Jacqueline Rayner

This was a delight. EarthWorld is the first proper adventure for the new TARDIS team of the (amnesiac) Doctor, Fitz, and Anji following the trapped-on-Earth arc; Anji was introduced in the previous book, Escape Velocity (which I read back around the time it came out, in 2001), but this was her first trip in the TARDIS. I don't have much memory of Anji despite reading five novels featuring her back in the day, but she is great here. Rayner has an exceptional handle on her, much the same way show more she does Bernice Summerfield. She is real, funny, and inventive, and her internal monologue utterly convinces; much of the novel is told from her perspective, and the book works all the better for it. I liked the e-mails she writes her (dead) boyfriend sprinkled throughout the text; I liked her interactions with the three would-be rebels; I liked her solutions to the situations she ends up in. I have three more Eighth Doctor Adventures featuring Anji that I am slated to read in the coming year; I can only hope those writers measure up to Rayner.

At one point, I started to wonder if Fitz was a bit flanderized-- he seemed pretty pathetic. But I think Fitz actually kind of is pathetic, it's just that he's normally written by male authors who sympathize with his patheticness. And if he feels flanderized, well, that's because (as the novel delves into a bit) he was literally flanderized in the novel Interference. His existential crisis was well handled, and I liked his resolution at the novel's end.

The one weak point of characterization is the Doctor himself. I liked the slightly off-kilter Doctor we got in the Earth arc novels The Turing Test and Father Time, and here it seems that he knows a little too much about how he is "supposed" to act on an adventure considered it's his first one. But there is a neat moment at the end, where he does some stuff no other Doctor would do, and Rayner captures Paul McGann's performance as well.

All this, plus it's that rarest of things: a media tie-in with thematic depth! This is a story about memory, and the gap between what we remember and what actually was. The Doctor has lost him memories, Fitz is made up of memories, Anji struggles over her memories of Dave, the planet New Jupiter is in a war over to what extent their cultural memory of Earth should dominate them, the EarthWorld theme park is entirely made up of misremembered Earth history, the president of New Jupiter struggles with false memories he's invented. It all comes together quite nicely, without being ham-handed. Definitely one of the best EDAs, and a worthy choice for BBC Books's fiftieth anniversary reprint line. show less

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."

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

Doctor Who is as perfectly suited to the short story as it is to any other medium, if not moreso-- Doctor Who thrives on the strange juxtaposition, and where does that work better than the short story? I may be talking rubbish, but there's no denying that when a Doctor Who short story anthology is done right, it can show all the myriad possibilities of Doctor Who within a single "work"-- something no novel, comic book, or even episode could do in a single installment.  Short Trips and Side show more Steps was the first Short Trips book to have a "theme," a loose one of journeys into slightly divergent continuities, which enabled those myriad possibilities in just the right way.

The book is very thoughtfully organized, with several of the stories broken up into multiple installments so that you read them slowly across the course of the book.  Plus there's a series of stories called "Special Occasions" by four different authors that flits in and out.  The whole thing has a nice and unified reading experience, with the right amount of variation to keep one going throughout.  I'm not going to review every story here, but I will try to hit the high and low points here.

The book is flanked by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham's "A Town Called Eternity," a two-parter starring the fifth Doctor, Peri, and the Master, and part one is fantastic; it feels exactly and utterly like one of those two-part Davison historicals (Black Orchid, The Awakening, The King's Demon).  It's written in this very clipped way that makes it seem like a Terrance Dicks novelization of a so-so television episode, and why normally I'd demand a writer do something more proseworthy, here it's just so perfect. I loved every bit of it, Master's zany plan and all.  Unfortunately, part two is just boring, but I suppose you can't have everything.

All of the Special Occasions stories, featuring the fourth Doctor and the second Romana, are varying degrees of fun, but the first one, "The Not-So-Sinister Sponge" by Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman, is the best.  The Doctor and Romana forget a very important day at the same time they land on the oddest planet.  It's six pages long, and in reading my wife the best bits, I essentially read her the whole thing.  Norman Ashby's "Do You Love Anyone Enough?" is a joke about Rolo ads, but a good one.  Steven Buford's "Better Watch Out, Better Take Care" is the weak link here, a not terribly interesting tale of the Doctor playing at Santa Claus for some reason.  The last one is "Playing with Toys" and is by David Agnew, writer of the television classics The Invasion of Time and City of Death, and I didn't really get it, but I wanted to like it.

There are a couple stories that take place in oddball continuities, but almost all of them suffer from not actually doing anything with them.  Gary Russell's "Countdown to TV Action" takes place between some old comic strips, but aside from the occasional (humorous) "Because I'm Dr Who and I'm a scientist" plays the story entirely straight for some reason.  Justin Richards gives us a tale in the world of the 1960s Peter Cushing films, but "The House on Oldark Moor" is a dead boring mashup of other things Peter Cushing has done-- there's a character named "Tarkin," hur hur.  The worst offenders are Steve Lyons's "Face Value," which follows The Ultimate Adventure stageplay, and Mike Tucker and Robert Perry's "Storm in a Tikka," which bridges the gap between Dimensions in Time and the in-character appearances of the Doctor, Ace, and K-9 on the educational video Search Out Science.  I've never seen/heard The Ultimate Adventure, but a story bridging the gap between two of the worst pieces of Doctor Who ever created should be hilarious... instead it's just a boring adventure that happens to have K-9 in, and "Face Value" is little better.

And some stuff is just fun.  Michie Docherty's "The Android Maker of Calderon IV" is a three-page joke... but a hilarious one.  Graeme Burk's "Turnabout is Fair Play" sees the sixth Doctor and Peri swapping bodies, and Peri attempting to impersonate the Doctor is excellent.  Other stuff wants to be fun, but doesn't succeed, like Christopher M. Wadley's "Gone Too Soon," which wants to be a heartfelt sendoff for the sixth Doctor, but ends up a schmaltzy tale about a character who sounds nothing like anyone ever played by Colin Baker.

The real triumph of the book is Daniel O'Mahony's "Nothing at the End of the Lane," a three-part reimagining of "An Unearthly Child" from the perspective of Barbara-- as a piece of literary sf that's much more rooted in the cultural concerns of the 1960s than actual 1960s Doctor Who ever was.  The idea is good, but the execution is brilliant.  Barbara is one of Doctor Who's best characters, of course, and this is surely the best writing she's ever had.  This is the kind of thing Doctor Who short fiction should be doing, and I loved every bit of it.  Why doesn't Daniel O'Mahony write more things?

Of course, there are some other stories peppered in there, some forgettable, some not, and unfortunately the forgettable ones are weighted to the back of the book a little too strongly, but on the whole, it's a diverse collection of enjoyable tales, showing how fun, how dark, how funny, and how moving Doctor Who can be.  Probably my second-favorite Short Trips volume so far, behind A Christmas Treasury.

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There are some good ideas here—the Doctor still grappling with the lingering effects of his amnesia, Anji in the first throes of grief for her boyfriend, Fitz having identity issues in light of everything that he (or some version of him) has been through—but I found myself disliking how Jacqueline Rayner dealt with them. Admittedly, a lot of my disappointment with the book is shaped by how Rayner deals with gender issues. She seems to have been vibrating with the need not to be seen as show more one of those Shrill Feminists, and so she/Anji are keen to remind us throughout that she's Not Like the Other Girls. (To be fair, getting a gig writing DW tie-in novels as a woman ca. 2000 probably wasn't easy and Rayner may well have felt that she couldn't push things too far but... there were other approaches, Jacqueline.) Even worse, though, was what Rayner does with Fitz. As much as he has sympathetic moments here as he deals with the existential horror of knowing that he's not the "real" Fitz, that he's essentially a clone with the memories of the original, now dead, Fitz, his reflexive, nasty sexism (more than once he offhandedly thinks of a woman as a bitch or a bint; he crashes a vehicle "while distracted by a frozen female android in a miniskirt", etc.) continues to sour me on him as a character. And that's even before we get into the skin-crawling way he thinks about how physically attractive some characters who are barely teenagers are. I came very close to giving up on the book there and then. There are the kernels of a better book here but wow, the vibes are rancid. show less