Simon Spurrier

AGH! Why hasn't Disney adapted this excellent character and series into a film or TV show yet? Why?

This volume was fantastic. Everything about it from the story to the art ruled. Amazing, heartfelt story - showcasing Aphra's parents, and her being pawned (and then pawning) both the rebellion and the empire, only to end up back in the clutches on Vader.

I'm looking forward to Vol. 7.

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

I normally would be doubly skeptical of a story tying into both Secret Wars (ugh) and Marvel Zombies (double ugh), but then I saw it was by Simon Spurrier, who was one of the contributors to Titan's excellent The Eleventh Doctor: Year Two series, so I decided to give it a chance. I read the Ms. Marvel Secret Wars tie-ins back in the day; I only have the foggiest notion what it was about. I think a bunch of timelines got show more smushed together into the same planet? You don't really even need to know that to understand this, as long as you're willing to accept 1) Elsa Bloodstone is commanding an army against a horde of zombies, and 2) it's possible to run into multiple versions of the same character.

This isn't high art, but it is surprisingly enjoyable and well done for what it is. Spurrier and artist Kev Walker take the post-Nextwave version of Elsa Bloodstone, but treat the character more seriously than Ellis and Immonen did. What would it be like to grow up with all this trauma? How would it affect you as an adult, and how could you relate to others after it happened? Spurrier explores this with a mix of horror and humor, and I wouldn't say I loved it, but it's much better than it needed to be. Walker impressed me as an artist, too; good with both character and action. At one point, I thought, "wow this guy should draw Star Wars"... later I realized he was the artist for Marvel's Doctor Aphra series, and I was probably subconsciously remembering some of the art I'd seen for that.

The collection also contains one issue of the original Marvel Zombies series as a bonus, but no one's tricking me into reading that shit.

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This volume solidified my belief that The Eleventh Doctor is far and above the best of Titan's three ongoing Doctor Who comics. Alice continues on as a companion from "Year One," but two more are added: the Squire and Abslom Daak of Doctor Who Magazine fame.

The invocation of Daak is more than a surface-level continuity thing; I actually think it reveals something important about the creative team's intentions. Coincidentally, I started reading through the Panini collections of the DWM comic show more strip around the same time I started this, and The Then and the Now reminds me of the classic fourth Doctor run by Pat Mills, John Wagner, and Dave Gibbons (I haven't actually gotten to Daak yet; his material is reprinted in one of the seventh Doctor volumes) in that it doesn't read like an attempt to imitate what the tv show does in comics form, but instead it takes what the tv show does and filters it through a comics prism. Si Spurrier and Rob Williams and their artistic collaborators are doing their own thing that draws on stuff the tv show did... but is really nothing like it in terms of tone and affect.

The story focuses on the eleventh Doctor's guilt over what he did as the "War Doctor" during the Time War; he's being hunted by a bounty hunter (the Then and the Now of the title) for a crime he doesn't remember committing... but is perfectly willing to believe he committed. He and Alice are joined by the Squire, a companion of the War Doctor he doesn't remember, and Abslom Daak, who finds himself at loose ends as a "Dalek killer" with no Daleks to kill. Each story here sees the Doctor retracing his steps through the Time War as Alice has strange visions ("EXTERMINHATE") and we get glimpses of the War Doctor and a mysterious child. There's lots of great stuff here, both horrifying and gentle, and never for a moment do you feel like you're watching the tv show. I like this portrayal of a guilt-wracked Doctor; I like the new weird TARDIS team he has inadvertently assembled; I like the guesses and glimpses we get of the Time War (once again demonstrating that Big Finish Time War is the least interesting Time War). My only complaint would be that Alice herself feels a bit lost in the epic Doctor angst of it all, compared to how much her character was foregrounded in "Year One" (her visions feels more like a plot device than a character point), but I am hopeful that future volumes in "Year Two" will remedy this.

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After a bit of a chaotic start in the first volume’s storyarc, our second return to the Dreaming finally seems to have more stability. The narrative begins to unravel the major themes that Spurrier introduced in the first volume (leadership, dream chaos, and the redemption quest) with some new threads that play with motifs of love, humanity, and the foibles of family. It begins with a fable about the new Dream’s attempt to find his humanity (a noted difference from his predecessor) show more through love (artfully arranged, lol, by the Dream Vortex herself, Rose Walker), and the disastrous consequences of trusting a little bit too much. The ensuing quest and the ramifications it has throughout the Dreaming leave the story wide open for Spurrier and co. to tread familiar pathways, as Daniel walks through Faerie, an audience is held for the new “ruler” of the Dreaming, and Matthew the Raven is left to deal with the chaos. Yet we’re given enough new material that the biggest concern we have is that this Dream has obvious echoes down the timeline - which seems fitting when we’re talking about the dreamstate, where nothing is entirely new. Once again, we are left hanging without a lot of answers, but the journey along the way was highly enjoyable, with amusing characters, stronger storytelling, and lovely artwork that makes us excited to return to these dreams for the third volume. show less