Roger Langridge

An engaging survey of a failed experiment from American history that is just rife with unintended consequences. And this is the sort of history that America keeps repeating as righteous morality police try again and again to ban things that a large number of people want to have available, be it marijuana and other drugs or abortions, books, or gay marriage.

The book is narrated by John Barleycorn, a fictional personification of alcohol that's been around for centuries, and it manages to cram show more in quite a few other public figures from Johnny Appleseed and P. T. Barnum to Al Capone and Eliot Ness to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous. show less

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

After reading and enjoying the Walter Simonson Mighty Thor, I picked up some more interesting-sounding Thor comics, the first of which was this set of nine single-issue stories by Roger Langridge (of Smithson and Doctor Who Magazine fame) and Chris Samnee (who would later illustrate a highly acclaimed run on Daredevil). This is pure comics, everything I want a superhero story to be. Fun but with a serious substrate, show more character driven, fast. In these stories, Thor comes to Earth for the first time, meeting Jane Foster, who is these stories is a museum curator. He's been exiled by his father-- but he doesn't know why, making it hard to redeem itself.

As he settles into life on Earth, he defends women against creeps, goes out drinking with the Warriors Three and meets Captain Britain, tries to confront Heimdall, battles dinosaurs with Captain America, meets other Avengers like Ant-Man and Iron Man, and falls in love with a human. Each story is entertaining on its own, but clearly also building up to a bigger thing. Part of a continuity all its own, it avoids much of the gloom and mediocrity that pervade contemporary superhero comics. The art is gorgeous, and makes you love Thor all over again. I have never been as interested in or charmed by Jane as I was here.

The crime, of course, is that continuity-free superhero comics don't sell. This is a distillation of the best of Thor and Marvel, but that's not what the market wants, and thus this was cancelled after eight issues plus a Free Comic Book Day tale. The eighth issue wraps up some of the strands, but there was clearly more story to be told-- that never will be. This is disappointing but not so disappointing that I would recommend against the book. If you want fun, funny, epic, charming Thor comics, pick this up. show less

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

This collection spans the entirety of the tenth Doctor and Rose era of DWM, which initiated when "The Christmas Invasion" aired and ran all the way to "The Runaway Bride," and it also includes a (kind of) companion-free storyline from between "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones," making for a nice sizeable chunk of DWM. Like the comics collected in The Cruel Sea, these are definitely trying to ape the storytelling of show more the Russell T Davies era on screen, but I also felt there was a more concerted effort to play to the strengths of comics here: more stories that do things so big that they could never have been afforded on screen, or stories with lots of different locations. Overall, it's a pretty pleasing package.

I've read this collection before, way back in 2008 when it came out. This is what I wrote back in December 2008:

With the coming of the new series, DWM's comics lost the larger overarcing narrative they'd often had, moving to standalones-- a move that makes sense for a variety of reasons. But, I think, it also results in a weaker reading experience-- not that stories with plot arcs running through them are innately better, but a good plot arc can provide a bit of oomph to a weaker story. Or maybe what's weakened the stories in this volume is the loss of Scott Gray as head writer, and his replacement by a wide variety of folks, not all of them the best. Either way, this collection is a bit of a jumble. The title story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis is fine for the most part, though the resolution is highly disappointing. Tony Lee's "F.A.Q." is an absolute mess, and the usually-dependable Mike Collins isn't up to scratch with "The Futurists"-- it has some nice ideas, but they don't really cohere. Jonathan Morris's "Opera of Doom!" is too slight to be effective. Morris's other effort, "Interstellar Overdrive" is quite fun and mostly faultless, but something always bothers me about stories where our protagonists would have died but for a convenient time loop that lets them do things over (as in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Cause and Effect" or Deep Space Nine's "Whispers"). It's fun to see the Brigadier in Alan Barnes's "The Warkeeper's Crown", but as I write this review, I can't remember anything else about the story, good or bad. The story Barnes seems to think he told (judging by his author's note) about the Brigadier and the Doctor coming to a new understanding now that the Doctor has been a soldier in the Time War is apparently much more interesting-sounding than the one he actually did tell. The standouts of the collection are the two "comedy" one-parters: Gareth Roberts's "The Lodger" has the tenth Doctor moving in with Mickey for a week, with hilarious consequences, of course. And Nev Fountain's "The Green Eyed Monster" puts Rose on a reality television show exploring her jealousy of the Doctor's other women-- especially Jackie! But aside from the comedy, in both of these stories, the characterization of all the regulars-- the tenth Doctor, Rose, Mickey, and Jackie-- is exactly right, making me miss what was once such an effective team.

Now, in January 2023, I was curious to see how much my impressions of some of these stories shifted!

The Betrothal of Sontar
This sees the first appearance of the Sontarans in the DWM strip since 1993's Pureblood (and even reuses that story's title term); it's about a group of low-quality Sontarans who run a mining rig instead of getting glorious soldiering duty, a neat look into a different dimension of Sontaran society than we've ever seen on screen. The cosmic maguffin wasn't super interesting, but I liked the two principal Sontaran characters. I'm not sure why in my review above I called this story's resolution "highly disappointing." Like, rereading it I have no idea what my beef was at all.

The Lodger
This was fun; you can see why Moffat picked it up to make it into a tv episode, and though being a 45-minute story gave it more room to breathe, this version has the benefit of pairing the Doctor with a familiar character—and not having to work in an alien threat of some kind. More of a series of vignettes than a story, but a very solid series of them, and the kind of thing that (somewhat ironically) only DWM could do, I think.

F.A.Q.
I was dreading this one going in. I remembered my negative review from last time around, and having since suffered through Tony Lee's run on IDW's Doctor Who comic book, my opinions of Lee as a comic writer have only diminished. But... I actually kind of liked this? I wouldn't say it's a work of genius or anything—the stories on either side of it are better—but it's fun enough. It has the grounded sensibility of the RTD era, focusing on an ordinary family affected by alien powers, shades of "Fear Her" (a story that I really like). Rose gets some good spotlight moments. The main thing I don't like is the reveal about the teacher who didn't really exist, which seemed kind of pointless. Like, it's spooky, but it doesn't really seem to make a character or thematic point.

The Futurists
I really don't know what I was thinking when I wrote my above review, because this story was on fire. Good ideas, great visuals, neat contrasts (black Romans in Britain vs. a fascist Italian state), fast pace—four different key locations in three installments!—nice themes, and above all, good characterization for Rose and some genuine laugh-out-loud jokes. Loved gags about the Silurians, how many people were in the resistance, the use of the resistance, and especially the clever use of the psychic paper. "But Darius... you can't read..." "Oh." I can imagine it playing out perfectly on screen. Rose leading the captured Silurian women in revolt is great, and her voice is captured very well. Exactly the kind of story the strip ought to be doing when the tv show is leading, and the volume's highlight. I don't know how I got it so wrong fourteen years ago.

Interstellar Overdrive
I do love time loop stories. They're one of my favorite sf subgenres. TNG's "Cause and Effect," Groundhog Day, SG-1's "Window of Opportunity," Discovery's "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," Russian Doll season one, Palm Springs, I love them all. I am a total sucker for them. I even love the chronic hysteresis bit in Meglos.

Um, except this one. I think it's a noble attempt. But it has two things going against it, I reckon. One is that the repetition just isn't as interesting when it's solely visual. Here the scenes are all shown from a different angle, but that means you don't really get that uncanny echo that makes these kind of things work on screen. The second is that since it's only two parts, the loop only repeats once, and so it's less a time loop story, and more a story where something happens once, and then the characters get a do-over. It feels cheap, I guess, if it's that easy to get out of the loop. Seeing the iterations is what makes these kind of things fun!

But there are some good jokes and the part one cliffhanger is a good one.

Opera of Doom!
This story is a delight. Quick, fun, good gags. A little too quick, maybe—the fact that people were disappearing into the alien opera house maybe should have been set up better—but I really enjoyed it. The really terrible musician who becomes amazing is a fun character with lots of good jokes.

The Green-Eyed Monster
Rose's last appearance in the strip is a good one, bringing Mickey back again and also marking Jackie's only strip appearance. It's a kind of contrived story about an alien jealousy monster and a talk show, but it's all worth it for the incredible sequence where Rose thinks that the Doctor has settled down with her mother. The ending gag of Jackie wanting a second kiss is delightful.

The Warkeeper's Crown
Rose of course stopped appearing on screen way back in July 2007, but DWM seems to have considered "The Runaway Bride" her official cut-off point as the current companion—the first episode without her as a lead, I guess. So here we get a companion-less story to bridge the gap before Martha, and DWM brings back the Brigadier to serve as a temporary companion. Though the Brigadier appeared in the "past Doctor" early of the early 1990s, I think this is his first present-day appearance since The Mark of Mandragora.

It's okay. I liked the first part all right, which pulls the Doctor, the Brigadier, and the wrong Mike Yates together; I liked the last part, where the wrong Mike Yates tries to remake Britain. The middle part, though, lost me in the complicated exposition about the relations on the alien planet, and the whole story suffered as a consequence. I didn't really get the ending, for example. It seemed like things ought to have been simplified. The idea of the Doctor meeting the Brigadier for the first time after he himself fought in a war seemed squandered in a single panel. (Shades of Big Finish's own attempt to do this story, Way of the Burryman, which I read Warkeeper's Crown in the middle of, coincidentally.)

Other Notes:

• #367 is one of the rare issues from this era I actually do own; I picked it up to get the free Big Finish CD that came with it. I have no memory of reading The Betrothal of Sontar part three on its own, but I have to imagine it made no sense.
• John Tomlinson previously wrote for DWM way back in 1989, scripting Nemesis of the Dalek. (He also wrote two Who strips for The Incredible Hulk Presents and a prose story from the collection Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer.) At 210 issues, that's the longest gap between contributions for any DWM writer/artist as of 2014's strips. His cowriter here, Nick Abadzis, would go on to the primary writer of Titan's The Tenth Doctor comic.
  
• From #363 to 368, we have three stories, two of which were by Gareth Roberts and got adapted for television! Plus The Love Invasion inspires a scene in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" on screen. Quite a hit rate for him. The Lodger is, however, his last contribution to the DWM strip.
• I was all prepared to admit I was too hard on Tony Lee as a writer, and then I read his behind-the-scenes I comments. I don't know how one manages to write a bad creator's commentary, but somehow he does. Lots of very belabored jokes, with the kind of self-deprecating humour that comes across as false modesty.
• Jonathan Morris gives an incredible amount of detail in his creator's commentaries, down to entire lost scenes from both his stories. I can't think of another DWM graphic novel with this level of detail. Though I enjoyed Opera of Doom! the lost joke about the very slow gondola chase would have been amazing.
• The Green-Eyed Monster opens with a caption reading "Quite a while ago...", which confused me at first, but I guess it's meant to indicate that this goes between "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Rise of the Cybermen," which was broadcast many months prior. Placement notes aren't really the kind of thing DWM typically goes in for, and it didn't even occur to me we weren't going in chronological order prior to that, since I think every strip here could comfortably fit between "Tooth and Claw" and "School Reunion."
• At the time I read this volume in October 2022, The Warkeeper's Crown was seemingly Alan Barnes's last contribution to the strip, but he is the writer of the current fourteenth Doctor strip, Liberation of the Daleks, that began in issue #584. In between these points, he wrote one million Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish and script-edited ten million.
  
• David A. Roach works on literally every story in this volume except for one ten-page strip, more than any other writer or artist... and somehow does not deserve cover billing!

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A bubbly, high-energy science fiction romp about a brazen career thief (who just so happens to frequently look and sound like a twisted Mary Poppins) and her robot sidekick as they race through heists and prison breaks at the seats of their pants. As I often find with humour-based stories, this is lacking a little bit in forward momentum for my tastes, but it's otherwise very entertaining. And even packs some interesting moral dilemmas at time, though they of course breeze unquestioned past show more the delightfully callous protagonist. show less