James PeatyReseñas

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/war-of-gods-by-nick-abadzis-et-al/

Really good climax to a multi-volume Tenth Doctor story, involving the Osirans and all the recurring characters from the previous installments of this sequence. Also includes a less impressive story bringing the Tenth Doctor to London to meet his previous companions (or are they).

Crítica | Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor #1: The Ghost Ship
http://www.planocritico.com/critica-doctor-who-the-road-to-the-thirteenth-doctor...

Crítica | Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor #2: The Steampunk Conundrum
http://www.planocritico.com/critica-doctor-who-the-road-to-the-thirteenth-doctor...

Crítica | Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor #3: Tulpa
http://www.planocritico.com/critica-doctor-who-the-road-to-the-thirteenth-doctor...

This volume seems pretty pointless. Do new incarnations of the Doctor need "roads" to them? What does that even mean? How can you set up a new incarnation of the Doctor? What it turns out to mean here is three standalone stories about the three previous incarnations of the Doctor, the three who had ongoings from Titan for the previous three years. So we get a tenth Doctor, Gabby, and Cindy adventure; an eleventh Doctor and Alice adventure; and a twelfth Doctor and Bill adventure. Each is fine, but I found the reveals in the tenth Doctor one not very convincing (the monsters look cool but that's it) and the story in the eleventh Doctor one confusing. I don't even remember the twelfth Doctor one. Some Titan writers have done impressive single-issue adventures (mostly the writers on the Eleventh Doctor series), but these are not of them.

Each story is followed by a short back-up featuring the same Doctor, but by the creative team of the upcoming Thirteenth Doctor book and set during an episode of the tv show. In each case, the Doctor sees a hand coming through a time portal, and then does nothing about it, continuing about his business. Having already read the first volume of The Thirteenth Doctor as of this writing, it's pretty pointless set-up, and I don't entirely buy that the Doctor would just ignore each of these time portals and go about his business. Sure, we know it has nothing to do with the events of "The Girl in the Fireplace" or "The Power of Three" or whatever, but how does he? But I do like some Rachael Stott art.

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The Eleventh Doctor has consistently been my favorite of Titan's three-then-four-then-three Doctor Who ongoings. For its first seven volumes, it was always written by Rob Williams and one other writer (Al Ewing for "Year One," Si Spurrier for "Year Two," Alex Paknadel for vol 1 of "Year Three"); they would typically cowrite the opening and closing story, and then alternate the stories in between, most of which were just one issue. I don't know how much collaboration there was, but they certainly seemed like a seamless whole, and the succession of done-in-ones allowed for a lot of variety. More than any other Titan ongoings, The Eleventh Doctor has felt like comics first and foremost, not a tv show on the comic page, much like the early years of Doctor Who Magazine's strip.

Year Three, alas, breaks the pattern. For the first time in the run of The Eleventh Doctor, we have a collected edition with no Rob Williams content, and this volume doesn't bring back Alex Paknadel from vol 1 of The Sapling, either. And to add insult to injury, the writer primarily used instead is George Mann. Now, Mann has gotten better than he was, even if he's not great, but I didn't find him very suited to the style of The Eleventh Doctor; neither is James Peaty, who handles the other of the four issues collected here. (There's also a four-page backup story by Vince Pavey.) Neither writer can get the short story down; in all of the examples collected here, the Doctor discovers a problem, and then defeats it right way, much too easily. Too long is spent on the build-up, keeping there from being an effective twist or turn at the climax; in Mann's "Fooled," for example, the Doctor just takes the villain's device and breaks it, and that's it; in Peaty's "Time of the Ood," things go similarly easy. Even when Mann has two issues, as in "The Memory Feast," we still have one-and-a-half issues of running around before we get to a quick resolution. (Overload the thingy, that good old Doctor Who standby.)

I also didn't find the engagement with the ongoing Sapling arc very satisfying. The Sapling himself is a blank slate of a character, the supposed memory crisis that the Doctor and Alice are experiencing doesn't really seem to make much of a practical difference, and though two of the three stories are about memory, they thematically are not up to much.

What does work is the art of I. N. J. Culbard. He's worked on two previous volumes of The Eleventh Doctor, but this is the first where he's made an impression on me, and it's a strong one; he draws three of the four issues here, and he has a somewhat Mike Mignolaesque style, even if it's all his own. Very atmospheric, pairs well with the coloring, and as The Eleventh Doctor does at its best, it feels like comics, not comics-as-tv (or tv-as-comics). I see that for the final volume he'll be back, and paired with Alex Paknadel, which should hopefully be an excellent combination.

Titan Doctor Who: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

"Year Three" of Titan's Twelfth Doctor ongoing has the umbrella title "Time Trials," but no kind of ongoing storyline is introduced in its first volume. Indeed, my guess is that the umbrella title is so vague because there won't be one, that kind of thing being much harder to weave into an ongoing that's beholden to what's happening on screen. (The twelfth Doctor was still on screen when these comics came out; "Year One" did have a minor ongoing plot, but "Year Two" didn't.) Like the last couple volumes of Year Two, the Doctor is still companionless here, but he does pick up one-off companion Hattie from The Twist for a perfectly okay outing about spooky underwater things in a seaside village. Mann has settled in as a serviceable writer of twelfth Doctor comics: rarely wretched, but in no way does the twelfth Doctor looking at the "camera" and saying, "I always thought the Jon Pertwee era was the best one" capture what the twelfth Doctor era was like on screen, which often pushed at the boundaries of screen Doctor Who to such an extent as to irritate me. Just try to be interesting, Mann! I do think Mariano Laclaustra is good at atmosphere, and he's probably this comic's best artist who wasn't Rachael Stott.

There's also a one-issue story by James Peaty where the Doctor lands in a town terrified by a floating smile. Warren Pleece turns in some excellent, disconcerting art, but the story itself is entirely predictable and obvious.

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Een verrassend leuke Doctor Who strip deze The Road To The Thirteen Doctor, een stripboek dat op zichzelf gelezen kan worden. Dat is niet het enige dat ik er leuk aan vind, mij spreekt ook heel erg aan dat het bij elkaar drie op zichzelf staande verhalen zijn met ook nog drie miniverhaaltjes. De tiende, elfde en twaalfde Doctor krijgen ieder met hun eigen companions een heel eigen verhaal die allemaal een voorbode zijn op het uiteindelijk ontstaan van de dertiende Doctor.

De hoofdverhalen zijn interessant en spannend en heel Doctor Whos! Misschien wel wat aan de korte kant maar dat kan ook heel goed zijn omdat ik dat niet gewend ben. Alle drie de Doctors zijn ook nog eens prima getekend wat als fan van de televisieserie een plezier is om naar te kijken.

De miniverhaaltjes van vier bladzijden die de drie Doctors op zichzelf ook nog eens meemaken voelde als een kers op de taart. Alsof je even met de Doctor alleen mag zijn tussen de avonturen door. Met het lezen van deze strips krijg ik ook weer zin om oude afleveringen te gaan kijken. Als dat geen compliment is dan weet ik het niet meer.½

To be honest, this is wretched. A series that began by emulating Russell T Davies's "domestic" style has ended up embracing the "planet Zog" style of Doctor Who he used to rail against. The Osirians are doing some kind of evil space thing, and all space itself is under threat. Who cares? I found the dimensions of the threat murky and confusing (I swear three different issues ended with Sutekh being released from captivity), I don't care about Anubis or the actress lady, and the personal hook of Gabby and Cindy is pretty much nonexistent. Bad and dull. Giorgia Sposito is fine as an artist, but she's no Elena Casagrande or Eleonora Carlini. I wanted to jump off the book at this point, but some people claim Year Three is a return to form, and my library has it all via Hoopla, so I guess I'll give it a shot.

There's also a one-issue story set during vol 6, about Gabby going to London for the first time. I didn't find the idea that the Doctor would be all mopey about London because Rose, Martha, and Donna were from there very convincing (it seems to me that he has a lot more London memories from across 900 years of life, and we've never seen him react to a place like that before), and I don't think Warren Pleece's art is a good match for the tenth Doctor (loved him on The Eleventh Doctor, though), but aside from that it was a fine enough insubstantial story.

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This volume pairs the ongoing (and hopefully conclusion) of the yawner of the Sutekh story. The Revolving Doors story sees Gabby going to London for the first time and dwelling on the Tenth Doctor's man pain. These comics have fallen a long way in my estimation since they began.½

The thought of using a comic in the classroom fifteen years ago was almost unheard of. Batman and Superman? Used to teach kids about history? Psaw I say! Psaw! In recent years as readers have been exposed to works like John Lewis’s March trilogy though, educators have taken a second look and realized, maybe there’s more to comics than just superheroes. And maybe, just maybe they do fit into the classroom. One such person is Josh Elder, who in 2009 founded the nonprofit Reading With Pictures, which this book was born out of. First published with a kickstarter and later kept in print by Andrews McNeel Publishing.

In this book, Elder and his colleagues have united some of the best creative talents to produce over a dozen short stories that can be used in the classroom that address topics across the board. Highlights include “The Power of Print” by Katie Cook and “The Black Brigade” by Chris Schweizer, as well as a foreword by Printz and Eisner Award winning author Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese) and a downloadable Teacher’s Guide that includes lesson plans for each story, how to use them, and best classroom practices.

This is one of those rare books that I would consider groundbreaking in its area. Not that there aren’t other books that talk about graphic novels in the classroom before this one, but this one is one of the first to use comics as a means of actually showing and telling the stories. As well as the fact that they recruited acclaimed artists and storytellers that are known for making comics that can be used in the classroom or have had other educational impact. Lastly, it is also the first (or one of the first as far as I can find) to be distributed by a major publishing house. As such, it an important stepping stone towards the future of using comics in education.

The book is well put together with a great deal of thought gone into who to recruit to write the stories. While some comics are better than others, I think it was absolutely brilliant to ask Chris Schweizer (Crogan’s Adventures) to create a story for the history section and it is certainly one of my favorites in the book. Josh Elder also has done a great job of dividing the comics into different sections--mathematics, history, literature, and so on, so that educators can get a feel for what types of stories might work for their lesson plans. There are also multiple stories in each section to give different ideas and angles. My one criticism here is that I wish there was a page separating each story, as they start to run together which can make it hard in some places to differentiate between two comics, especially to a neophyte reader.

The one other issue I have is something that helps, but also hurts. As I mentioned above this book was originally produced via Kickstarter and has subsequently been kept in print and published by Andrews McNell Publishing, which allows it to have a wider audience. However, something that bugs me a bit is that the included a page of advertising in the book for other AMP kids books. While the books aren’t bad, I would have preferred seeing it worked into the book somehow, such as comic using those characters or just an explanation of how those books meet the criteria that the book has been discussing.

Overall, this book is good stepping stone for all future books that want to discuss how comics and education can work hand in hand and will hopefully lead to some exciting possibilities in the future.

A cool first volume of the Reading With Pictures project. It's got some of everything. Some funny stuff, some serious stuff, some educational stuff. Hopefully it can get into the hands of educators and help get the comics format into more classrooms.