Christopher Jones (14) (1969–)

This was a delight. Easily the best of Titan's various Doctor Who miniseries, and probably the best of all its Who comics with the exception of the Eleventh Doctor ongoing. It's really just a loving pastiche of the Pertwee era, but one filled with nice little touches and deft characterization, exactly the kind of thing one (sometimes) wants from one's tie-in comics. Cornell's skill at this kind of writing is far and above most of Titan's writers, knowing exactly how to blend the familiar and show more the new in such a way as to warm the heart of even readers who aren't Pertwee fanboys. Christopher Jones is new to me as an artist but does solid work; clear likenesses and good action.

At the end, Cornell claims this is his last Doctor Who tie-in, but he's subsequently returned to the fold three times, which seems about right.

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https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3385685.html

This is a Third Doctor story, firmly set in UNIT between The Three Doctors and The Green Death, with beautiful attention to character and detail both in writing and art. The setting is a small English village, with the Master as part of the apparatus of an alien invasion; but then there's the really unexpected reappearance of a face from the past of Doctor Who, which really cranks up the storytelling a gear. (There's also time-slippage to show more Westminster in 1868.) The character of Jo is quite substantially redeemed here, and we're given more substantial grounds for Mike Yates' imminent change of allegiance than we got on screen. It's the Third Doctor era as informed not only by the show as broadcast but by the sympathetic (and sometimes superior) novelisations of the late great Terrance Dicks. Loved it. show less

Paul Cornell's final Who work, which becomes explicit in the final panels. As such, it's quite celebratory, and Cornell clearly had a lot of fun writing it. He also seems to be quite keen on making it feel like it could actually be a Pertwee serial, with appropriate situations, pacing and dialogue (albeit one that can also afford Marvel movie-level special effects). What that results in, though, is a very simple plot with a lot of very "knowing" distractions in the details. We learn how the show more Master fools people with those ridiculous rubber masks, how groovy Jo's unconscious is, and there's more than one panel of the Doctor gurning at the camera while he's being choked by a tentacle. There's even a famous bit of dialogue repeated from "Dimensions in Time" for comedic effect. It's all very cute, but it's a bit like eating too much candy without a proper meal. By the time the final chapter opened with a rather tortured homage to Sweet's 1974 single "Ballroom Blitz," I had just about had enough. It's too bad as the first chapter, which mostly plays it straight, is pretty much perfect. Christopher Jones' art is excellent, too. show less

This is Titan's first and last The Seventh Doctor volume (they have by this point stopped optimistically putting "Vol 1" on every title page), collecting a three-issue miniseries. The miniseries is written by Andrew Cartmel and illustrated by Christopher Jones (who illustrated Titan's Third Doctor series); Ben Aaronovitch is credited as "executive producer" but there's no indication of what this might actually mean even though he gets first billing on the cover! Anyway, I went into this not show more quite sure what it would be like. On the one hand, I suffered through Cartmel's attempt to recapture this era in his execrable Big Finish Lost Stories; on the other hand, I recently read Cartmel's early 1990s DWM comics for the first time, and found them really interesting and striking.

This is somewhere in between. Cartmel's not interesting in pushing the boundaries of Doctor Who or comics like he was thirty years ago, but this does a much better job of pastiching his own era than the Lost Stories did. It's a fun, if somewhat underdeveloped and simple story, about the Doctor, Ace, and the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group (of Remembrance of the Daleks fame) dealing with a crashed alien spaceship in the Australian outback. It has a sense of scale tv wouldn't have attempted in the 1980s, but I did feel that something thematically interesting could have been done that didn't happen here. Christopher Jones does a lot to enliven the material; he's a good tv tie-in artist, in that he can do both likenesses and action well.

The collection includes some other things, foremost among them the "Hill of Beans" back-up strip about the Doctor and Ace meeting Mags the werewolf from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy again... with the gimmick that the story is illustrated by Jessica Martin who played Mags! Since her acting days, she had actually become an independent comics artist. It's okay; it's a bit jumpy and incomprehensible at times, which I blame on both writing and art. My guess is that sci-fi action does not play to Martin's strengths as an illustrator. But hey, I do like Mags, and this probably does better by her than her incompatible reappearances in Big Finish's trilogy.

Finally, it contains two things I've reviewed elsewhere, so I won't go over them again: the Seventh Doctor strip from 2018's Free Comic Book Day issue and the First Doctor story "In-Between Times." Except that I will complain that the FCBD issue is a prologue to Operation Volcano but for some reason collected all the way at the end of this volume!

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