Dan McDaid
Autor de Firefly: The Unification War Vol. 3
Sobre El Autor
Series
Obras de Dan McDaid
Obras relacionadas
The Dollhouse Family (2019-) #6 — Ilustrador — 2 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1976-10-15
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- UK
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Cornwall, England, UK
Miembros
Reseñas
Mind the Gap Volume 3: Out of Bodies por Jim McCann
I'm really sad this is probably cancelled? or this is one long hiatus...
Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.
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:
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???
Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.
So, Doctor Who is back on screen. David Tennant regenerated into Matt Smith on New Year's Day, and the show once again has regular episodes and a regular companion; the strips reprinted here span from "The Eleventh Hour" to "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe," the entirety of series 5 and 6.
You might expect the strip to return to its pre–Crimson Hand format, which was well honed by the time of The Widow's Curse: unconnected stories featuring the tv TARDIS team, by a rotating group of writers and artists. But, surprisingly, the strip opts to go for the Crimson Hand format again: a single writer and linked stories. It seems to be that off the back of the success of The Crimson Hand, they must have wanted to try that approach again.
But it's not exactly the same. The strip using a single writer with continuing story threads hadn't been done while the tv show was on since Steve Parkhouse's run (#53-99, June 1981–Apr. 1985)!* As writer Jonathan Morris notes, this did cause some issues: when Rory became a regular companion during series 6, the strip couldn't accommodate this, as the entire run was set during series 5 when Rory had been erased from time. (Steve Parkhouse, of course, solved this kind of problem by pretending there were no such people as "Adric," "Tegan," "Nyssa," "Turlough," or "Peri.")
So while The Crimson Hand was a success, the run of strips collected in The Child of Time is a bit hamstrung in a way its predecessor was not.
Supernature
Indeed, it gets off to a rocky start. I remember this one from its original appearance in DWM... and I remember not liking it. The usually strong Mike Collins once again pencils the DWM debut of a new Doctor, but he seems to struggle with the faces of Matt Smith and Karen Gillian in a way that wasn't true of Eccleston, Piper, Tennant, and Agyeman. On top of that, while the introductory stories for all the previous new series companions do a good job of highlighting them, this sidelines Amy quite a lot, complete with a very Colin Baker–era transformation into a hideous creature. The story never really engaged me, and neither did the side characters.
Props, though, to the excellent joke about the gun held together with screws, that made me laugh, and Morris does a good Moffat pastiche in the recurrent glimpses of the colony's emergency message. (Oh, and in the gratuitous Amy nudity.)
Planet Bollywood!
Somewhat surprisingly, I would argue, screen Doctor Who has never given us a musical episode. Morris delivers a fantastic one here: the lyrics are good fun to read, the technobabble excuse for it all is actually convincing (enough), and of course Roger Langridge was born to draw it. (His stylized art is also the perfect fit for Matt Smith's chin.) I particularly liked the "Technobabble" song but they're all good. Might be the best story in this volume, except for the next couple.
The Golden Ones
Sometimes the strip very much tries to pastiche the kind of thing Moffat was doing on screen (see: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night). At other times, though, it does its own thing: this is a fast-paced contemporary sci-fi thriller, the kind of thing Moffat wasn't interested in, but Russell T Davies gave us on screen in Aliens of London/World War Three or The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. Or, to put it in DWM referents, it's like The Flood or The Age of Ice. It's very well put together, and I really enjoyed it. Good twists, quick jokes (you can tell Morris has got the hang of the Eleventh Doctor), nice moments for Amy, amazing visuals. The whole thing looks excellent; Martin Geraghty just ups his game every time he comes back. It's neat seeing the eleventh Doctor and Amy in a slightly different genre, and this is a good example of it.
The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop
This is, I think, the first comic strip you might call a Christmas special, but there will be more to come over the years. It's a good tradition to start, and who could draw it better than Rob Davis? There's not much of a story, to be honest: C. S. Lewis tells the Doctor and Amy a story about two kids meeting a man with a bookshop that leads to another world, with lots of references to Narnia and other children's fantasy stories; the story is a bit simple, though it has a pretty clever resolution. But it looks brilliant and feels evocative, and well, this is a comic strip after all. Davis's bookshop interior is in particular amazing, and the thing is shot through with the chilliness of winter.
The Screams of Death
Dan McDaid is back! And what a story for him. Again, it oozes with creepy atmosphere; it's like a better version of The Vampires of Venice. The villain's plan is convolutedly great in a way that makes perfect sense. Well, except for the bit where he uses flying hypnotized opera singers in their nightclothes as his minions! But all the time travel lark is a well-thought-through twist on a common trope.
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
If I was feeling a bit mean, I might say that as a writer, Morris can sometimes be better as pastiching other's styles than having his own. But again, this is one of those stories that feels like it could have been on tv: it's straight out of the show that gave us, say, Night Terrors to have creepy ghosts in a retirement home. It's got some good stuff, but it all wrapped up a bit too easy: basically the Doctor and Amy find out what's up, and then the story is over.
Long-time DWM inker David A Roach (by the time this came out, he had inked 85 strips) makes his pencilling debut here. He's good at likenesses, and it's interesting to note that I think he uses finer lines on his own work than others'. I did sometimes find the action less fluid.
Forever Dreaming
I don't have much to say about this one, except that Adrian Salmon does great both by Amy in a 1960s minidress and probably the creepiest-looking villains I can ever remember from DWM. The story is a bit of a confusing jumble of mental states; feels like it needed one more draft to sort it out.
Apotheosis
And here, the plot arc all comes to a head.
Plot arc? Indeed, I haven't mentioned any plot arc because there's not really a plot arc. In some individual stories, people would disappear between panels when touching the TARDIS: the TARDIS had been infected by the spores from the planet Basingstoke way back in Supernature. I don't think I noticed at the time, and I wouldn't have noticed now without the hints in the commentaries. This might be what you want with the show on the air: a viewer who picks up a random issue because they liked "Closing Time" doesn't want to be confused by a Glorious Deadesque epic, or even something like Uroboros or Mortal Beloved. So I would say there's not much of a plot arc to grab on to here, but I'm not sure there should be one.
As for its reveal in the story, it's done very well. It reminded me of that way that "Flesh and Stone" wrong-foots the viewer halfway through. You know, as a viewer of the revival's first four series, that series-long plot arcs never matter until the twelfth episode, so when the crack in time suddenly starts mattering, it really throws you for a loop. Similarly, you know that there's no plot arc at all in the strip when the programme is on tv, so the reveal about the TARDIS itself being the cause of problems is a great twist. What a cliffhanger! And the story has a lot of other stuff to like, both courtesy of Dan McDaid and Jonathan Morris. The nun warriors are well-handled: very Moffat but good fun.
The Child of Time
The problem with the arc, however, is that it's not really about anything. By which I mean, there's a bunch of events that have happened, but they don't really matter to the characters. This was very much not true of Majenta in The Crimson Hand, or Izzy and the Doctor in Oblivion. That means this story, aside from the fact that its villain Chiyoko had appeared before, is pretty much like any other one. Nothing is at stake here for the Doctor and Amy... even though the story arc means that the Doctor has been inadvertently responsible for a number of deaths! The story ends with an emotional climax, as the Doctor convinces Chiyoko to stand down... I wish we had seen more of her as a person throughout the arc, because I found this kind of unconvincing on its own. It felt like a lost opportunity to do something more.
That said, this is a pretty fun story on its own terms. The cliffhanger ending to part one is amazing, as is its resolution. (On the other hand, the resolution to part two is rubbish.) Alan Turing is a good temporary companion, and the Doctor flirting with him is great. The take on the Brontës is pretty delightful. I like that the backstory to Apotheosis is picked up and explained here, deepening the DWM universe. The Back to the Future shenanigans are fun. Overall, fun, but I am not sure it feels like the climax to a run of twenty in the same way Crimson Hand did.
Stray Observations:
* I almost wrote Alan McKenzie, but in fact his run (#100-10, May 1985–Mar. 1986) entirely fits into the hiatus between Revelation of the Daleks Part Two and The Trial of a Time Lord Part One.… (más)
So, Doctor Who is back on screen. David Tennant regenerated into Matt Smith on New Year's Day, and the show once again has regular episodes and a regular companion; the strips reprinted here span from "The Eleventh Hour" to "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe," the entirety of series 5 and 6.
You might expect the strip to return to its pre–Crimson Hand format, which was well honed by the time of The Widow's Curse: unconnected stories featuring the tv TARDIS team, by a rotating group of writers and artists. But, surprisingly, the strip opts to go for the Crimson Hand format again: a single writer and linked stories. It seems to be that off the back of the success of The Crimson Hand, they must have wanted to try that approach again.
But it's not exactly the same. The strip using a single writer with continuing story threads hadn't been done while the tv show was on since Steve Parkhouse's run (#53-99, June 1981–Apr. 1985)!* As writer Jonathan Morris notes, this did cause some issues: when Rory became a regular companion during series 6, the strip couldn't accommodate this, as the entire run was set during series 5 when Rory had been erased from time. (Steve Parkhouse, of course, solved this kind of problem by pretending there were no such people as "Adric," "Tegan," "Nyssa," "Turlough," or "Peri.")
So while The Crimson Hand was a success, the run of strips collected in The Child of Time is a bit hamstrung in a way its predecessor was not.
Supernature
Indeed, it gets off to a rocky start. I remember this one from its original appearance in DWM... and I remember not liking it. The usually strong Mike Collins once again pencils the DWM debut of a new Doctor, but he seems to struggle with the faces of Matt Smith and Karen Gillian in a way that wasn't true of Eccleston, Piper, Tennant, and Agyeman. On top of that, while the introductory stories for all the previous new series companions do a good job of highlighting them, this sidelines Amy quite a lot, complete with a very Colin Baker–era transformation into a hideous creature. The story never really engaged me, and neither did the side characters.
Props, though, to the excellent joke about the gun held together with screws, that made me laugh, and Morris does a good Moffat pastiche in the recurrent glimpses of the colony's emergency message. (Oh, and in the gratuitous Amy nudity.)
Planet Bollywood!
Somewhat surprisingly, I would argue, screen Doctor Who has never given us a musical episode. Morris delivers a fantastic one here: the lyrics are good fun to read, the technobabble excuse for it all is actually convincing (enough), and of course Roger Langridge was born to draw it. (His stylized art is also the perfect fit for Matt Smith's chin.) I particularly liked the "Technobabble" song but they're all good. Might be the best story in this volume, except for the next couple.
The Golden Ones
Sometimes the strip very much tries to pastiche the kind of thing Moffat was doing on screen (see: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night). At other times, though, it does its own thing: this is a fast-paced contemporary sci-fi thriller, the kind of thing Moffat wasn't interested in, but Russell T Davies gave us on screen in Aliens of London/World War Three or The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. Or, to put it in DWM referents, it's like The Flood or The Age of Ice. It's very well put together, and I really enjoyed it. Good twists, quick jokes (you can tell Morris has got the hang of the Eleventh Doctor), nice moments for Amy, amazing visuals. The whole thing looks excellent; Martin Geraghty just ups his game every time he comes back. It's neat seeing the eleventh Doctor and Amy in a slightly different genre, and this is a good example of it.
The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop
This is, I think, the first comic strip you might call a Christmas special, but there will be more to come over the years. It's a good tradition to start, and who could draw it better than Rob Davis? There's not much of a story, to be honest: C. S. Lewis tells the Doctor and Amy a story about two kids meeting a man with a bookshop that leads to another world, with lots of references to Narnia and other children's fantasy stories; the story is a bit simple, though it has a pretty clever resolution. But it looks brilliant and feels evocative, and well, this is a comic strip after all. Davis's bookshop interior is in particular amazing, and the thing is shot through with the chilliness of winter.
The Screams of Death
Dan McDaid is back! And what a story for him. Again, it oozes with creepy atmosphere; it's like a better version of The Vampires of Venice. The villain's plan is convolutedly great in a way that makes perfect sense. Well, except for the bit where he uses flying hypnotized opera singers in their nightclothes as his minions! But all the time travel lark is a well-thought-through twist on a common trope.
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
If I was feeling a bit mean, I might say that as a writer, Morris can sometimes be better as pastiching other's styles than having his own. But again, this is one of those stories that feels like it could have been on tv: it's straight out of the show that gave us, say, Night Terrors to have creepy ghosts in a retirement home. It's got some good stuff, but it all wrapped up a bit too easy: basically the Doctor and Amy find out what's up, and then the story is over.
Long-time DWM inker David A Roach (by the time this came out, he had inked 85 strips) makes his pencilling debut here. He's good at likenesses, and it's interesting to note that I think he uses finer lines on his own work than others'. I did sometimes find the action less fluid.
Forever Dreaming
I don't have much to say about this one, except that Adrian Salmon does great both by Amy in a 1960s minidress and probably the creepiest-looking villains I can ever remember from DWM. The story is a bit of a confusing jumble of mental states; feels like it needed one more draft to sort it out.
Apotheosis
And here, the plot arc all comes to a head.
Plot arc? Indeed, I haven't mentioned any plot arc because there's not really a plot arc. In some individual stories, people would disappear between panels when touching the TARDIS: the TARDIS had been infected by the spores from the planet Basingstoke way back in Supernature. I don't think I noticed at the time, and I wouldn't have noticed now without the hints in the commentaries. This might be what you want with the show on the air: a viewer who picks up a random issue because they liked "Closing Time" doesn't want to be confused by a Glorious Deadesque epic, or even something like Uroboros or Mortal Beloved. So I would say there's not much of a plot arc to grab on to here, but I'm not sure there should be one.
As for its reveal in the story, it's done very well. It reminded me of that way that "Flesh and Stone" wrong-foots the viewer halfway through. You know, as a viewer of the revival's first four series, that series-long plot arcs never matter until the twelfth episode, so when the crack in time suddenly starts mattering, it really throws you for a loop. Similarly, you know that there's no plot arc at all in the strip when the programme is on tv, so the reveal about the TARDIS itself being the cause of problems is a great twist. What a cliffhanger! And the story has a lot of other stuff to like, both courtesy of Dan McDaid and Jonathan Morris. The nun warriors are well-handled: very Moffat but good fun.
The Child of Time
The problem with the arc, however, is that it's not really about anything. By which I mean, there's a bunch of events that have happened, but they don't really matter to the characters. This was very much not true of Majenta in The Crimson Hand, or Izzy and the Doctor in Oblivion. That means this story, aside from the fact that its villain Chiyoko had appeared before, is pretty much like any other one. Nothing is at stake here for the Doctor and Amy... even though the story arc means that the Doctor has been inadvertently responsible for a number of deaths! The story ends with an emotional climax, as the Doctor convinces Chiyoko to stand down... I wish we had seen more of her as a person throughout the arc, because I found this kind of unconvincing on its own. It felt like a lost opportunity to do something more.
That said, this is a pretty fun story on its own terms. The cliffhanger ending to part one is amazing, as is its resolution. (On the other hand, the resolution to part two is rubbish.) Alan Turing is a good temporary companion, and the Doctor flirting with him is great. The take on the Brontës is pretty delightful. I like that the backstory to Apotheosis is picked up and explained here, deepening the DWM universe. The Back to the Future shenanigans are fun. Overall, fun, but I am not sure it feels like the climax to a run of twenty in the same way Crimson Hand did.
Stray Observations:
- I'm not being mean, but as I said when I reviewed The Widow's Curse, I'm a bit surprised Jonathan Morris was picked. Morris had done some solid strips, but they had all been one-offs, with the exception of a single two-parter. It seems a big leap from that to twenty!
- Mike Collins draws the colonists in Supernature wearing jumpsuits pretty similar to the one Rose wore in The Cruel Sea.
- It probably wouldn't have been to the story's benefit, to be honest, but it might have been nice to work the UNIT crew from The Age of Ice into The Golden Ones.
- In the extras, Morris talks a lot of rejected concepts. One of his ideas for Apotheosis was a story where the Doctor and Amy find frozen versions of what they assume to be their future selves, but are in fact their past selves. Editor Scott Gray rejected it for being a bit too like Morris's audio drama Cobwebs, but Morris would reuse the idea as the central twist of his audio drama Cortex Ice anyway.
- The typeface used in the Apotheosis logo is the one used the covers of all collections since The Crimson Hand.
-
Apotheosis is, alas, Rob Davis's last DWM contribution. I don't know what he's up to these days, but it seems a crime he never got a run of his own, or at least more stories. Like Dan McDaid, a great writer-illustrator double threat.
- "YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Aside from making his pencilling debut for DWM, David A Roach works on eleven strips as inker, more than the two artists featured on the cover, Martin Geraghty (8) and Dan McDaid (5).
* I almost wrote Alan McKenzie, but in fact his run (#100-10, May 1985–Mar. 1986) entirely fits into the hiatus between Revelation of the Daleks Part Two and The Trial of a Time Lord Part One.… (más)
Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.
With issue #400 we enter the period where I haven't reread any of the strips. Prior to this project, my last DWM graphic novel was The Widow's Curse in April 2010, so from this point on, I might have read every strip before, but only in the context of reading ten pages a month. Kind of. As an American, DWM has never been easy to get ahold of. Issues could be late, out of order, or just skipped when arriving at an American comic shop. So even though I've read most of this material in theory, it feels new to me. And even if I got it all in order and on time, it's different to read a twenty-one-issue story in three days than in twenty months! By the time I got to The Crimson Hand on the original read, did I even remember details seeded in Mortal Beloved or The Age of Ice? Seems doubtful.
So anyway: The Crimson Hand. This marks a return the "old" way of doing DWM—original companion, linked storytelling—that went away when Paul McGann did. On top of that, Dan McDaid writes twenty-one strips in a row, the first writer to rack up a run more than five strips long since Scott Gray's run from #333 to 353 (The Power of Thoeuris! to The Flood). This basically covers the whole Tennant specials year, from just after the broadcast of "Journey's End" up to just before the broadcast of "The Eleventh Hour," an enormous canvas for DWM to once again draw its own destiny.
Hotel Historia
This is a nice little one-parter that sets the stage for the whole run, though that wasn't its intention at the time; Dan McDaid makes his DWM debut as an artist for a story he also writes, and really, McDaid's expressive, dynamic, cartoony style is what makes this story stand out so much. Lots of great panels and great dynamic colors and strong sense of characterization for both the Doctor and Majenta Pryce. You can see why they wanted to bring her back—if they hadn't made her into a companion, surely she would have become a Dogbolter if nothing else! My only complaint is the fact the Majenta is running a time-travel hotel almost feels incidental; that idea seems like it could have some fun implications, but the story's just not long enough to do anything with them. It's a shame McDaid didn't have the time to do any more double-duty stories in this volume, though he would return as an artist during the Matt Smith run.
Space Vikings!
This is the volume's only story with no Dan McDaid and no Majenta. It's a bit of a goof but fun enough, and of course Rob Davis is one of those artists who can only enhance such a story with his dynamic storytelling style.
Thinktwice
And Majenta debuts as a companion. This story is mostly here to make that work, and to set up the story arc, but it's all very well done. There are some good jokes, the characters are strongly done (the Doctor pretending to be a doctor is great), and the part two cliffhanger—where Majenta uses her last breath to complain that the Doctor's ruined her life—is excellent. I found the villain a bit perfunctory, but he's not really the point.
The Stockbridge Child
It seems to be a DWM tradition at this point. When the strip begins having story-to-story continuity again, you also need to explicitly link back into the early days of the strip, making clear that not only is it a big story, but it's just one big story. When The Mark of Mandragora pulled together threads from the preceding year or so, it also included a cameo from an Iron Legion villain; when End Game began a new ongoing era, it went back to Stockbridge and Maxwell Edison from the Steve Parkhouse–Dave Gibbons days. So too does The Stockbridge Child: aliens are up to no good in Stockbridge, and the Doctor needs the help of Maxwell Edison to stop them.
It doesn't quite have the weirdness of Parkhouse's own Stockbridge stories, and I got a bit lost with some aspects (what were the parents up to exactly?), but this is an effective use of Maxwell Edison as a character. McDaid complains in the commentary that he gave Max too much angst, but I disagree; this builds on aspects of the character we saw in Stars Fell on Stockbridge and End Game, and also "new series"-ifies him. That is to say, this story treats him the same way "School Reunion" did Sarah Jane. It's got good callbacks without being nostalgic, and it looks forward to the future. Good stuff.
Mortal Beloved
I thought this was a delightful story, sort of off-kilter and unhinged in only the way a Doctor Who comic can be. The Doctor and Majenta end up at the mansion of Majenta's fiancé—whom she doesn't remember. The mansion is built on an asteroid adjacent to a massive space storm. In parallel stories, the Doctor interacts with a self-aware hologram of the dead fiancé, while Majenta finds out he kind of hangs on to life. There's ghosts and monster cyborgs wearing bowties and corpses on a corporate board of directors. Sean Longcroft had drawn two previous strips, but this is his first "serious" one, and he knocks it out of the park with atmosphere, as does James Offredi on colours. Surprising pathos here, to be honest.
The Age of Ice
I remembered not liking this one. I never like those kind of stories that basically come down to "whoa, dinos in the modern age!" Well, that was only a small part of this highly effective contemporary UNIT story. I wouldn't mark this as my favorite strip of the run, but it's perfectly done: good dialogue, good jokes, good characterization, especially for Majenta, some nice twists. It's a good riff on "The Sontaran Stratagem"-style storytelling, except that I thought McDaid managed to create some instantly likable UNIT characters in Colonel McCay and Captain Braxton. Seems a shame neither popped up again; they would have made good recurring characters for the strip. Majenta makes some interesting but very plausible moves here. And Martin Geraghty always excels that kind of high-energy stuff, whilst never losing the characters' essential humanity. My only real complaint is that derived of their drive to be "the first," returning aliens the Skith come across as kind of generic, but McDaid does eventually link them into the ongoing "Crimson Hand" plot in an effective way.
The Deep Hereafter
Now this is my favorite comic of the run, a madcap, hilarious riff on Golden Age detective comics. A dying private eye passes his hat and his charge onto the Doctor, who slips right into the role of investigating a list of bizarre characters, all suspects in a planet's greatest-ever crime, the theft of a world bomb. The Doctor hams it up in the part; Majenta, delightfully, disdains all of it: "If you're going to talk like that the whole time we're here, then I want nothing more to do with you." All the characters are great: the femme fatale who turns out to be a robot driven by "Tiny Danza," Half-Nelson the man where half of him got away in a transmat.. and half didn't, a beleaguered Centaurian lawyer who just wants to retire. Tremendous fun from writing to Rob Davis's pitch-perfect art to the colours that add so much to the atmosphere. Alpha Centauri was made for comics (there's a pinch of Zoidberg there, I feel), and the best part—other than the resolution—has got to be when Majenta threatens to drown Tiny Danza in whisky. Oh, and when he makes his surprise reappearance!
Onomatopoeia / Ghosts of the Northern Line
Onomatopoeia is one of those stories I admire more than enjoy; maybe I am a philistine, but I always struggle with comics where it's all about the images, not the words! That the characters lose their voices is a neat idea, but I struggled with the action a bit. Mike Collins is good at conventional tv tie-in comics, but I wonder if he was the right choice here, and if someone with a more fluid style might have done better. But I have to give kudos to this era's experimental run, which began in Deep Hereafter and continues into Ghosts of the Northern Line, a delightfully grounded (undergrounded?) ghost story with atmospheric art by Paul Grist. You can see that by this point, McDaid has got the tenth Doctor/Majenta partnership down to an art. They have great banter and Majenta some genuine character moments; the tenth Doctor gets in a nice bit of late-period self-loathing. The stuff about the ghosts is all so well done. Unfortunately, this is it, but thankfully it went out on a high...
The Crimson Hand
In his many years on the strip, Scott Gray raised the "season finale" to an art form with stories like Ground Zero, Wormwood, The Glorious Dead, Oblivion, and The Flood. Dan McDaid revives that tradition and does it proud with Gray's consistent collaborator Martin Geraghty back yet again. Lots of drama here, good surprises (I did not expect the return of a character from Thinktwice), nice explanation of the backstory, and a climax that really works, plot-wise and emotion-wise. One last double-cross from Majenta is the perfect way to wrap the whole thing up! My favorite part is the bit where Majenta and the Crimson Hand have won, and the Doctor is trapped in a pocket universe. It's sort of cribbing from those bits of The Glorious Dead where the Doctor is missing and Izzy is all alone... except in this case, it's the companion's own fault! A solid conclusion to a solid run.
Overall, I really enjoyed this volume. Even if there wasn't an ongoing story to hold everything together, it would still be a strong run for showing off the versatility of the strip at its best. Add Majenta—the kind of companion character who plays to the strengths of comics and adds something to every story in which she appears—and you get what is certainly the best run since the Scott Gray years, even if Rose/Martha/Donna years were solid too.
Stray Observations:
With issue #400 we enter the period where I haven't reread any of the strips. Prior to this project, my last DWM graphic novel was The Widow's Curse in April 2010, so from this point on, I might have read every strip before, but only in the context of reading ten pages a month. Kind of. As an American, DWM has never been easy to get ahold of. Issues could be late, out of order, or just skipped when arriving at an American comic shop. So even though I've read most of this material in theory, it feels new to me. And even if I got it all in order and on time, it's different to read a twenty-one-issue story in three days than in twenty months! By the time I got to The Crimson Hand on the original read, did I even remember details seeded in Mortal Beloved or The Age of Ice? Seems doubtful.
So anyway: The Crimson Hand. This marks a return the "old" way of doing DWM—original companion, linked storytelling—that went away when Paul McGann did. On top of that, Dan McDaid writes twenty-one strips in a row, the first writer to rack up a run more than five strips long since Scott Gray's run from #333 to 353 (The Power of Thoeuris! to The Flood). This basically covers the whole Tennant specials year, from just after the broadcast of "Journey's End" up to just before the broadcast of "The Eleventh Hour," an enormous canvas for DWM to once again draw its own destiny.
Hotel Historia
This is a nice little one-parter that sets the stage for the whole run, though that wasn't its intention at the time; Dan McDaid makes his DWM debut as an artist for a story he also writes, and really, McDaid's expressive, dynamic, cartoony style is what makes this story stand out so much. Lots of great panels and great dynamic colors and strong sense of characterization for both the Doctor and Majenta Pryce. You can see why they wanted to bring her back—if they hadn't made her into a companion, surely she would have become a Dogbolter if nothing else! My only complaint is the fact the Majenta is running a time-travel hotel almost feels incidental; that idea seems like it could have some fun implications, but the story's just not long enough to do anything with them. It's a shame McDaid didn't have the time to do any more double-duty stories in this volume, though he would return as an artist during the Matt Smith run.
Space Vikings!
This is the volume's only story with no Dan McDaid and no Majenta. It's a bit of a goof but fun enough, and of course Rob Davis is one of those artists who can only enhance such a story with his dynamic storytelling style.
Thinktwice
And Majenta debuts as a companion. This story is mostly here to make that work, and to set up the story arc, but it's all very well done. There are some good jokes, the characters are strongly done (the Doctor pretending to be a doctor is great), and the part two cliffhanger—where Majenta uses her last breath to complain that the Doctor's ruined her life—is excellent. I found the villain a bit perfunctory, but he's not really the point.
The Stockbridge Child
It seems to be a DWM tradition at this point. When the strip begins having story-to-story continuity again, you also need to explicitly link back into the early days of the strip, making clear that not only is it a big story, but it's just one big story. When The Mark of Mandragora pulled together threads from the preceding year or so, it also included a cameo from an Iron Legion villain; when End Game began a new ongoing era, it went back to Stockbridge and Maxwell Edison from the Steve Parkhouse–Dave Gibbons days. So too does The Stockbridge Child: aliens are up to no good in Stockbridge, and the Doctor needs the help of Maxwell Edison to stop them.
It doesn't quite have the weirdness of Parkhouse's own Stockbridge stories, and I got a bit lost with some aspects (what were the parents up to exactly?), but this is an effective use of Maxwell Edison as a character. McDaid complains in the commentary that he gave Max too much angst, but I disagree; this builds on aspects of the character we saw in Stars Fell on Stockbridge and End Game, and also "new series"-ifies him. That is to say, this story treats him the same way "School Reunion" did Sarah Jane. It's got good callbacks without being nostalgic, and it looks forward to the future. Good stuff.
Mortal Beloved
I thought this was a delightful story, sort of off-kilter and unhinged in only the way a Doctor Who comic can be. The Doctor and Majenta end up at the mansion of Majenta's fiancé—whom she doesn't remember. The mansion is built on an asteroid adjacent to a massive space storm. In parallel stories, the Doctor interacts with a self-aware hologram of the dead fiancé, while Majenta finds out he kind of hangs on to life. There's ghosts and monster cyborgs wearing bowties and corpses on a corporate board of directors. Sean Longcroft had drawn two previous strips, but this is his first "serious" one, and he knocks it out of the park with atmosphere, as does James Offredi on colours. Surprising pathos here, to be honest.
The Age of Ice
I remembered not liking this one. I never like those kind of stories that basically come down to "whoa, dinos in the modern age!" Well, that was only a small part of this highly effective contemporary UNIT story. I wouldn't mark this as my favorite strip of the run, but it's perfectly done: good dialogue, good jokes, good characterization, especially for Majenta, some nice twists. It's a good riff on "The Sontaran Stratagem"-style storytelling, except that I thought McDaid managed to create some instantly likable UNIT characters in Colonel McCay and Captain Braxton. Seems a shame neither popped up again; they would have made good recurring characters for the strip. Majenta makes some interesting but very plausible moves here. And Martin Geraghty always excels that kind of high-energy stuff, whilst never losing the characters' essential humanity. My only real complaint is that derived of their drive to be "the first," returning aliens the Skith come across as kind of generic, but McDaid does eventually link them into the ongoing "Crimson Hand" plot in an effective way.
The Deep Hereafter
Now this is my favorite comic of the run, a madcap, hilarious riff on Golden Age detective comics. A dying private eye passes his hat and his charge onto the Doctor, who slips right into the role of investigating a list of bizarre characters, all suspects in a planet's greatest-ever crime, the theft of a world bomb. The Doctor hams it up in the part; Majenta, delightfully, disdains all of it: "If you're going to talk like that the whole time we're here, then I want nothing more to do with you." All the characters are great: the femme fatale who turns out to be a robot driven by "Tiny Danza," Half-Nelson the man where half of him got away in a transmat.. and half didn't, a beleaguered Centaurian lawyer who just wants to retire. Tremendous fun from writing to Rob Davis's pitch-perfect art to the colours that add so much to the atmosphere. Alpha Centauri was made for comics (there's a pinch of Zoidberg there, I feel), and the best part—other than the resolution—has got to be when Majenta threatens to drown Tiny Danza in whisky. Oh, and when he makes his surprise reappearance!
Onomatopoeia / Ghosts of the Northern Line
Onomatopoeia is one of those stories I admire more than enjoy; maybe I am a philistine, but I always struggle with comics where it's all about the images, not the words! That the characters lose their voices is a neat idea, but I struggled with the action a bit. Mike Collins is good at conventional tv tie-in comics, but I wonder if he was the right choice here, and if someone with a more fluid style might have done better. But I have to give kudos to this era's experimental run, which began in Deep Hereafter and continues into Ghosts of the Northern Line, a delightfully grounded (undergrounded?) ghost story with atmospheric art by Paul Grist. You can see that by this point, McDaid has got the tenth Doctor/Majenta partnership down to an art. They have great banter and Majenta some genuine character moments; the tenth Doctor gets in a nice bit of late-period self-loathing. The stuff about the ghosts is all so well done. Unfortunately, this is it, but thankfully it went out on a high...
The Crimson Hand
In his many years on the strip, Scott Gray raised the "season finale" to an art form with stories like Ground Zero, Wormwood, The Glorious Dead, Oblivion, and The Flood. Dan McDaid revives that tradition and does it proud with Gray's consistent collaborator Martin Geraghty back yet again. Lots of drama here, good surprises (I did not expect the return of a character from Thinktwice), nice explanation of the backstory, and a climax that really works, plot-wise and emotion-wise. One last double-cross from Majenta is the perfect way to wrap the whole thing up! My favorite part is the bit where Majenta and the Crimson Hand have won, and the Doctor is trapped in a pocket universe. It's sort of cribbing from those bits of The Glorious Dead where the Doctor is missing and Izzy is all alone... except in this case, it's the companion's own fault! A solid conclusion to a solid run.
Overall, I really enjoyed this volume. Even if there wasn't an ongoing story to hold everything together, it would still be a strong run for showing off the versatility of the strip at its best. Add Majenta—the kind of companion character who plays to the strengths of comics and adds something to every story in which she appears—and you get what is certainly the best run since the Scott Gray years, even if Rose/Martha/Donna years were solid too.
Stray Observations:
- I usually reorder these volumes by publication order as I read, but I kept Space Vikings! where the book had it, even though it's way off; it would have come out around the time of The Crimson Hand. But collection editors Tom Spilsbury and Scott Gray knew what they were doing; you wouldn't want to go from Hotel Historia to Thinktwice any more than you'd want to go straight from "The Runaway Bride" to "Partners in Crime"; vital to the latter story is a sense that time has passed. Plugging in a one-off standalone adventure creates that impression.
-
Space Vikings! is I. N. J. Culbard's only contribution to the DWM universe, but he would go on to be one of the best artistic contributors to Titan's excellent Eleventh Doctor ongoing.
- The ending of Stockbridge Child kind of implies that Max dies! Seven years later we would find out, thankfully, that he was still alive.
- I was kind of disappointed to realize the Worldsmiths in The Deep Hereafter were not the World Shapers.
-
Ghost of the Northern Line is Paul Grist's only DWM contribution, but he would also do a couple stories for IDW, including a fun wordless one with the eleventh Doctor and Santa Claus.
- "YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: The new collections design only put three or four names on the cover, so omitting inker David A. Roach is less of a snub, but he inks sixteen of this volume's twenty-three strips. Mike Collins gets cover credit for working on four!
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