Scott Gray (1)

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

This is an era of the strip I actually remember fairly well from reading it in the magazine as it originally came out. Three of the four stories here I could have told you the premise of before cracking the book open, and the fourth (The Instruments of War) came back to me as soon as I got to the last page of Part One. I guess I was receiving and reading the magazine fairly regularly. We're into Peter Capaldi now, and as show more always the strip just keeps on trucking along; there's no attempt at anything like a story arc yet, just a series of individual stories as the new Doctor beds in. I will say that Capaldi's face seems a bit easier for the artists to capture than Matt Smith's was.

The Crystal Throne
In the gap between Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi on screen, the strip gave us this story featuring the so-called "Paternoster Gang." We've had a few Doctor-less main strips in our time (Darkness, Falling in #167, Conflict of Interests in #183, Unnatural Born Killers in #277, Character Assassin in #311, Me and My Shadow in #318, most recently Imaginary Enemies in #455), but this is the first time that one ever goes multiple installments, I believe. The Paternoster Gang does their thing in defeating a plot to replace the Queen with an insect Queen; shenanigans at the Crystal Palace are included. It's not high art, but it's good fun; Scott Gray of course has a good handle on the character voices, especially Strax. He manages to thread the needle of making Strax funny without making him dumb. I also appreciated the first-person narration from Madame Vastra.

Instead of pencils, Mike Collins supplies just layouts for David A Roach to ink over, and on some pages Roach does the layouts himself. (And he's not credited, but according to the backmatter, Scott Gray did the layouts on one page, too.) The story of how this one came together is perhaps more interesting than the actual story! I had a feeling photographs were traced for some of the Vastra images, and I was right, but all those scales sure would be pretty fiddly to draw!

The Eye of Torment
The twelfth Doctor makes his DWM debut in a very enjoyable story about a spaceship exploring the sun being attacked by creepy aliens. As is often the case with Gray/Geraghty/Roach stories it's not so much that the story does anything spectacularly innovative as that the story does everything spectacularly well. Great visuals (get a load of those panels of the sun, and there's an amazing one of the Doctor outside the ship in the final part), good dialogue especially for the Doctor, sharp guest characters, creepy aliens, fun wrinkles and complications, even the narration captions are perfect. The icing on the cake is that Scott Gray is always so good at characterization that he picks up on stuff only nascent in the show: the bit where Clara manipulates Rudy Zoom into going what could be his death is totally in keeping with where Clara goes in late series eight and series nine, but was just barely hinted at at this point in the show. Both writer and pencil artist express reservations about their capturing of Capaldi in the notes, but I didn't notice any issues at all.

The Instruments of War
The Doctor and Clara team up with Rommel (!) and the Sontarans (!!) to stop the Rutans from destroying Earth with a Sontaran weapon; Mike Collins writes and draws, as he sometimes does. Not as good as last time he did this (The Futurists, also about fascists, strangely), but good stuff. Captures the voice of the Sontarans well. Kirby-style technological sublime on the North African front is a great visual juxtaposition. The musical motif (so to speak) is a good one.

Blood and Ice
One thing I have found interesting about the Moffat era of the strip is how it picks up loose character threads from the show; this is something the strip had not previously really done when the show is on. That trend is continued here, with a story that actually looks at the idea of Clara's splinters, which was a mystery in series seven, but promptly forgotten about once it had been explained. What was it like for there to be thousands of you born across time and space for the purpose of saving one man? Jacqueline Rayner finally lets us find out as Clara bumps into one of her splinters in Antarctica. It's all very well done in terms of art, story, and character. So well done, in fact, that one wishes Jenna Coleman could have played this on screen. On the page, it's obvious that Winnie is only pretending to betray the Doctor and Clara... on screen, I reckon Coleman could have made us believe it for a moment!

Stray Observations:

• Way back when reading stories collected in The Flood graphic novel, I complained that both the Doctor and Destrii make racist comments that they don't actually get called out on, the effect of this being pretty uncomfortable. Haha... racism? That happened again in Crystal Throne, where Strax makes fun of a Sikh's headgear. But in 2014 this kind of thing is seen differently than in 2004-5, and DWM got a letter complaining about it, and the offending dialogue was changed for the graphic novel.
• The backmatter is always such good value. I enjoyed Gray's comments on the decline of third-person captions in comics, and his exploration of how to introduce a new Doctor. When he read the debut scripts for David Tennant and Matt Smith before actually seeing them in the role, he could only hear the voices of their predecessors... not so with Capaldi! Geraghty says he didn't like how the aliens in Eye of Torment weren't colored at first, but he came around to it in the end.
• Gray and Geraghty "cast" Lenny Henry as self-aggrandizing amoral tech mogul Rudy Zero; Gray bemoans that he hadn't been used in the show yet. Lenny Henry eventually did turn up on the show in Jodie Whittaker's era... as a self-aggrandizing amoral tech mogul!
• Capaldi's Doctor doesn't appear until the very last page of Part One of The Eye of Torment, in a really great moment. I guess this was because of release date constraints (the issue came out just before "Deep Breath," and they didn't want twelve pages of the twelfth Doctor running around before he had had a real adventure on screen), but it works very well on its own terms as a way to debut a new Doctor in the strip. It would be a good surprise for our hypothetical reader who doesn't follow the show!
• With The Eye of Torment, Scott Gray brings an end to an astounding 39-strip run as the writer of the comic, beating out Steve Parkhouse's previous record of 32.
• Blood and Ice was designed to work as a strip exit for Clara, since no one involved knew if "Last Christmas" was going to be her exit or not.
• Revisiting the events of The Tenth Planet with Peter Capaldi's Doctor? As always, DWM beats the tv show to it.
• In The Eye of Torment, the Doctor and Clara go to a frozen spaceship; in Instruments of War, they go to a frost fair; in Blood and Ice, they go to Antarctica. It's a very cold collection! Fortuitous that I read it in December, I guess.
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Our man David A Roach gets cover credit yet again! Of course, this is again a volume where he is more than a "mere inker."

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

The relationship of the Doctor Who Magazine strip to the television programme upon which it is based is occasionally a strange thing. The strip is often at its best where there is no tv show—or when it's pretending there is no tv show. But even when it's tied into the show, it rarely delves into its history: very few strips are direct sequels, Big Finish–style, to tv stories; recurring monsters from the show are used show more pretty sparingly. I think you could have quite successfully read all the strips from #355 to now and not even known there was a Time War, for example! This collection features multiple stories that take a very different approach... but then, it is the fiftieth anniversary of the tv show. If the strip is ever going to celebrate the show, this is the moment!

Again, it's always interesting to me to compare reading the strip in collections against my memory of reading it as it came out. I have vague memories of The Broken Man—mostly the two-dimensional aliens—but very strong ones of Imaginary Enemies, one of my favorites. I remember liking Hunters of the Burning Stone, but the impact of the part one cliffhanger was muted by the fact that I live in America, and thus read all about the surprise on GallifreyBase long before I got to read the issue!

The Broken Man
By this point, I think we have to accept that I am just simpatico with Scott Gray's approach to the strip, and I will like everything he does. Add in Martin Geraghty and David Roach, and how can you lose? I don't think Moffat would have done something like this story on screen—maybe if it was a bit more stylized, like a spy movie, to fit in with the "every week's a new film" vibe of series 7A—but Gray and his artistic collaborators perfectly plunge Moffat's TARDIS trio into a Cold War espionage story with a strong character focus. There's a likeable British spy, an evil Soviet mastermind, creepy two-dimensional aliens, lots of good bits for Amy, a charming protestor, a creepy golem disguised as an alien robot. Good twists, great jokes. Is it in my top ten? No. Is it a solid adventure, just what one wants DWM to deliver month-in, month-out? Absolutely. I breezed through this and had a great time, but it is seasoned with real horror and tragedy, too.

Imaginary Enemies
I'm not a big fan of the River Song story arc of series 6. One thing that doesn't work for me is the retrospective reveal that Amy and Rory were friends with their daughter all along, a reveal that not even Moffat does anything with beyond the confines of the single story in which it appears. We have no hint that this gave them any kind of retrospective closure. So I appreciate this for being the one Doctor Who story in the entire universe to actually be interested in Mels. It's a Doctor-less flashback adventure set at Christmastime, about Amy and Rory coming under threat from the Krampus. Cute stuff, and a fitting send-off for Amy, especially that gorgeous final page montage of Amy and Rory growing old in twentieth-century America. It is so tv-heavy, though, it is kind of jarring to read. My hypothetical strip-only reader would probably be more confused than ever!

Hunters of the Burning Stone
There were a lot of fiftieth-anniversary spectaculars in 2013. Every tie-in medium was obligrated to produce one. DWM's was one of the most interesting and clever of the lot, I reckon. Instead of focusing on the fact that it was the fiftieth anniversary of all Doctor Who, Scott Gray zooms in on the fact that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Doctor Who story. Hence: the long-awaited sequel to 100,000 BC! (Yes, because this is what the story is called in DWM-land.)

I imagine it could be dumb. It is in fact great. As I said above, this is a lot more focused on what was happening on screen than we usually get in DWM: return appearances by Ian and Barbara, plot points turning on specific details from a tv story, lots of montages from the history of the show, not the strip. But it works because of one of Gray's usual strengths: his focus on the character of the Doctor. On screen, the eleventh Doctor was largely without the Time War angst that characterized his two predecessors, but there were hints of it, and Gray picks up on those hints with a story that focuses on the Doctor rediscovering who he was from the beginning. There are lots of clever reveals and turns; the whole police box thing is cheeky but inspired. It's great to get "London 1965" Ian and Barbara back, the kind of thing that only the strip could do, and their interactions with the eleventh Doctor are pitch perfect. The Tribe of Gum returns... and why not? The Doctor has been woven into the history of humankind, and it all started with them!

And yet, the story also manages to reflect the history of the strip and to face forwards as well. This is also a sequel to The Flood, picking up on the MI6 thread of some eighth Doctor strips, and it deftly pulls together the threads Gray had been weaving since his return to the strip with The Chains of Olympus. Plus, a return to Cornucopia, and the return of the Lakes indicate that this is no nostalgia fest: the strip is continuing to develop its own ideas and settings as it always has.

I will say Gray's weakness as a writer is that many of his stories have this bit where everything stops so someone can explain a complicated backstory, and I am not always sure I follow it. Why did the aliens want the Tribe of Gum to be flying around in space? Probably the answer is in here, but I am not sure I got it. But this is again great stuff, well illustrated by the dependable Geraghty/Roach team, with amazing visuals and strong character work.

"What is buried in man?" I am so glad I forgot about that reveal so that I could experience it all over again!

Other Notes:

• I imagine this was more obvious reading this at the time, but I wouldn't have known without the backmatter. Scott Gray indicates that the stories in The Chains of Olympus take place during series 6, while Amy and Rory are actively travelling with the Doctor, while The Broken Man takes place during series 7A, when he just picks them up for occasional adventures.
• With a run as (one of) the strip's main companion(s) from #421 to 455, Amy has the third-longest of any companion, below only Izzy (#244-328) and Frobisher (#88-133), though Ace beats her out if you combine her two runs (#164-92 and 203-10). I don't think I would have guessed offhand that Amy would have had the longest run of any of the tv companions. In every other tie-in medium, it's always Ace who racks up the big numbers!
• Issue #456 debuted a new size for Doctor Who Magazine, which was slightly shorter and slightly fatter. But as the editorial staff knew Hunters of the Burning Stone would be collected alongside strips in the old size, Martin Geraghty had to draw his pages to work at both sizes! This meant content along the top and bottom of each page that could be cropped off to appear in the actual magazine, and only appear here. He says in the backmatter this mean more of people's legs and space above people's heads! Exclusive to this collection, folks!
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Just three artists on this volume, only one of which works on every story, but only two on the cover. Don't make me say it!

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End Game, the first of these collections of the eighth Doctor comics I remember being fairly average, but the second, with the change in writer from Alan Barnes to Scott Gray, is very good indeed. I would say that Doctor Who is made for the comic medium, but it's also made for the televisual and audio media, so that's not a very noteworthy distinction-- but suffice it to say, that Doctor Who, with all the strange possibilities that it creates, works very well in comics. This volume is no show more exception, giving us chases beneath London, kick-butt Cyberman/Sontaran action, introspection in feudal Japan, wacky autonomous robots, and, of course, the masterpiece that is The Glorious Dead itself-- a ten-part epic that would fit right in with any of the new series' grand finales. In a good way. The eighth Doctor is on fine form, Izzy is Rose before there was Rose, and who doesn't love Kroton the Cyberman? The wonderful art by Adrian Salmon, Martin Geraghty, and Roger Landridge doesn't hurt either.

Added October 2022; access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

If you have a consistent writer, does the strip have a natural tendency toward story arcs? The backmatter here explains that after the Threshold arc, editor Gary Gillat promised fewer arcs... but in his very next multi-part story, scripter Scott Gray introduced the elements of a new story arc. Just can't be avoided, I guess? Like the stories in End Game, this arc draws on the strip's long history, but it feels less beholden to it, as instead of lots of returning strip elements, we just have one in the form of Kroton, and also unlike End Game, I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms.

Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools
Just as the McCoy-era strips picked up a character from the Tom Baker–era back-ups and brought him into the main strip in the present, we have that here with Kroton the Cyberman with a Soul, and so the collection helpfully reprints his original appearances. Throwback is basically fine; I think what I struggle with is that even before Kroton breaks away, none of the Cybermen feel particularly Cyberman-y. I mean, I guess there's no reason Cybermen can't chat about things, as long as they do so logically, but they don't feel like the impassive, unstoppable telos of humanity here. But, you know, I would never say no to some Steve Dillon art, and Kroton's interventions on behalf of the human resistance are well done. Ship of Fools is a great spooky sf tale, but Kroton himself could pretty much be any random traveler in it. If someone picked it up because of issue #23's "A NEW CYBERMAN COMIC STRIP!" cover blurb, I imagine they were kind of disappointed.

Happy Deathday
This is DWM's special contribution to the... ah, 35th anniversary? Is that a thing? It's a deliberately goofy multi-Doctor story, and I have to say, deliberately goofiness is probably better than deadly earnestness when it comes to these things, as the Doctors team up against the Beige Guardian, and there are references to Dimenions in Time, and it all turns out to be a videogame that Izzy is playing. There are some good jokes, and the art is fun.

The Fallen
This is DWM's sequel to the TV movie: Grace, since its events, has been using DNA she recovered to try to create a human/Time Lord hybrid, that will fulfill her desire to hold back death. But the DNA didn't come from a Time Lord, because he was in the body of a Skarosian morphant, and so Grace and the MI6 scientist she's been working with have inadvertently created a horrendous monster. Meanwhile, the Master is back... even though no one knows it. What I realized while reading it is that it's really the only sequel to the TVM ever made! BBC Books kind of edged close to it a couple times (and I know authors wanted to use Grace in novels but couldn't), while Big Finish totally ignored it except for using McGann himself (up until they got Eric Roberts, anyway). But this is a full-fledged sequel, following on from its scenes and character beats, even. The Doctor makes big impacts on people's lives, and this has repercussions he's not always thinking about. There's a strong focus on the characters of the Doctor and Grace here, and Martin Geraghty does a great job with big action and character close-ups alike. Overall, a good one, and the beginning of a good direction, I think.

Unnatural Born Killers
If you say, "Adrian Salmon, draw a story about Kroton the Cyberman beating up Sontarans," of course he will draw the hell out of it. And it turns out he can write, too! It took a bit for me to adjust to the more irreverent, human Kroton of the 1990s, but it was the right call for sure.

The Road to Hell
I felt that this was the weakest story of the volume, though it got better as it went. At the beginning, I found it hard to track the different groups and characters, who were introduced thick and fast. But once the relationship between Izzy and Sato Katsura came into the foreground, I found the story worked a lot better. There are some great moments here, such as Izzy making the future of Japan manifest as her knowledge of manga, anime, and Power Rangers, but then the cliffhanger being the reveal of the atomic bombing of Japan. Some neat concepts here, and one thing I appreciate about Gray as a writer is his peppering of the dialogue with small moments of humor, especially between Izzy and the Doctor.

TV Action!
It's DWM's 20th anniversary! Alan Barnes's notes in the commentary give the whole thing an air of desperation, but I thought it was a blast... even though, as an American, most of the cultural references go over my head. They bring back one of DWM's first original villains, Beep the Meep, but have him and the TARDIS cross over into a different universe... ours. The Doctor and Izzy chase Beep through BBC Television Centre on the day DWM debuted, culminating in a scene where the real Tom Baker pretends to be the Doctor to cower Beep. Magnificent! The real Tom Baker quotations used in his dialogue are priceless.

The Company of Thieves
This was good fun: the Doctor and Izzy arrive on a ship being hijacked by pirates, and when a Cyberman is found belowdecks, everyone misunderstands the situations... because it's Kroton, his path intersecting the TARDIS's at long last. Like I said above, the interplay between the Doctor and Izzy really works; I enjoyed her putting on her glasses and spouting Star Trek bafflegab to confuse a bunch of pirates about the status of their engines. This does a great job of escalating a complicated situation, and then exiting it. It's filled with delightful moments, such as a "high" Kroton, Izzy's idea to stop the bad guy, the TARDIS team flying through the void of space, and the two pirates who don't trust each other drifting apart in space on the final page. The Glorious Dead is great, of course, but this might be Scott Gray at his best, and Adrian Salmon's work is as delightful as always... or maybe even moreso.

The Glorious Dead
The biggest DWM story ever! Ten whole months! It could be a grind, but Gray stops it from being so by switching things up every so often. The first three parts play out relatively normally, with the Doctor, Izzy, and Kroton trying to figure out what's up with this alien planet and the strange religion coming to it. But then the part three cliffhanger is marvelous: the Doctor hears the words "WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP" and suddenly finds himself waking up... in bed with a Grace who called him "honey?" It's the kind of cliffhanger I can imagine Steven Moffat doing.

Part four then does something I can't remember any DWM story doing before (corrections welcome): jumping forward away from a cliffhanger, in this case about three weeks. The installment entirely focuses on what Izzy and Kroton on the occupied planet Paradost, told almost entirely via her narration (as a letter to Max). The jump forward again feels very Moffat (e.g., "Day of the Moon"); the choice to focalize the installment via the companion feels very Russell T Davies (e.g., "Doomsday"). And then in part five, we're doing something else entirely yet again! Here we have a masterpiece of surreal comics storytelling, as the Doctor tumbles from universe to universe, and thus from storytelling style to storytelling style. It starts out ordinary-ish, with the Doctor in a world where he did stay with Grace, but soon he's in a western, he's a cartoon tiger, he's in Peanuts getting advice from the Rani. I guess it's all a bit Steve Parkhouse—it reminds me of Once Upon a Time Lord—but it's so well done, and it's striking for coming in the middle of what has seemed like a pretty straight DWM space epic up until this point. Bits of it are drawn by Roger Langridge, which works well.

So with part six, things settle down... a bit. But we still get massive surreal landscapes of the omniverse, and the reveal that the alien planet the enemies come from is actually Earth, and the return of Sato, and Izzy shrunk and put in a test tube, and the reveal that the Master is behind it all! Again, it feels a bit RTD, akin to the reveal in Last of the Time Lords that the Toclafane are actually humans, and that the Master has been manipulating the entire series. It's all a bit mad, but in the best DWM way, and Gray and Geraghty's focus on the Doctor and Izzy and Kroton as people keeps it anchored. I do tune out a bit whenever we get one of those multi-page sequences of someone explaining the History Of All Time or whatever, but on the whole, this really works, and I like how it subverts the seeming prophecy about a Doctor/Master battle. Kroton gets a great end. Izzy's discussion of her parents and her relationship to them works well this time out. I think this does a good job of taking the kind of Parkhouse/Gibbons-y space epic and marrying it to the sensibilities of contemporary, character-focused storytelling—similar to what Big Finish was about to do in its own Paul McGann stories, and foreshadowing the approach the new series would take under Russell.

The Autonomy Bug
I was going to say this was cute, but it's not; like the New Eighth Doctor Adventure The Cannibalists, it uses cuteness to disguise how horrifying it really is. The Doctor and Izzy come to an institution for deranged robots, and realize they are being pretty awfully mistreated. I didn't love it, but it's an effective serious story from Roger Langridge, and has a great moment of cartoon logic, and a nice conclusion. The stuff with the robots painting their faces is pretty good.

Other Notes:

• Roger Langridge will go on to be a McGann-era mainstay of the strip as an artist, so much so that he illustrated the eighth Doctor installment of IDW's 50th anniversary series. But I, weirdly, know him from the fact that he illustrated special installments of the short-lived Shaenon K. Garrity webcomic Smithson (2004-8, I think? previously known as More Fun).
• Unnatural Born Killers is one of only a few Doctor-free main strips... and actually the last one featured the Sontarans, too!
• The Doctor is said to have defeated Beep twice before; the second time was in the story Star Beast II, published back in 1995, but this was collected with some twelfth Doctor strips, so I haven't read it yet. Big Finish would later add another Beep encounter, a direct follow-up to Star Beast II, inconsistent with this story. Which is, you know, as canon as anything. In IDW's era, they'd even do another story about the Doctor crossing over into our universe!
• Barnes was inspired by a Star Trek short story he only vaguely remembers; it would be "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman from the anthology The New Voyages.
• The only thing to dislike about Kroton being in the TARDIS crew is how little his time was! His departure story immediately follows his introduction. I demand missing adventures set between The Company of Thieves and The Glorious Dead. Another one to go on the the-tv-show-gets-cancelled-and-the-strip-becomes-a-nostalgia-fest list, I guess.
• I kept comparing The Glorious Dead to something Russell would do, and it really is, in a number of ways... and then I learned from the commentary that Russell actually wrote DWM after part four!
• Did the readers at the time know The Glorious Dead was going to be ten parts? Or did they just come to the end each month and read "TO BE CONTINUED..." every time instead of "TO BE CONCLUDED..." and wonder if it would ever end?

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The final volume of DWM's eighth Doctor comic strips was definitely my least favorite of the three I recently read. After the climax of Oblivion, Gray opts to do some light, standalone, companion-less stories, and unfortunately, none of these (aside from "Where Nobody Knows Your Name") have much to recommend them. They're not bad, but they're not much to make them exciting, either. The Nightmare Game, Gareth Roberts's contribution, is particularly dull/pointless. Fortunately, things get a show more little better with the return of Destrii in Bad Blood (though I feel the return of Jodafra was bungled; the one-dimensional villain here is nothing like the enjoyable fop from Oblivion), and things become absolutely magnificent with The Flood, which again, beats the new series to its own game, providing a gripping, world-shaking conclusion to ten years of the eighth Doctor. (And how can anyone fail to like the melancholy whimsy of "The Land of Happy Endings"?) The endnotes are also on top form this time, as we see just how the return of Doctor Who to the telly impacted the strip-- for the worse, I'm afraid. I want my Ninth Doctor: Year One featuring Christopher Eccleston and Destrii! (originally written February 2008)

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

And here we come to the end. Not just the eighth Doctor, but the end of an unprecedented era in Doctor Who Magazine history.

Something I've tracked in this project is for how long the strip functions as a self-contained narrative. For example, you can read from #1-60 and it all makes sense... but then the Doctor changes appearance between #60 and 61! Peri spontaneously disappears between #129 and 130. Benny appears suddenly in #193, and Ace disappears; Ace reappears in #203; and then Ace and Benny disappear after #210. The tv programme and other external factors prevent the strip from working as a totally self-contained story, even if it almost gets away with it at times. (The Shape-Shifter picks right up from The Moderator even though the Doctor changed his appearance!)

But from #244 to 353, we have a continuous story (side-strips like The Last Word or Character Assassin aside): over a hundred strips, not quite ten years' worth, that you can read without interruption. The characters, the themes, the ideas, develop from story to story. It had never been done before in Doctor Who Magazine history—no one prior to Alan Barnes, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, and company had ever had such a canvas to work on, and thus far, no one has ever had one again. Even more amazingly, it's clear this could have kept on going. This volume introduces Destrii as a new companion, only to immediately wrap up the narrative of her and the eighth Doctor. The universe where Doctor Who didn't come back to tv is probably a darker one overall, but its DWM strip could have kept going for another five years at least, I bet.

Where Nobody Knows Your Name
The eighth Doctor, a bit mopey after the events of the Ophidius/Oblivion arc, ends up in a bar that is—unbeknownst to him—run by Frobisher—who doesn't recognize the Doctor either. It's a great one-off, with some good character moments and strong comedy and heartfelt writing. The idea that they don't recognize each other is good; as Gray says in the end notes, "it avoided becoming a cosy, nostalgic reunion then and made it a bit more poignant." Not to spend my time here complaining about Big Finish, but compare this to the obnoxious sentimentality of something like the eighth Doctor meeting the Brigadier again in Stranded: UNIT Dating.

The Nightmare Game / The Power of Thoeuris! / The Curious Tale of Spring-Heeled Jack
For me, the DWM strip is always a bit less interesting when it becomes continuity-light. These aren't quite a series of one-offs, but they are pretty close to it. We have a story of the Doctor involved in a goofy plot involving aliens and football, one about Osirians in ancient Egypt, and one about an alien acting as Spring-Heeled Jack in nineteenth-century London. The Nightmare Game didn't work for me; I think it wants to be The Star Beast, but it doesn't have the energy or inventiveness of that story, and Gareth Roberts's Doctor's voice doesn't feel like Scott Gray's—too stiff and old-fashioned. Even the usually reliable Mike Collins seems to be having a bad day. The Power of Thoueris! is fun if slight—hard to go wrong with Adrian Salmon—but Curious Tale is again kind of a plod.

The first and third stories here both try to fake you into thinking you're meeting a new companion. I guess, anyway; Roberts claims in the end notes it was his intention to make readers think the pointless kid character was going to be a companion? Goodness knows why he wanted to do that, or why anyone fell for it. Gray pulls off a similar twist to much better effect in Curious Tale.

I do like the recurring gag across #330 to #338 about the Doctor turning up everywhere in a new, often ludicrous hat.

The Land of Happy Endings
Has anyone had to come up with more "celebratory" strip concepts than Scott Gray? He certainly had to do it a lot of times, and in the end notes to these collections, he sometimes comes across as increasingly desperate. Here it's Doctor Who's fortieth anniversary, and he would still be doing it ten years later for the fiftieth! This is surely one of the better ones, a tribute to the pre-DWM comics framed as a dream of the depressed eighth Doctor. The actual story is bonkers and charming, the coloring is beautiful, and the end is poignant.

Bad Blood / Sins of the Fathers
And suddenly, the ongoing story is back. Bad Blood is the return of Destrii—who becomes a companion—and her uncle Jadafra—who becomes a villain. I remember this not sitting well with me the previous time I read this collection; way back in January 2008, I wrote, "I feel the return of Jodafra was bungled; the one-dimensional villain here is nothing like the enjoyable fop from Oblivion." Fourteen years later (!) I think I was wrong: Jodafra is an enjoyable fop if he thinks he can use you, but an awful bastard otherwise, and Bad Blood does a great job drawing that out, and establishing what makes him distinct from Destrii. A strong story with lots of great characters and concepts; after a minor slump, the strip is once again firing on all cylinders. This continues into Sins of the Fathers, which mostly is there to set up Destrii as a companion, especially the logistics of her holo-disguise, but is another solid story. Like the late Moffat/Smith era, Gray and his artists make it feel like a new movie every time.

The Flood
The end of the eighth Doctor's comic run is surely also one of its best stories. An amazing setting, a great use of the Cybermen, some real meaningful, human stuff from both the Doctor and Destrii, perfect artwork. So good that Russell T Davies cribbed from it two different times (the Doctor absorbing the Time Vortex in The Parting of the Ways, the Cybermen as ghosts in Army of Ghosts), but of course he did, because this is operating right in the same ethos as him, my preferred ethos for Doctor Who, where the fantastic crashes right into the ordinary. The Cyberman plan—to make people want to by Cybermen by making their emotions unbearable—has never been bettered. The Doctor's increasingly desperate plans and ploys are done amazingly well. The new Cyberman design is fantastic. Martin Geraghty is on fire as much as the Doctor is during the climax. The narration by Izzy is the icing on the cake, and the cameos from her, Maxwell Edison, and Grace are well-placed. The ending isn't a regeneration, but it could have been, and it works either way.

Even the coda with the cows is great. I'm sad it had to end, but it couldn't have ended better than this.

Stray Observations:

• There's never been much sign that DWM cares about the Big Finish uses of their concepts; the woman Frobisher is married to here is seemingly not the one he settled down with when he left the Doctor in The Maltese Penguin.
• #337 was, fact fans, the very first issue of Doctor Who Magazine I ever picked up, meaning The Land of Happy Endings was my first-ever DWM strip. I picked up that issue so I could get ahold of its exclusive Big Finish audio drama, Living Legend, written by Scott Gray himself! It would be a few years before I would become a regular purchaser of DWM... I own The Coup / Silver Living, which came free with #351, but the cover to that one doesn't strike a chord; I think I might have just bought the CD on its own on eBay in that case.
• Normally I think Gray does a great job capturing the Doctor in general and Paul McGann specifically, but I don't care for a Doctor who makes scalping jokes and thinks Native Americans went around saying "How!" and calls them "Red Indians." Ugh.
• One thing I don't like about The Flood: the bit where Destrii is inadvertently racist. It's just not what I want to read about a companion doing? I think the story might get away with it if Destrii or anyone else acknowledged it, but all the only reaction comes from someone who's been emotionally compromised by the Cybermen. Similarly, I don't quite buy that you could watch as much Earth tv as Destrii has and not know about money!
• Can I just say, Martin Geraghty has always drawn Paul McGann as kind of tall... but in reality, McGann's only a couple inches taller than the "short" Sylvester McCoy. I feel like this is surely because of those TVM promo photos where McCoy hands McGann the TARDIS key, where McGann is clearly way taller. Supposedly McGann was standing on a box! Can we assume that even if McGann is average height, the character of the eighth Doctor is tall, and thus Martin Geraghty draws him correctly?
  
• The "Flood Barriers" behind-the-scenes here, about how DWM almost got to do the regeneration, and their pitch of Ninth Doctor: Year One, is really fascinating to read. I totally see the reason neither panned out, but it does seem a bummer that DWM could be offered something so titanic yet not get to do it, and I bet Scott Gray and Martin Geraghty would have made The Ninth Doctor: Year One something special. But they made the right call—especially once Night/Day of the Doctor came along!

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