Wellington Dias

This is one big story, and I don't have meaningfully distinct comments about each volume, so this review takes in both.

Titan's Doctor Who crossovers got bigger every year. This one is eight issues and two collected editions, and crossed through its ongoings (instead of just featuring characters from them), taking in issues of The Tenth Doctor: Year Three, The Eleventh Doctor: Year Three, and The Twelfth Doctor: Year Three. It also features the ninth Doctor, Rose, Jack, Tara, Madame Vastra, and Jenny; Jenny, the Doctor's daughter; the fourth Doctor and second Romana; and River Song in a set of specials. Plus every other incarnation of the Doctor puts in at least a one-scene cameo. Is that enough already?

It is, in fact, too much. It follows the Big Finish model: the characters are mostly separate for most of it, which means they undertake pretty generic adventures, and then the characters come together at the end, which means the narrative doesn't have room for anything other than simple solutions and generic Doctor sniping... something we've seen twice in the past two years! I have posited in the past that Big Finish's nostalgic crossovers are pointless because they bring together characters we see in ongoing adventures all the time already, and the same is true here. There is no novelty to bringing "back" the tenth Doctor, Gabby, and Cindy when I read their adventures already. The only characters we don't already see all the time in Titan adventures are Jenny, the fourth Doctor and Romana, and River, but the first of those I had no desire to see come back, and the others I listen to the adventures of already via Big Finish. (Plus, I didn't find the stories or dialogue very good; the River story in particular was confusingly written and poorly illustrated.)

If we aren't getting nostalgia, then we're not getting anything, because this story isn't really about anything. A dimension turns people into mindless zombies... as Doctor Who threats go, it's definitively bottom tier and generic. Does this story have any interesting themes or clever characterization? Basically, no. The one exception is the Eleventh Doctor issue, which isn't by any of the regular Eleventh Doctor writers but is at least by regular Eleventh Doctor artists Leandro Casco and I. N. J. Culbard. It's a decent tale of the eleventh Doctor and Alice being trapped on ancient Gallifrey and becoming inadvertently involved with the Time Lord's early TARDIS experiments. The rest of it all is sound and fury, signifying nothing. I'm glad that after three goes, Titan finally abandoned these annual events; I had mixed thoughts about Four Doctors, but it was overall pretty interesting. The latter two have been exercises in tedium.

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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.

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This volume opens "Year Three" of Titan's Eleventh Doctor ongoing, and as always, I find it excellent stuff. The opening two-parter, "Remembrance"/"The Scream" by returning writer Rob Williams with artists I. N. J. Culbard, Leandro Casco, and Wellington Diaz, takes the Doctor and Alice first to the funeral of their old friend John Jones, and then to a trap laid for them by a Silence who's so good at being forgotten that not even his own people remember who he is. As always, it's full of bonkers, delightful, dark stuff that is both very Doctor Who and nothing like the tv show. (Well, actually, it reminds me a lot of the first half of series 6's opening two-parter; "The Impossible Astronaut" is a delightfully disconcerting opening that I felt "Day of the Moon" didn't really capitalize on, and this pushes out even further in that direction.) My only complaint here is that what actually happened to the memories of the Doctor and Alice is a bit nebulous; their quest to regain them seem to be the Year Three arc, but it also seems that they remember most things!

As always, Rob Williams trades off his stories with another writer; in this case, newcomer Alex Paknadel writes "The Tragical History Tour" with returning artist Simon Fraser. Again, this is a story with an off-the-wall concept: time on Earth becomes spatialized, so you can get from one year to the next just by walking. The late 1960s start invading future years to take their stuff; the Doctor, Alice, and the Sapling bump into Alice's neighbor Kushak, all whose past selves are taking refuge in his 2015 apartment. So the Doctor, Alice, the Sapling, and all the Kushaks pile into a bus and drive back to 1968 to figure out what's going on! I enjoyed it a lot, though I did wish it was a three-parter as I felt the character(s) of Kushak kind of got lost in the midst of everything else. But this is a series that never does three-parters really, and is probably better for it; The Eleventh Doctor rockets through concepts that other Titan ongoings would probably drag out to tedium, always chasing the novelty that makes it always the best of the ongoings.

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