Alan Barnes (1) (1970–)

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

It's DWM's longest story! By issue count, at least; I think The Glorious Dead still has it beat out by approximately ten pages. Picking up from the end of The Power of the Doctor, this leads right into Destination: Skaro... though I am unconvinced that its events really could squeeze into the sixty minutes the Doctor states have passed between the two stories in Destination: Skaro. I am pretty sure it took me longer than show more sixty minutes to read it!

It's a bit bonkers, and it's not very deep, but it is fun. One of Alan Barnes's strengths as a writer has always been rearranging pop culture iconography in interesting ways: here the Daleks attack the World Cup Final in 1966, only it turns out that it's all a simulation from the future, an amusement park where people go to experience Dalek wars... and the park enslaves real Daleks to make it all work. When the Doctor escapes from the simulation, he brings real Daleks with him.

It's not very deep, but it is deep enough; the story does some fun stuff with the disjunction between how we perceive Daleks as viewers (fun, goofy) and how they function in the narrative of Doctor Who (purveyors of genocide); probably the best of the many strong cliffhangers is the one where a bunch of tourists began chanting "EXTERMINATE," hoping to be exterminated! As you would, of course. It casts a lens on Doctor Who's own story, but also reflects the way that, say, Nazis come across in real pop culture. Alan Barnes amps it up as the story proceeds by even bringing in the TV Century 21 Daleks, contrasting their even more goofy iconography with the brutality of the "actual" Daleks.

It does give a feeling of being made up as it went along. Mostly I don't mind this (so does, say, the original Star Beast) but it does seem like the whole story could have ended with part eight but keeps going with a whole new subplot.

Lee Sullivan does a great job with Daleks of course, but all throughout; he captures new series Daleks, classic series Daleks, TV21 Daleks, all of them. James Offredi matches him on coloring with some good work, especially on the TV21 stuff.

If you thought this would be a deep plunge into the mysteries of the fourteenth Doctor (and I can see why you might have, though the story itself discards this pretty quickly), this isn't it. But it is a solid piece of DWM fun.

Other Notes:

• For those of us who keep track of such things, these fourteen strips tie Alan Barnes for the twelfth-longest run as writer of the DWM strip with Steve Parkhouse (#86-99), and tie Lee Sullivan for seventh as artist with David A Roach (#451-64). For total written, it moves Barnes from fifth to third (at 41 strips, a bit below Steve Parkhouse's total of 46), and Lee Sullivan from eighth to seventh (at 44 strips). But I believe there's more to come after this for both, so their numbers will move even further up.
• This is Barnes's first contribution to the main strip since #380, a gap of 204 strips! This would place him in second for largest gap (if we discount the returns for issue #500), behind John Tomlinson's record of 210... except that Lee Sullivan makes his first contribution since #317, setting a new record of 267!
• I'm given to understand that the conceit of TV Century 21 was that it was a news magazine from one century after its time of publication. Because of that, the humorless pedants of the Tardis wiki have counted all sorts of weird stuff as "valid" because it was printed in TV21 alongside the Dalek strips. Like, they'll count Thunderbirds... but (up until recently) not Scream of the Shalka or Death Comes to Time!? Anyway, if they are paying attention to Liberation, they need to take all that stuff back out, because Barnes establishes the TV21 comic strips are an in-universe 21st-century children's fiction.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

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

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 show more 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.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

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 show more 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.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

Holy exterminating crap, this one has it all. Communists! Identity crises! Double-crosses! Sixie (I can't tell you how happy it makes me to realize that SIX GETS ALL THE BEST STORIES)! Charlotte! Daleks! Thaleks! And a story so intricate I'm going to need another listen. Bravo!