Warwick Gray

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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What the heck happened!? It's so... tiny.

This era sees the strip expand to twelve pages per issue, a sign of unprecedented faith in it. (Compare to the dinky strips we get these days... assuming we get any at all!) But on the other hand, we get the smallest collection I can remember. If you were reading this in the mag, I'm sure it wouldn't matter. (And indeed, I remember liking this era quite a bit... a decade ago.) But show more it's hard to not feel disappointed when you've reached the end of a collection and read three whole stories!

What happened is that the twenty-issue collections weren't selling well. (At least, I guess, since the collection hiatus between The Widow's Curse and The Crimson Hand.) The problem was they had to be priced so high they priced most people out. So, smaller collections could have lower prices and people would be more likely to pick them up. In the future, collections of about thirteen strips would become the norm, but the problem here is that the story arc had been designed with a twenty-issue collection in mind, so it had to be split up into two chunks of roughly ten strips apiece, but based on where the stories divided, we ended up with a nine-issue collection here, followed by an eleven-issue one in Hunters of the Burning Stone. (They were, however, released simultaneously, so you could at least get all twenty strips at once.)

Thirteen strips is more satisfying, but in this case there wouldn't be a way to get to thirteen strips that wouldn't be awkward. If you chucked The Broken Man into The Chains of Olympus, you'd get up to thirteen, but then you'd end up with a pretty weird volume for Hunters of the Burning Stone if it went from #455 to 467. One Amy and Rory story, one companion-less anniversary story that brings an arc to a climax, and then a couple Clara stories.

It seems a weird paradox that the actual strip was doing well enough to get its page length increased while at the same time the reprint sales fell off enough that they needed to be slimmed down!

The Chains of Olympus
Rory makes his DWM debut... but more importantly, Scott Gray returns as scripter of the main strip for the first time since The Flood way back in 2005! There have been many good writers of the strip in the interim, of course, but something I like about Gray is his interest in the character of the Doctor himself. The Doctor goes through a little arc here, which is nice, in terms of his attitude toward Socrates. The plot itself is fun: the beginning sets you up to think that either the Greek gods were aliens all along, or aliens are impersonating the Greek gods, but the answer turns out to be neither, and more tragic. And of course Gray is great at peppering his very serious story with moments of levity, like the Doctor's double-take when he meets Plato, or the blacksmiths who make Rory's magic sword seizing an opportunity to advertise.

Mike Collins is back on art. Since Supernature, I think he's gotten a better handle on Matt Smith... I still feel unconvinced by his Karen Gillan. But he's a great illustrator regardless: lots of big expansive stuff here that he and inker David A Roach capture perfectly. One of the selling points of the strip is it's like what you see on screen but with an unlimited budget, and Collins is always great at that kind of thing. I like the inverted design of the Greek gods; nice work from colourist James Offredi there. Good, breezy fun with a strong undercurrent.

The final moment doesn't just point to a new story arc; it also points at an aspect of the Doctor's character. I like Socrates's evaluation of him.

Sticks & Stones
This is a highly effective two-parter, giving us two styles of story at once: an urban thriller featuring the Doctor and a domestic base-under-siege featuring Rory and Amy. An alien graffiti artist attacks London, spraying his name first across London landmarks and then across language itself: soon everyone finds themselves unable to say any word other than "MONOS" and then everyone finds themselves becoming the word "MONOS." It's a great concept, one of the things that plays very well to the strength of the comics medium, and everyone here works together to make it work: artists Martin Geraghty and David Roach, letterer Roger Langridge, and even DWM art editor Richard Atkinson, who supplied a panel of brand logos turning into "MONOS" again and again. The eventual resolution is quite good, too.

I like how for Rory, almost the entire story takes place in a supermarket. It's very human, and plays to the strengths of his character. I like that, however, meanwhile the Doctor is in a flying van, careening around London landmarks! Again, Gray is great at peppering his writing with small jokes, like Rory complaining about Amy's driving, or all the stuff about Amy's cooking. Geraghty is usually strong at this kind of urban escapade thing (see The Flood, The Age of Ice, The Golden Ones), but he also does well by the story's human elements, capturing all three regulars very well.

I have one complaint: if this had been on screen in, say, the Russell T Davies era, I think the characters trapped in the supermarket and the police detective the Doctor teams up with would have had a bit more material. This was plotted as a three-parter before Gray realized he could do it in two... but I wonder if three parts would have made these characters pop more and make a strong story even stronger.

Oh, I just got the title. Nice.

The Cornucopia Caper
The strip moves from strength to strength with another fun one with serious undercurrents. This brings us to the city of Cornucopia, which becomes the second of the strip's recurring settings alongside Stockbridge, and introduces someone who I am pretty sure goes on to be a recurring character, the unlicensed monkey thief Horatio Lynk. Lynk is an intstantly likeable character: telling the first part through his narration was an inspired move, and his flirtatious repartee with Amy Pond really sings. I loved all their escapades together. The Doctor and Rory get a nice subplot, too, with the Doctor on the back foot but still clever. And, I can't say this enough, lots of good jokes! I always genuinely laugh out loud at least once when reading a Scott Gray story.

I do think that unlike some other strip writers, Gray rarely tries to overtly mimic the style of the tv programme itself, though sometimes the strip resonates a bit with particular aspects of the screen version. Rather, it seems to me that back when he wrote his amazing run of stories from Ophidius to The Flood, he honed in on what a Doctor Who comic strip truly was and ought to be. So now, returning to the strip, he doesn't try to do Moffat on the page, he just takes his Scott Gray formula and applies it to a new set of characters, while still keeping those characters true to their screen counterparts. I imagine it's harder than it looks to strike this balance, but the result is, I think, the platonic ideal of the DWM comic strip.

Plus, of course we get some sweet Dan McDaid goodness. I love his Amy Pond; his less realistic style means he captures her perfectly without being beholden to Karen Gillan's actual likeness! The energy he imparts Lynk, the grubbiness of Cornucopia, the ominousness of his alien Ziggurat, the grotesequeness of his villains, it's all perfect.

Stray Observations:

• Actually, at 129 pages (including commentary) the length of this collection ties for smallest with The Cruel Sea, The Land of the Blind, Ground Zero, Evening's Empire, and The Good Soldier. But I think it feels smaller, because 1) the extras I am pretty sure are a bit longer than normal, so there's less actual strip content, and 2) because the actual strips are longer than they have been, that means fewer actual strips and fewer actual stories are collected here.
• Karen Gillan is a good-looking woman, of course, but I am not convinced she has the breasts that Mike Collins gives Amy. Indeed, I don't think that's true of any of the female companions!
• I like how Gray manages to build up that sense of a DWM universe without obtrusive continuity references: this collection features a return of the Moblox from Ophidius et al. (#300-03) and the Necrotists from The Way of All Flesh (#308-10).
• A city where crime is legal but must be channeled through bureaucratic guilds... it's Ankh-Morpok from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, isn't it? Gray doesn't mention that as an influence, though, so maybe it was just somewhere in his subconscious. I think Izzy was established as a Discworld fan, wasn't she?
• "YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: There are exactly four artists who work on this volume. All but one of them receives cover credit. Who could have been left out???

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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.

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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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