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Next in the sequence of Tenth Doctor comics, continuing his adventures with New Yorker Gabby Gonzalez. Most of the album is taken up with the title story, which on the face of it looks well qualified for my list of Belgium references in Doctor Who, except that most of the action is explicitly set across the border in the (fictional) French town of St Michel. Gabby gets a bit more character development here, and knowing as we do what the ultimate fate of Amy and Rory is, the Angels are a source of real menace. A shorter story at the end, Echo, takes Gabby back to New York to fend off an alien threat and reconnect with her family. Enjoyable stuff. ( )

This comic features the Doctor’s scariest enemies, the Weeping Angels. If you’re like me, you’ll probably be not blinking for most of your reading. I yelled out loud when the comic revealed how one character prevented himself from blinking. Yikes! The First World War setting was a good one, and it was interesting to see where people ended up when they had been attacked by the Weeping Angels. I liked the writing and the Scottish connections—Robbie Morrison is easily my favourite Doctor Who comics writer. I was less interested in the smaller story, Echoes; the art was less interesting and because the story was shorter, there wasn’t much to it. It was fine, but The Weeping Angels of Mons was definitely better. The only thing Mons did not have enough of was the biplanes featured on the cover! ( )

When they were introduced in the classic Who episode “Blink” the Weeping Angels were a great concept, but I felt their subsequent reuse in the TV series devalued their impact. But their use here makes total sense.

If there had to be a follow up Angels story, then this was the right one. The battlefields of WW1 makes the perfect setting for the Doctor’s reencounter with these iconic creatures.

It’s a heart-felt poignant story of duty, and sacrifice that hits all the right notes of classic Who. ( )

The Weeping Angels seem to me to be a uniquely televisual monster. Their whole gimmick is that they don't move if you can see them-- so you need a medium that clearly delineates movement. It's particularly clever, because Weeping Angels aren't just frozen when characters see them, but when you the audience are looking. Big Finish have done okay by them, but it's definitely been diminishing returns, and the way Big Finish must indicate movement by stings of music is often inadvertently hilarious, and people have to say things like, "Gosh, that statue wasn't there a second ago!" aloud.

Comics, I think, start out from even more of a disadvantage, in that in a comic nothing is moving when the viewer is looking at it. Possibly a clever writer could make use of this somehow, but judging from The Weeping Angels of Mons (not to mention Terrorformer), Robbie Morrison is not one. This is a generic Doctor Who pseudo-historical. Plus, if you think about it, a Weeping Angel actually isn't that scary in terms of what it does: yes, it plucks you out of time... so that you can live a long and fulfilling life! Most of the tv and audio episodes featuring them manage to get around that, but this one's setting flags up the problem. If you're a soldier in the trenches of World War I, this is actually a step up! Again, a clever writer could probably make something of that, but this story does not.

One of the real high points of Titan's first Tenth Doctor volume was the Doctor's new companion, Gabby Gonzalez, who felt like a real person with a distinctive voice. Unfortunately, there's none of that present here, where Gabby could be literally any young female companion. This isn't just a writing problem, but an art one, as she suddenly looks like a generic non-Hispanic white woman.

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Gabby & The Doctor land in No Man's Land in the midst of The Great War in 1916. There they discover that Scottish infantrymen and their German opponents are both facing a much greater danger - The Weeping Angels! The battlefield scenes of mud, smoke, and darkness are a perfect fit for the angels and the comic quickly sketches an interesting cast of guest characters. Gabby continues to be wonderful and is growing into one of my favorite companions rather quickly. The story builds on the Weeping Angels mythos created in "Blink" but not as well explored in their later tv stories.

The brilliant - if obvious in retrospect - twist is that one of the soldiers is sent back in time to a nearby French village, where he marries and settles down as a farmer, waiting to catch up to the First World War and bail out his friends.SPOILER>

The only downside to this comic is that the Doctor seems to a sanctimonious ass for much of this comic, which I guess is true to the characterization of the Tenth Doctor, but I still don't have to enjoy it. The volume also includes a one-issue story called "Echo" set in contemporary Brooklyn which is highly derivative of the Pranavores plot except these are creature who amplify sound instead of feelings. The resolution is also derivative of "Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks" so it makes me wonder if the creators of this issue were just in a rush to get something out. ( )