance. It's a bit less interesting without it! I like that we get a return from those of those crimelords here.
• Scott Gray notes he considered having Annabel disguise herself as Majenta Pryce in Pay the Piper. I see why he didn't, but what a twist it would have been!
• Whoever wrote the Tardis wiki article on Amy Johnson didn't read all the way to the end of The Blood of Azrael, because it claims she dies!
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: We have cover credit! Yes, for the first time, after eighty-eight previous artistic contributions to Doctor Who Magazine in ten previous graphic novels, David A Roach has finally got his name on the cover! Is it because inking has finally been recognized as a valid part of the comics experience? Well, no. It's because he pencils and inks one strip here. Pencilling one strip > inking eighty-eight. I'll be continuing to monitor this key facet of DWM.

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The relationship of the Doctor Who Magazine strip to the television programme upon which it is based is occasionally a strange thing. The strip is often at its best where there is no tv show—or when it's pretending there is no tv show. But even when it's tied into the show, it rarely delves into its history: very few strips are direct sequels, Big Finish–style, to tv stories; recurring monsters from the show are used pretty sparingly. I think you could have quite successfully read all the strips from #355 to now and not even known there was a Time War, for example! This collection features multiple stories that take a very different approach... but then, it is the fiftieth anniversary of the tv show. If the strip is ever going to celebrate the show, this is the moment!

Again, it's always interesting to me to compare reading the strip in collections against my memory of reading it as it came out. I have vague memories of The Broken Man—mostly the two-dimensional aliens—but very strong ones of Imaginary Enemies, one of my favorites. I remember liking Hunters of the Burning Stone, but the impact of the part one cliffhanger was muted by the fact that I live in America, and thus read all about the surprise on GallifreyBase long before I got to read the issue!

The Broken Man
By this point, I think we have to accept that I am just simpatico with Scott Gray's approach to the strip, and I will like everything he does. Add in Martin Geraghty and David Roach, and how can you lose? I don't think Moffat would have done something like this story on screen—maybe if it was a bit more stylized, like a spy movie, to fit in with the "every week's a new film" vibe of series 7A—but Gray and his artistic collaborators perfectly plunge Moffat's TARDIS trio into a Cold War espionage story with a strong character focus. There's a likeable British spy, an evil Soviet mastermind, creepy two-dimensional aliens, lots of good bits for Amy, a charming protestor, a creepy golem disguised as an alien robot. Good twists, great jokes. Is it in my top ten? No. Is it a solid adventure, just what one wants DWM to deliver month-in, month-out? Absolutely. I breezed through this and had a great time, but it is seasoned with real horror and tragedy, too.

Imaginary Enemies
I'm not a big fan of the River Song story arc of series 6. One thing that doesn't work for me is the retrospective reveal that Amy and Rory were friends with their daughter all along, a reveal that not even Moffat does anything with beyond the confines of the single story in which it appears. We have no hint that this gave them any kind of retrospective closure. So I appreciate this for being the one Doctor Who story in the entire universe to actually be interested in Mels. It's a Doctor-less flashback adventure set at Christmastime, about Amy and Rory coming under threat from the Krampus. Cute stuff, and a fitting send-off for Amy, especially that gorgeous final page montage of Amy and Rory growing old in twentieth-century America. It is so tv-heavy, though, it is kind of jarring to read. My hypothetical strip-only reader would probably be more confused than ever!

Hunters of the Burning Stone
There were a lot of fiftieth-anniversary spectaculars in 2013. Every tie-in medium was obligrated to produce one. DWM's was one of the most interesting and clever of the lot, I reckon. Instead of focusing on the fact that it was the fiftieth anniversary of all Doctor Who, Scott Gray zooms in on the fact that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Doctor Who story. Hence: the long-awaited sequel to 100,000 BC! (Yes, because this is what the story is called in DWM-land.)

I imagine it could be dumb. It is in fact great. As I said above, this is a lot more focused on what was happening on screen than we usually get in DWM: return appearances by Ian and Barbara, plot points turning on specific details from a tv story, lots of montages from the history of the show, not the strip. But it works because of one of Gray's usual strengths: his focus on the character of the Doctor. On screen, the eleventh Doctor was largely without the Time War angst that characterized his two predecessors, but there were hints of it, and Gray picks up on those hints with a story that focuses on the Doctor rediscovering who he was from the beginning. There are lots of clever reveals and turns; the whole police box thing is cheeky but inspired. It's great to get "London 1965" Ian and Barbara back, the kind of thing that only the strip could do, and their interactions with the eleventh Doctor are pitch perfect. The Tribe of Gum returns... and why not? The Doctor has been woven into the history of humankind, and it all started with them!

And yet, the story also manages to reflect the history of the strip and to face forwards as well. This is also a sequel to The Flood, picking up on the MI6 thread of some eighth Doctor strips, and it deftly pulls together the threads Gray had been weaving since his return to the strip with The Chains of Olympus. Plus, a return to Cornucopia, and the return of the Lakes indicate that this is no nostalgia fest: the strip is continuing to develop its own ideas and settings as it always has.

I will say Gray's weakness as a writer is that many of his stories have this bit where everything stops so someone can explain a complicated backstory, and I am not always sure I follow it. Why did the aliens want the Tribe of Gum to be flying around in space? Probably the answer is in here, but I am not sure I got it. But this is again great stuff, well illustrated by the dependable Geraghty/Roach team, with amazing visuals and strong character work.

"What is buried in man?" I am so glad I forgot about that reveal so that I could experience it all over again!

Other Notes:

• I imagine this was more obvious reading this at the time, but I wouldn't have known without the backmatter. Scott Gray indicates that the stories in The Chains of Olympus take place during series 6, while Amy and Rory are actively travelling with the Doctor, while The Broken Man takes place during series 7A, when he just picks them up for occasional adventures.
• With a run as (one of) the strip's main companion(s) from #421 to 455, Amy has the third-longest of any companion, below only Izzy (#244-328) and Frobisher (#88-133), though Ace beats her out if you combine her two runs (#164-92 and 203-10). I don't think I would have guessed offhand that Amy would have had the longest run of any of the tv companions. In every other tie-in medium, it's always Ace who racks up the big numbers!
• Issue #456 debuted a new size for Doctor Who Magazine, which was slightly shorter and slightly fatter. But as the editorial staff knew Hunters of the Burning Stone would be collected alongside strips in the old size, Martin Geraghty had to draw his pages to work at both sizes! This meant content along the top and bottom of each page that could be cropped off to appear in the actual magazine, and only appear here. He says in the backmatter this mean more of people's legs and space above people's heads! Exclusive to this collection, folks!
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Just three artists on this volume, only one of which works on every story, but only two on the cover. Don't make me say it!

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What the heck happened!? It's so... tiny.

This era sees the strip expand to twelve pages per issue, a sign of unprecedented faith in it. (Compare to the dinky strips we get these days... assuming we get any at all!) But on the other hand, we get the smallest collection I can remember. If you were reading this in the mag, I'm sure it wouldn't matter. (And indeed, I remember liking this era quite a bit... a decade ago.) But it's hard to not feel disappointed when you've reached the end of a collection and read three whole stories!

What happened is that the twenty-issue collections weren't selling well. (At least, I guess, since the collection hiatus between The Widow's Curse and The Crimson Hand.) The problem was they had to be priced so high they priced most people out. So, smaller collections could have lower prices and people would be more likely to pick them up. In the future, collections of about thirteen strips would become the norm, but the problem here is that the story arc had been designed with a twenty-issue collection in mind, so it had to be split up into two chunks of roughly ten strips apiece, but based on where the stories divided, we ended up with a nine-issue collection here, followed by an eleven-issue one in Hunters of the Burning Stone. (They were, however, released simultaneously, so you could at least get all twenty strips at once.)

Thirteen strips is more satisfying, but in this case there wouldn't be a way to get to thirteen strips that wouldn't be awkward. If you chucked The Broken Man into The Chains of Olympus, you'd get up to thirteen, but then you'd end up with a pretty weird volume for Hunters of the Burning Stone if it went from #455 to 467. One Amy and Rory story, one companion-less anniversary story that brings an arc to a climax, and then a couple Clara stories.

It seems a weird paradox that the actual strip was doing well enough to get its page length increased while at the same time the reprint sales fell off enough that they needed to be slimmed down!

The Chains of Olympus
Rory makes his DWM debut... but more importantly, Scott Gray returns as scripter of the main strip for the first time since The Flood way back in 2005! There have been many good writers of the strip in the interim, of course, but something I like about Gray is his interest in the character of the Doctor himself. The Doctor goes through a little arc here, which is nice, in terms of his attitude toward Socrates. The plot itself is fun: the beginning sets you up to think that either the Greek gods were aliens all along, or aliens are impersonating the Greek gods, but the answer turns out to be neither, and more tragic. And of course Gray is great at peppering his very serious story with moments of levity, like the Doctor's double-take when he meets Plato, or the blacksmiths who make Rory's magic sword seizing an opportunity to advertise.

Mike Collins is back on art. Since Supernature, I think he's gotten a better handle on Matt Smith... I still feel unconvinced by his Karen Gillan. But he's a great illustrator regardless: lots of big expansive stuff here that he and inker David A Roach capture perfectly. One of the selling points of the strip is it's like what you see on screen but with an unlimited budget, and Collins is always great at that kind of thing. I like the inverted design of the Greek gods; nice work from colourist James Offredi there. Good, breezy fun with a strong undercurrent.

The final moment doesn't just point to a new story arc; it also points at an aspect of the Doctor's character. I like Socrates's evaluation of him.

Sticks & Stones
This is a highly effective two-parter, giving us two styles of story at once: an urban thriller featuring the Doctor and a domestic base-under-siege featuring Rory and Amy. An alien graffiti artist attacks London, spraying his name first across London landmarks and then across language itself: soon everyone finds themselves unable to say any word other than "MONOS" and then everyone finds themselves becoming the word "MONOS." It's a great concept, one of the things that plays very well to the strength of the comics medium, and everyone here works together to make it work: artists Martin Geraghty and David Roach, letterer Roger Langridge, and even DWM art editor Richard Atkinson, who supplied a panel of brand logos turning into "MONOS" again and again. The eventual resolution is quite good, too.

I like how for Rory, almost the entire story takes place in a supermarket. It's very human, and plays to the strengths of his character. I like that, however, meanwhile the Doctor is in a flying van, careening around London landmarks! Again, Gray is great at peppering his writing with small jokes, like Rory complaining about Amy's driving, or all the stuff about Amy's cooking. Geraghty is usually strong at this kind of urban escapade thing (see The Flood, The Age of Ice, The Golden Ones), but he also does well by the story's human elements, capturing all three regulars very well.

I have one complaint: if this had been on screen in, say, the Russell T Davies era, I think the characters trapped in the supermarket and the police detective the Doctor teams up with would have had a bit more material. This was plotted as a three-parter before Gray realized he could do it in two... but I wonder if three parts would have made these characters pop more and make a strong story even stronger.

Oh, I just got the title. Nice.

The Cornucopia Caper
The strip moves from strength to strength with another fun one with serious undercurrents. This brings us to the city of Cornucopia, which becomes the second of the strip's recurring settings alongside Stockbridge, and introduces someone who I am pretty sure goes on to be a recurring character, the unlicensed monkey thief Horatio Lynk. Lynk is an intstantly likeable character: telling the first part through his narration was an inspired move, and his flirtatious repartee with Amy Pond really sings. I loved all their escapades together. The Doctor and Rory get a nice subplot, too, with the Doctor on the back foot but still clever. And, I can't say this enough, lots of good jokes! I always genuinely laugh out loud at least once when reading a Scott Gray story.

I do think that unlike some other strip writers, Gray rarely tries to overtly mimic the style of the tv programme itself, though sometimes the strip resonates a bit with particular aspects of the screen version. Rather, it seems to me that back when he wrote his amazing run of stories from Ophidius to The Flood, he honed in on what a Doctor Who comic strip truly was and ought to be. So now, returning to the strip, he doesn't try to do Moffat on the page, he just takes his Scott Gray formula and applies it to a new set of characters, while still keeping those characters true to their screen counterparts. I imagine it's harder than it looks to strike this balance, but the result is, I think, the platonic ideal of the DWM comic strip.

Plus, of course we get some sweet Dan McDaid goodness. I love his Amy Pond; his less realistic style means he captures her perfectly without being beholden to Karen Gillan's actual likeness! The energy he imparts Lynk, the grubbiness of Cornucopia, the ominousness of his alien Ziggurat, the grotesequeness of his villains, it's all perfect.

Stray Observations:

• Actually, at 129 pages (including commentary) the length of this collection ties for smallest with The Cruel Sea, The Land of the Blind, Ground Zero, Evening's Empire, and The Good Soldier. But I think it feels smaller, because 1) the extras I am pretty sure are a bit longer than normal, so there's less actual strip content, and 2) because the actual strips are longer than they have been, that means fewer actual strips and fewer actual stories are collected here.
• Karen Gillan is a good-looking woman, of course, but I am not convinced she has the breasts that Mike Collins gives Amy. Indeed, I don't think that's true of any of the female companions!
• I like how Gray manages to build up that sense of a DWM universe without obtrusive continuity references: this collection features a return of the Moblox from Ophidius et al. (#300-03) and the Necrotists from The Way of All Flesh (#308-10).
• A city where crime is legal but must be channeled through bureaucratic guilds... it's Ankh-Morpok from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, isn't it? Gray doesn't mention that as an influence, though, so maybe it was just somewhere in his subconscious. I think Izzy was established as a Discworld fan, wasn't she?
• "YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: There are exactly four artists who work on this volume. All but one of them receives cover credit. Who could have been left out???

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https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-clockwise-war-by-scott-gray/

I had bought this in hard copy ages ago, and had not appreciated that the title story, a Twelfth Doctor / Bill Potts adventure, is a direct follow-on from the previous Twelfth Doctor volume, The Phantom Piper, which I have not read yet. The arc also depends quite heavily on continuity from earlier stories in Doctor Who magazine, most of which I had read but long ago.

But I got over it and very much enjoyed the title story and the collection as a whole. There is a whole arc about Cybermen, which comes close to making them interesting. There is a First Doctor story, a couple of Fourth Doctor stories, and a Fifth Doctor story by Paul Cornell. There are some interesting endnotes by the writers and artists, reflecting on what worked and what didn’t, and why. I still wish I had got the previous volume but I don’t regret reading this.

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)

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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!

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This is the period where the Gary Gillat–envisioned retooling of the comic strip really takes off. We have a new Doctor whose story is primarily being told here; we have a new, strip-only companion for the first time since Olla the Heat Vampire way back in issue #134, almost a decade ago; we have a largely consistent creative team, as Martin Geraghty works on all but one of the twenty-six strips, Robin Smith all but two, and Alan Barnes all but seven; we have ongoing threads between stories for the first time since around The Mark of Mandragora. It's a clear attempt to recreate what made the comic special during the Dave Gibbons era—complete with callbacks to that era in many ways.

Overall, there's a real sense of the comic shifting what its approach is. It's not aping the tv show, it's not aping a series of novels, it's not aping Vertigo Comics. Most often, it's aping itself, in the Mills & Wagner/Dave Gibbons/Steve Parkhouse era. Big, loud stories, with lots of universal danger, epics with ponderous (in a good way) narration but also fun quips. I don't think it always works, but it's fun to read, and it's very noticeable. A different creative team might build up to a dramatic epic every so often... here we arguably get three of them in less than two years! Why not go for broke constantly?

End Game
The eighth Doctor's comic strip debut gives us a new Doctor and a new companion, but also takes things back to the strip's roots with an old friend (Maxwell Edison, previously seen in a single two-part story way back in 1982) and an old setting (Stockbridge, the Doctor's home base in issues #61-83, 1982-83). It's fun to see Max again, though he actually doesn't really do anything here other than stand around—for obvious reasons the strip focuses more on new companion "Izzy S." It's also nice to see Stockbridge again, though End Game made me realize there wasn't really anything to Stockbridge: it's just a generic English village where something can go wrong, without any recurring characters or anything other than Max (though we do get a St. Justinian's mention). On top of all this, we get an old villain, too, though not one who ever featured in the strip before.

More important than the continuity, I suspect, is the style. Barnes and Geraghty are clearly aping both The Iron Legion or The Stockbridge Horror: we start with an ordinary English village, but quickly go cosmic. It has a great energy but I found it somewhat baffling; there are a lot moving parts here for a story made up of just four eight-page installments. The Celestial Toymaker trapping Stockbridge, Knights Templar who have betrayed their oaths, a distorted duplicate of the Doctor. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what was happening, but I enjoyed the ride.

New companion Izzy seems fun but hasn't yet done a ton to distinguish herself. She has potential, but there is a pretty awkward panel where she blurts out her whole backstory and personality to the Doctor, rather than have it be organically unfolded in the story.

The Keep
If we want to continue finding Dave Gibbons–era analogues for this new era (and the creators encourage us to do so in the notes), then this is (as they admit) Stars Fell on Stockbridge, a two-part story that kind of works on its own but is mostly there to set up the next story. There is a lot going on here: it's set in the future era of The Talons of Weng-Chiang (but also the time Earth is evacuated due to solar flares), there are gangs on the surface, there's a living sun, there's a malevolent android. But in all of this, the Doctor and Izzy don't really do anything they just get told what's going on by other people, get out of jams due to luck, then leave. It might ape Stars Fell a bit, but Stars Fell works as a story in way that this does not.

A Life of Matter & Death
This begins what becomes a bit of a trend for the strip, if I recall correctly: the celebratory adventure on a special occasion. (There was a celebratory nostalgia strip before, Party Animals, but not for any particular reason.) Here, the 250th issue of DWM sees the Doctor and Izzy in a weird alien dreamscape where the Doctor is attacked by many of his old foes, and defended by old allies—all ones from the television series. It's not much of a story, and honestly not much of a celebration, either. The old villains get some good jokes (especially Dogbolter), but there's too much time spent on the actual story, which is not up to much. I liked Sean Longcroft's art in The Fangs of Time, but found it hard to distinguish characters here. I do like that whenever the strip celebrates its own past, it gives the impression that the Doctor's past from the comics is more important than that from the television programme. When he dreams up old enemies, he never dreams up the Master!

Fire and Brimstone
This follow-up to The Keep folds in the Daleks and alternate Daleks and the Threshold. It has some great moments—the cliffhanger where the Doctor is exterminated, the appearance of the Threshold—but there was so much going on, that as in End Game, I ended up feeling a bit lost. Stars exploding, wormholes forming, fire elementals, ancient Time Lord secrets. On the one hand, full of energy and verve... on the other, what was this actually about? Felt like that got lost in the cracks somewhere...

By Hook or By Crook
The Doctor and Izzy land on an alien planet, and the Doctor is promptly arrested for murder while trying to buy jam, so it's up to Izzy to get him out. Izzy is always good for a couple good jokes per story, but she's absolutely delightful here. Gray's script is one of the funniest DWM tales I can remember, from the moment Izzy sees the Doctor forlornly looking out the window of the police cruiser, to the clever but perhaps all-too-obvious way she ultimately solves the mystery. My favorite story in the volume.

Tooth and Claw
Well, this one is The Dogs of Doom; like there, one of the cliffhangers is that the Doctor himself has been converted into a monster. There a werewolf, here a vampire. Plus we get the introduction of short-term companion Fey Truscott-Sade. I thought this one was fun... except Martin Geraghty uncharacteristically let the side down on art, as I often had to work hard to figure out which one of the myriad characters was speaking. Like, Izzy or Fey? Fey or seductive woman? Marwood or airplane pilot? Not sure what the issue was (too much crammed into panels?) but it ruined the effect of the story. On GallifreyBase, Martin Geraghty himself materialized to tell me: "I was moving house slap-bang in the middle of pencilling this story and the woman whose house I was moving into suddenly decided she wasn't leaving, forcing me to spend an extended period of time living at my brother's surrounded by boxes and sans drawing board.

"So yes, work done under some degree of pressure..."

The Final Chapter
And this one is, of course, The Tides of Time, down to the return of the Higher Evolutionaries and Shayde and Tubal Cain, though it goes in for much more Gallifrey stuff than Tides of Time actually did. A bit too much, to be honest. It's fine, but a bit bewildering and a bit noisy, and once again, the mechanics of things get a bit amorphous as we move toward the climax.

Wormwood
The Threshold story comes to a climax. This has got some clever stuff in it, some great visuals, and at six parts, the story doesn't feel overstuffed like many of the previous ones have. The regeneration fakeout is excellent and really well done—and as the notes note, really only would work in comics. (Well, the audios actually did something similar recently, but they couldn't commit to it for so long!) The Threshold base on the moon is great, I loved the simplicity of the Threshold plan, the use of the Time Lord translation gift was excellent, Abraham White is a great villain. The characters get the space to breathe here. The reveal of what the Threshold are is dementedly clever. Solid stuff.

Stray Observations:

• Okay, some people say "Endgame" not "End Game." But, 1) look at that spacing between the "D" and "G" scrabble tiles, and 2) the running foot uses "END GAME" as well.
• I like this era of strip collections for including full credits breakdowns on the table of contents. On the other hand, I don't like the way the strips are reordered, to move the ones not part of the main story to the end. I guess this is supposed to provide a more continuous reading experience... but those "bonus" strips are mentioned in the "main" ones so it's actually more jarring!
• One thing I like about the DWM collections is their branding often prioritizes artists; the spine here read "GERAGHTY • BARNES • GRAY • SALMON," giving first billing to an artist, not a writer. But just to the penciller; poor Robin Smith is not so honored!
• I can't exhaustively list who cameos in A Life of Matter & Death, but I noticed Sharon, Gus, Ivan Asimoff, Shayde, the Time Witch, the Free-Fall Warriors, and even the little robot from The Iron Legion. No representation from anything post-John Ridgway that I noticed, though, and not even a Frobisher cameo, surprisingly.
• I guess I don't know where it would actually happen, but I'm surprised we've never gotten one of Fey's pre–Tooth and Claw encounters with the Doctor detailed anywhere. Maybe when the show is cancelled again and DWM resumes rotating past Doctor strips, they can give us that.
• No strip in #261! I think #184 was the last time?
• A member of the Order of the Black Sun appears, yet another reference to the strip in DWM's early days. Only, this comes from (Alan Moore–penned) backups that have yet to be collected, so I haven't read them. Someday, please, DWM?
• Overall, though, there is very much an attempt to create a DWM universe for the first time since Muriel Frost in The Mark of Mandragora. That said, I think nearly every single back-reference that's not just a cameo is to something Steve Parkhouse wrote, so it's a very limited universe.
• Alan Barnes is very much a master of the final page cliffhanger. So many good ones... undermined by the fact that they are usually placed on the right-hand side, so there's not a page-turn reveal. Not sure how they would have looked on original publication.

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

This volume continues the "past Doctor" focus of Land of the Blind, but with a more unified approach otherwise. Bar two fill-ins, every story in the volume is illustrated by Martin Geraghty; the strip hasn't had a unified artistic vision since John Ridgway went from primary artist to one of many back in 1988, so around seven years prior! I like the unity of approach, but even better that it's Geraghty, who is great both with likenesses and storytelling, the combo you need—but don't always find—in a tie-in artist. There's also a new unity of vision behind the scenes; the commentary in this volume by strip editor Gary Gillatt is great stuff, showing how he decided to totally change the approach of the strip

Curse of the Scarab / Operation Proteus / Target Practice
We open with a three-part fifth Doctor and Peri story, a three-part first Doctor and Susan story, and a one-part third Doctor and Jo story. They are all pretty competent. Curse of the Scarab is a decent adventure runaround, with some fun ideas and some more implausible ones; like a lot of Alan Barnes's Big Finish work, this involves plunging the Doctor into a certain moment in historical pop culture, and Barnes is a good pop culture historian, so it works. Some lush artwork from Geraghty helps. Operation Proteus is okay; again, there's some good stuff and some other stuff I found harder to buy, such as the way the cure is deployed. Target Practice is the DWM main strip debut of Adrian Salmon (I guess he was already doing the Cybermen strip, but I won't get to that for some time), and he is one of my favorites. His style is well suited to the subject matter.

Black Destiny
Martin Geraghty may be a good artist, but he's not a good enough artist (yet, anyway) to save us from Gary Russell's confusing transitions; there were several moments in this story where I didn't know what was going on or who was who. The resolution is total nonsense, introducing a whole idea never before mentioned in the story.

Ground Zero
This story does a lot of things to change it up, to signal that the comic strip as you knew it is at an end. There's an ongoing story in DWM for the first time since, I think, The Mark of Mandragora way back in #169-72... five years prior! Ground Zero picks up on hints dropped in three of the previous four stories in this volume, paying off why a mysterious a voice accosted Peri, Susan, and Sarah Jane.

It's also our first story with more than three installments since Final Genesis in 1993. It uses its five parts to good advantage, twisting and turning through a complicated plot; it has powerful cliffhangers. Obviously the death of Ace, but the reappearance of the old companions and the TARDIS plunging into the human collective unconsciousness are also great moments, well executed. The story uses its space to good advantage.

It also feels very now for the first time in a long time. This is the Doctor of the tv movie, not the show, not just in costume, but in attitude, and in an indication that both he and Susan are part human. The death of Ace adds to this: the strip is an ongoing concern, able to change its own narrative in a way that hasn't been true since the introduction of Bernice Summerfield. But it's not just the death of Ace. The story builds off what has come before and sets up what is to come.

On top of all that, it's a dang good story. I will say it runs a bit intense for my tastes—Peri is put through the wringer in a way I don't quite like—but it's engaging, it's interesting, the identity of the narrator is a good reveal, it has great concepts, it has great visuals. The empty streets, the Threshold, the TARDIS straining itself, the console room exploding, and of course Ace's death. Tremendous stuff, and I devoured it. Though I have enjoyed the strip more than I have not since A Cold Day in Hell!, it really does feel like something special is back.

Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time
This is a neat little semiautobiographical story about writer and artist Sean Longcroft's on-again off-again love affair with the show, peronified by him interacting with Tom Baker as the Doctor. Well done, I found it amusing and heartwarming in equal measure. "[Y]ou can't be four years old forever, you know. But part of you always will be."

Stray Observations:

• Gary Gillatt says in the commentary that around this time, strips by Colin Baker, Barry Letts, and Andrew Cartmel all fell through. We've seen good stuff from Cartmel, but the other two leave me a little more apprehensive. Did we dodge a bullet or miss works of artistic genius? We'll never know, I guess.
• It took a few posts of explanation from friendly GallifreyBase posters for me to get the last-panel joke in Curse of the Scarab that Barnes is so proud of in the notes. A bit belabored.
  
• Gary Russell admits he can't actually write comics in the notes, but he only realized this after being punted off IDW's Doctor Who comic after six issues of its eighteen-issue run. I agree, to be frank (his IDW story was terrible), and I admire his honesty. Despite this self-realization, he's evidently writing an upcoming comic for Cutaway...
• I understand the reasoning behind jettisoning the Bernice Summerfield era from the strip's history (#193-208), maybe even all the way back to the first VNA allusion (The Grief in #185). But by showing the classic tv console room being exploded, the strip lops off a bit of its own history, as the new console room was its invention, in The Chameleon Factor (#174).
• It's particularly a shame, as the strip had made this "yes our own history does matter" move before, with the sequence leading up to The Mark of Mandragora. As the new-era strip will do in its next installment in End Game, that storyline even referenced the very first ever DWM story to make it clear that yes, the ongoing story you have read since The Iron Legion is back! But that is gone, along with the VNAs, even though I don't think it had to go with them.
• When logging this collection in LibraryThing, I realized that my children already own a book by Sean Longcroft... he is the illustrator of Usborne's First Book about the Orchestra, a "noisy" book I read them many times until the circuitry shorted. Now that I know, I can actually see it in the style.

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

I think at the time, this surely must have been an abrupt transition. From the dangerous and moody seventh Doctor in #211, straight into the fourth Doctor and Romana gadding about in #212. Ace and Bernice are gone without a word; the strip of course has had to write out TV companions before (i.e., Peri) but usually at least says something about it. We get nothing like that this time. For me, though, it reads a little less abruptly because of where I included The Age of Chaos, which caps off the VNA era with The Last Word and eases us into the "past Doctor" stuff with Under Pressure and The Age of Chaos itself; plus, in publication order, Bringer of Darkness opens this volume, which is sort of a second Doctor story in a seventh Doctor style, giving another transitional point.

Unfortunately, the backmatter doesn't include anything from Gary Russell, who was strip editor at the time, and thus the one responsible for the sudden, unprecedented change in the DWM comics format. No longer is the strip one ongoing story; it's now a nostalgia tour. Thankfully, Gareth Roberts does explain a bit in his notes on The Lunar Strangers: there was no longer a television programme to follow, and so the mag became a celebration of Doctor Who's history, driven in part by the VHS range, which randomly dipped into the show's history, "So he was going to follow a similarly randomised pattern in DWM." I'm not sure this would have been my choice, but it has a good logic behind it.

First, it makes sense to uncouple from the NAs: why should one range of tie-ins be beholden to another, when the other clearly doesn't care about this one? Had the strip kept following the books, Ace would have had to disappear again around the time of #223, and then two new companions would have appeared out of nowhere in #227. But if you're going to uncouple, it makes sense to do so in a strong, distinctive way: continuing to do seventh Doctor adventures, just without Benny and "Spacefleet" Ace I think would have raised questions as to why the strip wasn't consistent with the NAs (a range the mag promoted every month with the preludes!) if it was featuring the same characters. Going into the show's past gives a clear reason for the strip to be unconnected to the novels, even if I don't like the loss of the strip's ongoing nature.

Bringer of Darkness
This is a neat little story, very effectively done. We begin our "past Doctor" adventures with the second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria, and the story follows on from The Evil of the Daleks in having the Doctor investigate if he really did kill off all the Daleks or if he needs to finish the job, and in examining Victoria's emotional reactions to the Daleks, who killed her father; Victoria narrates the story in retrospect from some time shortly after she leaves the TARDIS. Add the dark, moody art of Martin Geraghty, and it all works rather well: a story with some darkness, but also some emotional depth, and it does a neat job of foreshadowing the NAs in a plausible, interesting way. (This came out during Emperor of the Daleks!, so arguably at the height of DWM's VNA era.)

Victims
The fourth Doctor and second Romana investigate murders on a world known for its high fashion. The best part of this is the repartee between the Doctor and Romana; Abnett captures season 17 perfectly in that regard. No, strike that; the best part is the joke about the Doctor trying on Colin Baker's coat, which made me laugh out loud. The story is a bit darker than a real season 17 story, which works; what works less well is that it's kind of a mystery... but it has exactly one suspect, who turns out to have done it. I felt like it fizzled out by the end despite a strong start. Colin Andrew does a reasonable Tom Baker, but his Lalla Ward likeness is very inconsistent; if you're going to go for this retro/nostalgia approach, though, I think you need artists who are good at likenesses.

The Lunar Strangers
The very first page of this one is genius, stuff only the DWM comic could do: cows in spacesuits on the moon. Nothing else here quite lives up to that. The evil space cows' evil plan didn't strike me as wholly plausible, even by the standards of reading about the plans of evil space cows, and I didn't buy the human base administrator's actions either; it turns out she's been pretending, but 1) a good fake-out needs to be plausible, and 2) if she was suspicious, she could have just locked up the evil space cows and every subsequent problem would have been avoided! Gareth Roberts does capture the voices of the fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough well, though, and Martin Geraghty draws a good evil space cow, even if I struggled to distinguish the two.

Food for Thought
In his notes, Nicholas Briggs says this wasn't his first comic strip, but it was his last. We can be thankful for this, I guess, because it feels like a first attempt, full of awkward, confusing transitions and unclear action, though perhaps a good artist could have saved the script somewhat. At least Briggs correctly notes that the characterization for Polly is downright awful.

Change of Mind
This third Doctor and Liz Shaw story is, I believe, Kate Orman's only comics work, though I gather one of the characters here recurs from her novels. She has a good handle on Liz; the throughline of the Doctor trying to figure out why Liz left (this is set some time later) works very well. It has some good set pieces, such as where the Doctor and Liz use a sit-in to distract the villain, and the climax. Unfortunately, there are two mysterious men in long coats, and as Orman herself points out, some sequences are hard to follow the action of.

This leads me on to a different point: there are three different writers in this volume who were new to comics (essentially, as far as I can tell) in Roberts, Briggs, and Orman; contrast this against Dan Abnett, by this point highly experienced, and Warwick Scott Gray, gradually amassing a body of quality DWM work. For most of its run, the strip has been written by experienced comics writers from outside the Doctor Who world, but that's been slowly changing since the late 1980s. We've seen fan writers with little comics experience come aboard before, of course (e.g., Paul Cornell, Marc Platt), but this is the first volume where I've read a couple strips and thought to myself that the writers were clearly inexperienced comics writers. Orman mentions making mistakes of the medium: but addressing this kind of mistake the exact thing an editor ought to have been on top of! My inference would be that, say, John Freeman and Richard Starkings knew how to nurture a new comics writer in a way that Gary Russell does not. Which, if you've read any of Gary Russell's comics work, is entirely to be expected.

Land of the Blind
Thankfully, the volume closes out as strongly as it opens, with another well put together second Doctor story (this time with Jamie and Zoe) from Scott Gray, now paired with Lee Sullivan. This is a clever, inventive story about a city cut off from the outside universe, with some neat turns, good villains, and one really good joke. You could have stuck this in the Dave Gibbons era and no one would have batted an eye: not crazy ambitious, but the exact kind of thing the strip ought to be doing. I breezed through it in the best of ways.

Stray Observations:

• Surely the story should have been called Fashion Victims. It's so obvious it boggles my mind that it's not.
• After a pretty substantial run on the writing roster, Dan Abnett finally exits the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. It's not his final Doctor Who work; he also wrote a couple Big Finish audio dramas and the Christmas novel The Silent Stars Go by. He has also been a pretty prolific writer in American comics. My favorite comics work by him is the excellent Legion Lost, but he's also the kind of writer who will reliably churn out tie-in issues to crappy "events," so I've actually read quite a lot by him, with things like Flashpoint and Convergence. Oh, and he also invented something called "Guardians of the Galaxy"!
• Enid Orc has got to be a pseudonym, yes? But for who...
• I always like to imagine what my hypothetical knows-Doctor Who-only-from-the-comics reader is thinking. In this volume, it's "Who the heck are Romana, Tegan, and Turlough? Where are Sharon and Gus?"
• It is not clear to me what comics Nicholas Briggs has written other than Food for Thought; not Doctor Who ones at any rate. You may have heard of him, though, for going on to voice the Daleks on tv, and for writing a couple Big Finish audio dramas. (I have 79 releases written or co-written by him, according to iTunes!)
• A hard-bitten space freighter captain going, "I ain't waitin' up here to get what's due! I don't care what the hell's goin' on down there! We're goin' in now, or we'll frazz the atmosphere!" (about which another character thinks "...hell's going on down there...") is surely one of the most Nick Briggs pieces of dialogue to ever Nick Briggs. I'm sure he put his heart and soul into it.
• How do they decide who gets cover credit on these collections, anyway? Poor Colin Andrew contributes to more strips than anyone else in this volume (he draws six of them) but is shut out by Scott Gray (writes four), Lee Sullivan (draws three), Gareth Roberts (draws three), Martin Geraghty (draws four), and Dan Abnett (writes three). Well, I'm sure it's about who is famous, either to comicdom at large, or to Who fans, but it does seem unfair.

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

Now we're knee-deep in the Virgin New Adventures: this volume weaves in and out of them, with companions coming and going and changing, with little explanation. The strips in Evening's Empire at least had some explanatory footnotes, but if you don't know why Ace is suddenly wearing sunglasses and leather... too bad for you! This volume also embraces the style of the NAs a bit, with lots of seventh Doctor masterplans that the companions moan about. On the other hand, every story here bar one features an old villain from the tv show, which does not feel very NAish to me—nor, actually, very DWMish.

We also see a new regular writing stable emerge: Paul Cornell and Dan Abnett continue on, but Andrew Cartmel is gone, seemingly replaced by Warwick Gray. Lee Sullivan, Colin Andrew, and (thankfully) John Ridgway dominate art.

Pureblood
The Doctor and Benny come up against a Rutan plot to use a group of pre-cloning Sontarans (isolated from the rest of the species) to destroy the Sontaran species. I found it interesting to see Sontarans as a group to be defended, something the tv show rarely does with its alien monsters, but they really are the victims here. It's decent stuff, undermined by a pretty contrived scene where Benny gets the Rutan to spill its entire plan and admit that the "pureblood" Sontarans are going to die as soon as the Rutan have finished using them, which felt a bit kids' tv to me.

This is, of course, the comic strip debut of Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield, who had recently become the Doctor's companion in Love and War. I was going to comment that the companion appearing out of nowhere is a thing DWM strip readers should be used to... but then I realized that's not actually true. New Doctors might appear without explanation, but in the previous decade of the strip, K9 is the only companion to appear without an introductory story. Obviously strip-original companions Sharon, Frobisher, and Olla all got introductions, but when Peri and Ace made their DWM debuts, in both cases, the strip maintained its own continuity by doing a story that brought them aboard the TARDIS, even if in both cases, it was back aboard. So Pureblood is actually the first time in DWM history a companion appears without explanation... which is a bit odd, as DWM readers were much more likely to have seen Planet of Fire and Dragonfire than read Love and War. I am not sure why this books-centric approach was taken, given the extent to which the strip had previously been determined to carve its own way, sometimes acting as if even the tv programme didn't exist! I don't know if it bothers me per se—I know well who Benny is by this point, so it's not like I was thrown—but it does kind of ruin the conceit of the DWM strip as a standalone narrative. Not even a helpful footnote to explain who she is!

Flashback
Not even John Ridgway can save this rather uninteresting plod into the supposed history of the Doctor and the Master.

Emperor of the Daleks! / ...Up Above the Gods...
Cornell, Freeman, and Sullivan provide a six-part Dalek epic that brings back Abslom Daak and the Star Tigers, and also plugs in between Revelation and Remembrance of the Daleks on screen, establishing how Davros went from prisoner of the Daleks to emperor of his own Dalek faction. It's fun, but it's not really about anything: this doesn't tell us anything about the characters involved, it doesn't really have any interesting themes. Daak's love dies for good finally, but it's not like it's a story about dealing with loss (I think Cornell could write a good one, but he's not trying to); it's more interested in plugging a continuity gap, but one never feels like the Doctor's manipulations might go awry. Still, it has its moments: I liked the sixth Doctor's role in the story, and Daak himself is always fun of course, and Lee Sullivan is the man you want if you want armies of battling Daleks. His reveal of Davros on top of the ice pyramid is excellent stuff.

I violated my usual rules (reading the strips in publication order within each volume) by reading the interquel story written two years later, ...Up Above the Gods..., between parts 2 and 3, where it would fit for the sixth Doctor and Davros. This had the effect of reducing the mystery somewhat, but it was kind of interesting. The story itself is fine; I think it would be fun to listen to Colin Baker and Terry Molloy perform this.

Final Genesis
The Doctor, Benny, and Ace cross over to a parallel universe where ...and the Silurians went much better, and the Doctor forged peaceful coexistence between humans and Silurians. I like that basic idea, but the story doesn't do much with it: swap all the Silurians here for humans, and it would pretty much be the same story; the villain is a very generic mad scientist.

Ace is suddenly back, again without explanation, and she's a bad-ass space solider. I think the awkwardness of this is less forgivable than Benny's non-introduction.

Time & Time Again
DWM's 35th-anniversary story is a fun one, probably my favorite story in this volume. It's pretty simple: the Doctor has to find the Key to Time again, only each segment is hidden in the Doctor's own history. So we get a series of quick one-page encounters: Benny in the Land of Fiction, Ace sword-fighting the third Doctor, the seventh Doctor fishing with the sixth, Ace watching the cricket game from Black Orchid, and so on. It's nostalgic, but also a bit cheeky, which is a good balance to hit. I particularly liked the development of the relationship between the sixth and seventh Doctors from Emperor of the Daleks!; I can't think of another time Doctor Who has done something like this.

I will say that though I do love John Ridgway, he's not great with likenesses, so I don't think this plays to his strengths.

Cuckoo
I think there's a good idea here that doesn't come off. The Doctor takes Benny and Ace to see a famous nineteenth-century woman paleontologist, clearly a fictionalized Mary Anning, only he wants to stop her from discovering something. But she's barely in the story, and her main contribution is to run off crying when a man is mean to her. I like the idea that Ace and Benny are disappointed with the Doctor's treatment of her... but she hasn't even been in the story yet when they get mad. This would work better if we met her and saw her discovery, and then the Doctor revealed his plan to undermine it.

I don't think Ridgway does a very good Benny, and his Ace has been better, too. On the other hand, I feel like this was the first Benny story where I could imagine Lisa Bowerman reading the lines. The scratchy lettering for the alien requires way too much work to read.

Uninvited Guest
I think that after the Sontarans, the Master, the Daleks, the Silurians, and the Black Guardian, we probably didn't also need the Eternals, but this is the best returning-villain story in the book: a neat, creepy tale, which really plays to Ridgway's strengths. The Doctor at his most dangerous and most potent, using time itself as a weapon. I liked it.

Stray Observations:

• These days, once every couple years some writer reads Paul Cornell's Bernice Summerfield character description and remembers she's supposed to be amazing at reading body language, and so some audio drama plot point will suddenly hinge on this. I always find it unconvincing. But it happens twice in this volume, so it's a venerable tradition!
• The art of part 2 of Pureblood is credited to Colin Howard. Is he the same guy as Colin Andrew, or did someone get confused? Or did he draw just a single part!? I'm guessing confusion is the root cause here: there is a Colin Howard that drew some DWM covers, and I can't find any evidence he produced interior comics art other than this.
• I buy the way Cornell brought Daak back, but the retcon for why the Star Tigers aren't dead is pretty unconvincing. They were definitely dead back in Nemesis of the Daleks, so the "oh you didn't have time to check the bodies thoroughly" excuse doesn't quite wash. Still, I felt that story did them dirty, so I appreciate the retcon's intent, though they didn't do a ton in this crowded story.
• This is, I believe, Daak's last DWM story. Emperor of the Daleks! ends Daak's obsession with Taiyin, which Titan would ignore when it brought back the character two decades later.
• Emperor of the Daleks! part four is the first all-color DWM strip. I get it was the 200th issue, but I'm not sure it was the best choice.
• As someone who just read The Daleks from TV Century 21 last month, I appreciated that Cornell's Daleks kind of felt like those ones at times; I wish he'd leaned into it more, actually.
• This volume is the end of an era (after this, the DWM strip takes a very different approach), so it represents the last DWM work of a lot of people. ...Up Above the Gods... is, I think the last DWM writing of Richard Alan, a.k.a. Richard Starkings. I'm not sure if he continues to letter for the mag or not; I guess I'll see. Since writing for DWM, he's also wrote one comic for IDW, collected in Through Time and Space. Paul Cornell doesn't write for DWM again, either, but goes on to write much more Doctor Who, including more novels, comics for IDW and Titan, and of course several tv episodes. He also goes on to have a real non-Who comics career, including Captain Britain and MI13 for Marvel and Action Comics for DC. John Ridgway also finishes as a regular DWM artist here; I'm not really sure what he did post-DWM, except that he illustrated Cutaway Comics's recent Omega miniseries.
• Final Genesis does make sure to give us that NA staple, a journey into someone's mind, and even namechecks good old "puterspace."
• It's interesting seeing all these pre-Lisa Bowerman illustrations of Benny. I like how Colin Andrew draws her, but she doesn't really look like my mental model of the character. I also struggle to imagine Bowerman performing some of this dialogue.
• In his notes, Cornell claims that the fishing sequence in Time & Time Again is that one that precedes The Two Doctors... but Frobisher is there! Does this suggest that Frobisher's run of DWM strips is interspersed with Peri's tv episodes? Seems convoluted if so. If Peri and the Doctor leave Frobisher behind when they go to Space Station Chimera, they must come back for him later in time for The World Shapers, then drop him off again for The Trial of a Time Lord.
• Also, what's with the little robot fishing with Frobisher?

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My review of this book can be found on my Youtube Vlog at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d1ISzcuXU4

Enjoy!

It could have great, a massive arc. But the Piper bit was over very quickly, and it just wasn;t for me.

The main story is fantastic, definitely the best in current years. The cybermen origin story is a bit weird, but it is from the 90s, just a pity Spare Parts et al have came along since then. The other doctors mini stories are quite fun, if a bit short.

This comic book is monstrous funny. Gray and Langridge picked 4 Marvel Silver Age monster, with Fin Fang Foom being the most famous one (imagine the rest :)) and they cooked up a very story, turning the characters interesting and imagining an outrageous situation. It is like the whole Nextwave run rolled up in one issue.

It only proves that a good writer can work with material available.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1884735.html

Sadly the very last of the SJA audiobooks, read by Anjli "Rani" Molhindra, about the kidnapping and trial of Sarah Jane by an alien race with an unhealthy devotion to the truth. It's a decent tale, well read by Malhotra, which actually probes at Sarah's own motives and actions and the slightly ambiguous moral basis for them, a bit more deeply and more effectively than one might have expected from an audio book for younger listeners. It's very vivid in places, perhaps reflecting author Scott Gray's experience in comics.

I loved this one--a fairly lighthearted entry into the X-Men world. My favorite scene, by far, was Logan fighting off zombie clowns in Budapest: "We will...juggle...your brains...". Also, a great story arc with the Inhumans and Kurt Wagner, as he questions his place (if any) in the human world.

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.

Everything I said about The Glorious Dead still applies here. I don't know if I could pick a favorite between the two; this one has the magnificent story arc about Izzy's body swap in it, which gives both Izzy and the eighth Doctor an upstart or ten, and also introduces Destrii, who I gather goes on to be of great importance. The only flaw is really the story Oblivion itself, which is a bit of a muddle at the end, but that'd more than made up for by the fact that Children of the Revolution is all kinds of awesome. Oh, and colour comes to DWM with this volume, which just makes the great art of Martin Geraghty, Lee Sullivan, and John Ross even greater.

Added November 2022; access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

In my review of The Glorious Dead, I wrote, "I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms." Now that we're in the early 2000s, this is more true than ever. The tv show is dead, long live the tv show—now what can the strip be like without it? There aren't even really many callbacks to the previous history of the strip anymore, just its own immediate continuity.

2001 is the year I became a Doctor Who fan, though I didn't discover the strip until I started picking up these reprint collections a few years later. What made me a Doctor Who fan is the spiritual counterpart of this era of the strip: the Paul McGann audio dramas. Like the comic, the audios had a lightly serialized background story with strong character drama in the foreground... and every single installment felt big, like you were watching a movie, or if not that, like the writer was trying to make a statement about Doctor Who every week. Indeed, the very first issue collected here had a cover-mounted CD containing episode one of the very first Doctor Who audio drama I ever heard.

This volume consistently feels like it's cribbing in a way—it's cribbing from the tv show that hasn't come back yet. The audios and the comics of this time, like the show when it returned, reinvented Doctor Who to be like Buffy or Deep Space Nine, without ever losing what made it work in the first place.

Ophidius
This is like an RTD series opener. Well, maybe more accurately, an RTD Year Five Billion episode: "okay, you like us, now here's some weird colorful stuff only we can do." The arrival of color to the strip works perfectly in this bold, exciting story that launches a new story arc for the eighth Doctor and Izzy. Ophidius is a great setting, the Doctor and Izzy are both on fine form, and new character Destrii is great—I never read this without foreknowledge of what her true purpose was, but I suspect it works well, as she bonds with Izzy only to betray her. In fact, it's a lot like Moffat's The Impossible Astronaut: you think you're watching a standard series premiere only to realize something much more unexpected and unusual is happening.

The bodyswap plot is a great idea, and would only work in comics. On tv, you wouldn't want to write out one of your leads temporarily like this; imagine Billie Piper being replaced! On audio, you'd have a new character with a new voice, and I think the continuity of personality wouldn't come across. You could do it in a novel, but I don't think it would work as well, as you wouldn't have the clear visual reminder of what had happened. But in comics, you can swap character appearances without worrying about actors, and you can get the same character "voice" but with a totally different appearance.

Beautiful Freak
This one-part story follows up Ophidius with the character implications. Scott Gray and Martin Geraghty are at the peak of their creative voices here: the character voices shine, the art is gorgeous. "I d-don't want to be strong... I w-want to be me..." is a devastatingly effective line; the sequence of the Doctor plunging Izzy into the TARDIS swimming pool is gorgeous. I don't really remember seeing much of the TARDIS interior in the McGann run up until this point, but they use it really well here. Again, this is the kind of story you could only do in the strip: with its highly variable story lengths, you can spend eight pages on a character moment and nothing else.

The Way of All Flesh
I remembered this one as being very bad, but upon reading it, realized I was confusing it with a different DWM story about artists in the early twentieth century, The Futurists. In this one, the Doctor and Izzy meet Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego, and discover evil aliens are using the Mexican Day of the Dead to harvest life-force. I don't have much to say about this one... in that it is yet again a solid, well-done story from the Gray/Geraghty team, enhanced by the way it plays off the ongoing character beats. Amazing visuals, nice conversations between Izzy and Frida.

Character Assassin
Another one of those largely continuity-free one-off strips celebrating something. (The last of the McGann era, if I recall correctly.) A fun but disposable adventure of the Master in the Land of Fiction.

Children of the Revolution
What can I say? Another strong outing from Scott Gray, this time joined by Lee "Best at Daleks" Sullivan on artwork. Opening with an extract with Izzy's diary is a clever move; it gives us some personality insight, but also lets us quickly and efficiently do some exposition. It has multiple great cliffhangers and several powerful visual moments. "Good Daleks" is a strategy many different Doctor Who stories have pulled (all the way back to Troughton's debut, but more recently Victory of the Daleks on screen and Dark Eyes on audio), but surely this is the only good "good Dalek" story? The way they are revealed and then that reveal is out-revealed is great; the humans' prejudice against Daleks being a driver for the story is very well done; everything looks fantastic underwater; there's a helluva cliffhanger; Izzy is once again on top form. Gray and Geraghty might be firing on all cylinders, but Sullivan can step up to the plate, too. The growing pressure on the Doctor as a character is nicely done as well; more on that soon.

Me and My Shadow / Uroboros / Oblivion
Technically, this is three separate stories: a one-issue prologue and then two big stories. But these eleven strips feel like the kind of three-part series finale that Russell T Davies and Steve Moffat would go on to write: this is the comic's "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" or its "Face the Raven"/"Hell Bent"/"Heaven Sent." A story even bigger than The Glorious Dead! Each part works fine on its own from a plot perspective, and there's a shift in approach and location between each installment, but in terms of theme and character, the stories all add up to one big story. Me and My Shadow is fine, a well-enough-but-a-little-confusing story about what Fey has been up to since she was dropped off at the end of Wormwood.

But then we launch into Uroboros and it's magnificent again. The reveal of Destrii in Izzy's body is great. We get more insight into Destrii as a character, and it very much intrigues. The characterization of the Doctor is excellent, being pushed in different directions but never becoming unrecognizable; I very rarely say this, but I would love to get to hear Paul McGann perform some of the anger here. The idea of following up a previous adventure and seeing its consequences is strong; at the time this was a Bush/Blair 9/11 allegory, but it reads even more prescient (unfortunately) these days. This is the kind of comics that just propels you from installment to installment.

It also propels you straight into Oblivion, the explosive finale: Izzy versus Destrii as we finally find out what exactly has been going on. I did get a bit muddled in the backstory of Oblivion and the nature of the threat here, but what really works is of course the character stuff. Izzy taking on Destrii is fantastic; the reveal about Izzy's sexuality, which makes sense of some pretty heavy-handed characterization from way back in End Game even moreso. Her decision to go home is great, and perfectly timed. The sequence paralleling the lives of Izzy and Desrtii is very well written and beautifully drawn.

Other Notes:

• I was a bit surprised to recognize the Mobox in Ophidius: eighteen years later, Scott Gray would reuse them in a thirteenth Doctor strip adventure. When I read The Power of the Mobox, it had been over a decade since I first read this volume so I didn't recognize them at all, and so I experienced the callback in reverse order!
• Did the strip skip issue #305? No, that was the VNA throwback The Last Word, not collected until much later in The Age of Chaos, though I read it much earlier. It did, however, skip #307, which ran a TV Comic reprint. The backmatter here doesn't mention any script or art issues, but I feel like surely there must have been some.
• The appearance of what are clearly Martian tripods in "Character Assassin" is a bit cheeky—The War of the Worlds wouldn't come into the public domain in the UK for another sixteen years!
• Surely Izzy is—by a wide margin—the strip's best original companion thus far. Though I guess the competition here isn't exactly fierce. I mean, I do like Frobisher, but well-rounded person, he is not exactly.
• Making Izzy gay this way—not explicitly clear until her last story—probably feels a bit underwhelming to modern audiences who get much better representation on a regular basis. But she's Doctor Who's first clearly gay main companion, and dealing with that is made to really matter here. The tv show doesn't make it here until 2017; even the audios not until 2011. (I know all of these are arguable.) It does feel a bit like Scott Gray watched Willow come out on Buffy and thought he could do it too. In a good way.
• Destrii's Uncle Jodafra is a fun one-off character, and I seem to recall he returns along with her in the next volume.
• Interesting to note that in both Izzy and Destrii's stories, a picture of the Enterprise is used as a stand-in for escape. It's the sort of spot the TARDIS itself might be used normally, but of course they couldn't be watching Doctor Who, and I'd rather see Star Trek here than one of those dumb stand-ins the tie-ins use sometimes. So it's a bit jarring, but I also don't know what a better option would be. Anyway, I reckon Scott Gray would write an excellent Star Trek comic.
• Pretty amazing to think that much of this was running in parallel with McGann's second audio season (Jan.-June 2002), which was doing much the same thing as I said above, and has almost as good a hit rate. (I rate five of its six stories highly; actually, the bad one is a bad "good Dalek" story.) Charley dominates the audio companions for much the same reason Izzy does the comics ones, and the run manages to do interesting stuff with the Doctor as well, just like this. What a time to be a Who fan in general, and an eighth Doctor one in specific. (And though I haven't read the eighth Doctor novels of this era very systematically, most of the ones I have read are also strong: EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, The City of the Dead, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura. I guess on the other hand, though, you've got Escape Velocity and Time Zero in this era; the McGann comics have never done anything that bad for sure.)
• Uroboros/Oblivion is thus the Neverland of this run. I really like Neverland, but one thing that sticks out when comparing this comic run to the audios is that Gray is able to write big epic finales that don't need to draw on Time Lord mythology to have scale and scope. Though he did go to that well in Wormwood, neither this nor The Glorious Dead engage with that aspect of the Doctor Who mythos. I think the Time Lords can be crutch for writers looking for grandeur, and Gray is perfectly capable of working without it.
  
• I feel like my reviews here have kind of undersold this run. If you just read synopses of it all, I'm not sure it would come across better than any other era of DWM history. What makes this era sing is less the big stuff (though the arc is very well done) or the premise of any individual tale (though there are some good ones), but the way the dialogue shines and the story is paced and the art is perfect. It's just well done; I may as well have been grinning all the way through reading this.

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End Game, the first of these collections of the eighth Doctor comics I remember being fairly average, but the second, with the change in writer from Alan Barnes to Scott Gray, is very good indeed. I would say that Doctor Who is made for the comic medium, but it's also made for the televisual and audio media, so that's not a very noteworthy distinction-- but suffice it to say, that Doctor Who, with all the strange possibilities that it creates, works very well in comics. This volume is no exception, giving us chases beneath London, kick-butt Cyberman/Sontaran action, introspection in feudal Japan, wacky autonomous robots, and, of course, the masterpiece that is The Glorious Dead itself-- a ten-part epic that would fit right in with any of the new series' grand finales. In a good way. The eighth Doctor is on fine form, Izzy is Rose before there was Rose, and who doesn't love Kroton the Cyberman? The wonderful art by Adrian Salmon, Martin Geraghty, and Roger Landridge doesn't hurt either.

Added October 2022; access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

If you have a consistent writer, does the strip have a natural tendency toward story arcs? The backmatter here explains that after the Threshold arc, editor Gary Gillat promised fewer arcs... but in his very next multi-part story, scripter Scott Gray introduced the elements of a new story arc. Just can't be avoided, I guess? Like the stories in End Game, this arc draws on the strip's long history, but it feels less beholden to it, as instead of lots of returning strip elements, we just have one in the form of Kroton, and also unlike End Game, I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms.

Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools
Just as the McCoy-era strips picked up a character from the Tom Baker–era back-ups and brought him into the main strip in the present, we have that here with Kroton the Cyberman with a Soul, and so the collection helpfully reprints his original appearances. Throwback is basically fine; I think what I struggle with is that even before Kroton breaks away, none of the Cybermen feel particularly Cyberman-y. I mean, I guess there's no reason Cybermen can't chat about things, as long as they do so logically, but they don't feel like the impassive, unstoppable telos of humanity here. But, you know, I would never say no to some Steve Dillon art, and Kroton's interventions on behalf of the human resistance are well done. Ship of Fools is a great spooky sf tale, but Kroton himself could pretty much be any random traveler in it. If someone picked it up because of issue #23's "A NEW CYBERMAN COMIC STRIP!" cover blurb, I imagine they were kind of disappointed.

Happy Deathday
This is DWM's special contribution to the... ah, 35th anniversary? Is that a thing? It's a deliberately goofy multi-Doctor story, and I have to say, deliberately goofiness is probably better than deadly earnestness when it comes to these things, as the Doctors team up against the Beige Guardian, and there are references to Dimenions in Time, and it all turns out to be a videogame that Izzy is playing. There are some good jokes, and the art is fun.

The Fallen
This is DWM's sequel to the TV movie: Grace, since its events, has been using DNA she recovered to try to create a human/Time Lord hybrid, that will fulfill her desire to hold back death. But the DNA didn't come from a Time Lord, because he was in the body of a Skarosian morphant, and so Grace and the MI6 scientist she's been working with have inadvertently created a horrendous monster. Meanwhile, the Master is back... even though no one knows it. What I realized while reading it is that it's really the only sequel to the TVM ever made! BBC Books kind of edged close to it a couple times (and I know authors wanted to use Grace in novels but couldn't), while Big Finish totally ignored it except for using McGann himself (up until they got Eric Roberts, anyway). But this is a full-fledged sequel, following on from its scenes and character beats, even. The Doctor makes big impacts on people's lives, and this has repercussions he's not always thinking about. There's a strong focus on the characters of the Doctor and Grace here, and Martin Geraghty does a great job with big action and character close-ups alike. Overall, a good one, and the beginning of a good direction, I think.

Unnatural Born Killers
If you say, "Adrian Salmon, draw a story about Kroton the Cyberman beating up Sontarans," of course he will draw the hell out of it. And it turns out he can write, too! It took a bit for me to adjust to the more irreverent, human Kroton of the 1990s, but it was the right call for sure.

The Road to Hell
I felt that this was the weakest story of the volume, though it got better as it went. At the beginning, I found it hard to track the different groups and characters, who were introduced thick and fast. But once the relationship between Izzy and Sato Katsura came into the foreground, I found the story worked a lot better. There are some great moments here, such as Izzy making the future of Japan manifest as her knowledge of manga, anime, and Power Rangers, but then the cliffhanger being the reveal of the atomic bombing of Japan. Some neat concepts here, and one thing I appreciate about Gray as a writer is his peppering of the dialogue with small moments of humor, especially between Izzy and the Doctor.

TV Action!
It's DWM's 20th anniversary! Alan Barnes's notes in the commentary give the whole thing an air of desperation, but I thought it was a blast... even though, as an American, most of the cultural references go over my head. They bring back one of DWM's first original villains, Beep the Meep, but have him and the TARDIS cross over into a different universe... ours. The Doctor and Izzy chase Beep through BBC Television Centre on the day DWM debuted, culminating in a scene where the real Tom Baker pretends to be the Doctor to cower Beep. Magnificent! The real Tom Baker quotations used in his dialogue are priceless.

The Company of Thieves
This was good fun: the Doctor and Izzy arrive on a ship being hijacked by pirates, and when a Cyberman is found belowdecks, everyone misunderstands the situations... because it's Kroton, his path intersecting the TARDIS's at long last. Like I said above, the interplay between the Doctor and Izzy really works; I enjoyed her putting on her glasses and spouting Star Trek bafflegab to confuse a bunch of pirates about the status of their engines. This does a great job of escalating a complicated situation, and then exiting it. It's filled with delightful moments, such as a "high" Kroton, Izzy's idea to stop the bad guy, the TARDIS team flying through the void of space, and the two pirates who don't trust each other drifting apart in space on the final page. The Glorious Dead is great, of course, but this might be Scott Gray at his best, and Adrian Salmon's work is as delightful as always... or maybe even moreso.

The Glorious Dead
The biggest DWM story ever! Ten whole months! It could be a grind, but Gray stops it from being so by switching things up every so often. The first three parts play out relatively normally, with the Doctor, Izzy, and Kroton trying to figure out what's up with this alien planet and the strange religion coming to it. But then the part three cliffhanger is marvelous: the Doctor hears the words "WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP" and suddenly finds himself waking up... in bed with a Grace who called him "honey?" It's the kind of cliffhanger I can imagine Steven Moffat doing.

Part four then does something I can't remember any DWM story doing before (corrections welcome): jumping forward away from a cliffhanger, in this case about three weeks. The installment entirely focuses on what Izzy and Kroton on the occupied planet Paradost, told almost entirely via her narration (as a letter to Max). The jump forward again feels very Moffat (e.g., "Day of the Moon"); the choice to focalize the installment via the companion feels very Russell T Davies (e.g., "Doomsday"). And then in part five, we're doing something else entirely yet again! Here we have a masterpiece of surreal comics storytelling, as the Doctor tumbles from universe to universe, and thus from storytelling style to storytelling style. It starts out ordinary-ish, with the Doctor in a world where he did stay with Grace, but soon he's in a western, he's a cartoon tiger, he's in Peanuts getting advice from the Rani. I guess it's all a bit Steve Parkhouse—it reminds me of Once Upon a Time Lord—but it's so well done, and it's striking for coming in the middle of what has seemed like a pretty straight DWM space epic up until this point. Bits of it are drawn by Roger Langridge, which works well.

So with part six, things settle down... a bit. But we still get massive surreal landscapes of the omniverse, and the reveal that the alien planet the enemies come from is actually Earth, and the return of Sato, and Izzy shrunk and put in a test tube, and the reveal that the Master is behind it all! Again, it feels a bit RTD, akin to the reveal in Last of the Time Lords that the Toclafane are actually humans, and that the Master has been manipulating the entire series. It's all a bit mad, but in the best DWM way, and Gray and Geraghty's focus on the Doctor and Izzy and Kroton as people keeps it anchored. I do tune out a bit whenever we get one of those multi-page sequences of someone explaining the History Of All Time or whatever, but on the whole, this really works, and I like how it subverts the seeming prophecy about a Doctor/Master battle. Kroton gets a great end. Izzy's discussion of her parents and her relationship to them works well this time out. I think this does a good job of taking the kind of Parkhouse/Gibbons-y space epic and marrying it to the sensibilities of contemporary, character-focused storytelling—similar to what Big Finish was about to do in its own Paul McGann stories, and foreshadowing the approach the new series would take under Russell.

The Autonomy Bug
I was going to say this was cute, but it's not; like the New Eighth Doctor Adventure The Cannibalists, it uses cuteness to disguise how horrifying it really is. The Doctor and Izzy come to an institution for deranged robots, and realize they are being pretty awfully mistreated. I didn't love it, but it's an effective serious story from Roger Langridge, and has a great moment of cartoon logic, and a nice conclusion. The stuff with the robots painting their faces is pretty good.

Other Notes:

• Roger Langridge will go on to be a McGann-era mainstay of the strip as an artist, so much so that he illustrated the eighth Doctor installment of IDW's 50th anniversary series. But I, weirdly, know him from the fact that he illustrated special installments of the short-lived Shaenon K. Garrity webcomic Smithson (2004-8, I think? previously known as More Fun).
• Unnatural Born Killers is one of only a few Doctor-free main strips... and actually the last one featured the Sontarans, too!
• The Doctor is said to have defeated Beep twice before; the second time was in the story Star Beast II, published back in 1995, but this was collected with some twelfth Doctor strips, so I haven't read it yet. Big Finish would later add another Beep encounter, a direct follow-up to Star Beast II, inconsistent with this story. Which is, you know, as canon as anything. In IDW's era, they'd even do another story about the Doctor crossing over into our universe!
• Barnes was inspired by a Star Trek short story he only vaguely remembers; it would be "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman from the anthology The New Voyages.
• The only thing to dislike about Kroton being in the TARDIS crew is how little his time was! His departure story immediately follows his introduction. I demand missing adventures set between The Company of Thieves and The Glorious Dead. Another one to go on the the-tv-show-gets-cancelled-and-the-strip-becomes-a-nostalgia-fest list, I guess.
• I kept comparing The Glorious Dead to something Russell would do, and it really is, in a number of ways... and then I learned from the commentary that Russell actually wrote DWM after part four!
• Did the readers at the time know The Glorious Dead was going to be ten parts? Or did they just come to the end each month and read "TO BE CONTINUED..." every time instead of "TO BE CONCLUDED..." and wonder if it would ever end?

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A nice conclusion to Izzy's story, even if the revelations made in her final pages seem to come a bit out of left field. The run of strips compiled in "Oblivion" feel like a complete season arc, although admittedly more of an emotionally-driven one than the previous McGann colections. In fact, the emotions - centering on Izzy's forced body swap with the fish-like alien Destrii - are the best part about the strips, because for once, the longer plots are a touch lacking. There's a lot of content here that could use additional length or depth, especially "Uroboros," which has a great concept that wraps up way too quickly, and "The Way of All Flesh," which renders guest stars Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera oddly...typical. The stronger strips are the one-shots "Beautiful Freak" and "Me and My Shadow," along with the one solid multi-part strip, "Children of the Revolution." The latter, an unexpected sequel to the classic "Evil of the Daleks," presents the evil pepperpots in a way we've never seen before, but actually works really well - both as a natural development from the classic '60s story and in counterpoint to the comic arc's emotional themes.

The art is also worth mentioning this time around. Aside from the regular artist Martin Geraghty (who *still* veers between capturing Paul McGann dead-on and not at all), Lee Sullivan does some great, classically clean art for "Children of the Revoluton," while my personal favorite is John Ross' stylized art for "Me and My Shadow" and "Uroboros." Adrian Salmon's wonderful colors, starting with "Children," are also worth note - they really bring this first collection of full-color strips to life with a sizzle.

"Oblivion" is a good collection, perhaps the most self-contained of the McGann volumes. It lacks the waywardness of the writing in "Endgame" and the overkill of 'funny' strips in "The Glorious Dead." There are some tremendously strong ideas here, too, and the color is a real book. But the McGann strips have yet to live up to the quality of the Steve Parkhouse days, and with just one collection to go, who knows if they ever will.

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