Adrian Salmon

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

Here, we settle into what becomes the structure of the strip for the next several years: thirteen-strip arcs designed to fill out the new, smaller, graphic novel size. This one takes us up until the end of Matt Smith's run, and feels a bit like an appendix to the rest of it, picking up some characters and concepts from the previous volume, but not being as big as what had come before. Which, to be fair, is how Clara's tv run with the eleventh Doctor feels too!

Scott Gray, I think, keeps pushing himself here. It's interesting to read the backmatter, because he's always looking for opportunity to squeeze a bit more characterization; he notes, as I did as a viewer, that Clara feels like a bit of a nonentity during her first series, and so he tries to delve into her a bit more... coincidentally foreshadowing her transition into being a teacher that would come with "The Day of the Doctor"! He also zooms in on the eleventh Doctor's occasional bouts of mopiness, his relationship with the TARDIS as a character, and his self-doubts.

He also keeps on building up the DWM world. A lot of DWM fans say they like the comic's building up of its own world, but I think what they really mean is they like the way the comic did that when they were twelve: they like Maxwell Edison and Stockbridge and Dogbolter and the fact people say "mazumas" and the DWM version of Gallifrey. It would be easy for the strip to continuously go back to these things, as it did during the Izzy era. But Gray and his artistic collaborators (mostly Mike Collins here) keep pushing the DWM universe forward. Here, we get more about the Lakes from The Broken Man and Hunters of the Burning Stone, and more about Horatio Lynk and Cornucopia from The Cornucopia Caper, and we get the addition of Amy Johnson to the DWM recurring cast. It's great stuff, and I love that the strip keeps doing it instead of resting on the laurels of nostalgia. Cornucopia is a great setting.

A Wing and a Prayer
Like Rose and Martha, Clara is introduced into DWM with a fast-paced, lively story with some good moments for her character, illustrated by Mike Collins. It's the only way to do it, I guess! This is a good solid story that one expects from DWM at this point, which makes it easy to overlook how good it is. Good jokes, good characterization, neat concepts, and an excellent climax. An enjoyable take on the celebrity historical with a delightful ending. If they were all like this, we'd be in great hands.

Welcome to Tickle Town
Now, it pains me to say this, because normally I have nothing but praise for him (indeed, I own a piece of his original artwork, the only comics artist for whom that is true), but... I don't think Adrian Salmon was the right person to draw this story. Tickle Town is a Disneylandesque amusement park, only its inhabitants have been held captive for twenty years, kept in line by cartoon characters. Salmon of course draws great cartoon characters: the frog cowboy is a particular highlight. But it seems to me the power of the story visually comes from the contrast between the cartoons and the real people, but Salmon's style is sufficiently realist to make it work. Maybe with regular DWM colourist James Offredi it would have stood out more? But I can't help thinking there's a better version of this out there, where (say) Martin Geraghty draws all the human characters and Salmon the cartoons, and the contrast is striking.

But still, it's decent fun, particularly the song about the world being a nuclear wasteland set to the tune of "It's a Small World, After All."

John Smith and the Common Men
Back in the Paul McGann days, once senses Scott Gray tearing his hair out trying to come up with new premises for anniversary strips. In 2013, he had to come up with two! Hunters of the Burning Stone was a fiftieth-anniversary story, and now we have a one-off for the anniversary itself. I have fond memories of this one from back in 2013, a sort of sideways take on the concept: less about Doctor Who the show with its characters and aliens, and more about Doctor Who at its core: the values it promotes. John Smith is a government drudge who can't help anyone even when he wants to; the story depicts his slow awakening to something being wrong in the world and how he stops it. David A Roach excels on art, giving us an army of bow-tied bureaucrats, and an atmosphere of all-consuming drudgery. A clever idea for an anniversary story, not derivative at all, and well-executed.

Pay the Piper / The Blood of Azrael
Pay the Piper is a short, seemingly standalone story that ends up leading into a bigger story to come. In the backmatter, Scott Gray calls Pay the Piper a "Utopia"... but of course DWM was doing this kind of thing long before the television programme was (e.g., Stars Fell on Stockbridge, Darkness, Falling, The Keep, Me and My Shadow). Pay the Piper is fun at first: the Doctor and Clara at an auction in cyberspace complete with comedy alien cab driver, then kind of horrifying when the Doctor gets "erased" and it turns out genocide and cannibalism are on the menu. Then it shifts again and you learn that two different guest characters are members of MI-6's "Wonderland" project from Hunters of the Burning Stone... and there's a hell of a cliffhanger when the Doctor accidentally sells the TARDIS!

This all leads into The Blood of Azrael, another Cornucopia-focused story that brings back Amy Johnson, Annabel Lake, and Horatio Lynk, all becoming firm favorites, and gives Matt Smith's Doctor some really interesting stuff to do when he's rich but TARDIS-less. Gray shows real insight into the character of the Doctor, and the story itself is a decent one, with some good twists and nice themes about xenophobia and money and amazing visuals from Mike Collins and David A Roach. The bit where Amy goes to her death is genuinely emotional! She does not die, but I did not remember that.

The complaint I have is a bit unfair: it's just not as good as Hunters of the Burning Stone! I think this is down to the characterization of the climax; the Doctor apologizes, and... that's it, the TARDIS accepts it. I kind of wanted more of a reckoning... but that's probably outside the scope of what the strip can actually do. The last page, with Matt Smith dancing is celebration, is excellent.

Sometimes DWM is superior to the television programme. That was not the case during the Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant eras, even at the strip's best. But I think we actually got pretty close to that again during this latter-era Matt Smith run. It might be dancing in show's shadow... but boy can it dance like no one else.

Stray Observations:

• The relationship between Clara and Amy (not that one) had romantic/sexual chemistry in my opinion, Scott Gray picking up something that I don't think was really hinted at on screen until series eight!
• I like Cornucopia as I said above. One of the benefits of evolving a setting in a comics medium is that every time the artist changes, the world expands. Dan McDaid's Cornucopia is not Martin Geraghty's is not Mike Collins's. But they all coexist. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like Gray made a slight mistake in removing the "crime is legal" schtick from Corncuopia's first appearance. It's a bit less interesting without it! I like that we get a return from those of those crimelords here.
• Scott Gray notes he considered having Annabel disguise herself as Majenta Pryce in Pay the Piper. I see why he didn't, but what a twist it would have been!
• Whoever wrote the Tardis wiki article on Amy Johnson didn't read all the way to the end of The Blood of Azrael, because it claims she dies!
• "JUST A TRACER" WATCH: We have cover credit! Yes, for the first time, after eighty-eight previous artistic contributions to Doctor Who Magazine in ten previous graphic novels, David A Roach has finally got his name on the cover! Is it because inking has finally been recognized as a valid part of the comics experience? Well, no. It's because he pencils and inks one strip here. Pencilling one strip > inking eighty-eight. I'll be continuing to monitor this key facet of DWM.

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https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-clockwise-war-by-scott-gray/

I had bought this in hard copy ages ago, and had not appreciated that the title story, a Twelfth Doctor / Bill Potts adventure, is a direct follow-on from the previous Twelfth Doctor volume, The Phantom Piper, which I have not read yet. The arc also depends quite heavily on continuity from earlier stories in Doctor Who magazine, most of which I had read but long ago.

But I got over it and very much enjoyed the title story and the collection as a whole. There is a whole arc about Cybermen, which comes close to making them interesting. There is a First Doctor story, a couple of Fourth Doctor stories, and a Fifth Doctor story by Paul Cornell. There are some interesting endnotes by the writers and artists, reflecting on what worked and what didn’t, and why. I still wish I had got the previous volume but I don’t regret reading this.… (more)

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

This is the period where the Gary Gillat–envisioned retooling of the comic strip really takes off. We have a new Doctor whose story is primarily being told here; we have a new, strip-only companion for the first time since Olla the Heat Vampire way back in issue #134, almost a decade ago; we have a largely consistent creative team, as Martin Geraghty works on all but one of the twenty-six strips, Robin Smith all but two, and Alan Barnes all but seven; we have ongoing threads between stories for the first time since around The Mark of Mandragora. It's a clear attempt to recreate what made the comic special during the Dave Gibbons era—complete with callbacks to that era in many ways.

Overall, there's a real sense of the comic shifting what its approach is. It's not aping the tv show, it's not aping a series of novels, it's not aping Vertigo Comics. Most often, it's aping itself, in the Mills & Wagner/Dave Gibbons/Steve Parkhouse era. Big, loud stories, with lots of universal danger, epics with ponderous (in a good way) narration but also fun quips. I don't think it always works, but it's fun to read, and it's very noticeable. A different creative team might build up to a dramatic epic every so often... here we arguably get three of them in less than two years! Why not go for broke constantly?

End Game
The eighth Doctor's comic strip debut gives us a new Doctor and a new companion, but also takes things back to the strip's roots with an old friend (Maxwell Edison, previously seen in a single two-part story way back in 1982) and an old setting (Stockbridge, the Doctor's home base in issues #61-83, 1982-83). It's fun to see Max again, though he actually doesn't really do anything here other than stand around—for obvious reasons the strip focuses more on new companion "Izzy S." It's also nice to see Stockbridge again, though End Game made me realize there wasn't really anything to Stockbridge: it's just a generic English village where something can go wrong, without any recurring characters or anything other than Max (though we do get a St. Justinian's mention). On top of all this, we get an old villain, too, though not one who ever featured in the strip before.

More important than the continuity, I suspect, is the style. Barnes and Geraghty are clearly aping both The Iron Legion or The Stockbridge Horror: we start with an ordinary English village, but quickly go cosmic. It has a great energy but I found it somewhat baffling; there are a lot moving parts here for a story made up of just four eight-page installments. The Celestial Toymaker trapping Stockbridge, Knights Templar who have betrayed their oaths, a distorted duplicate of the Doctor. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what was happening, but I enjoyed the ride.

New companion Izzy seems fun but hasn't yet done a ton to distinguish herself. She has potential, but there is a pretty awkward panel where she blurts out her whole backstory and personality to the Doctor, rather than have it be organically unfolded in the story.

The Keep
If we want to continue finding Dave Gibbons–era analogues for this new era (and the creators encourage us to do so in the notes), then this is (as they admit) Stars Fell on Stockbridge, a two-part story that kind of works on its own but is mostly there to set up the next story. There is a lot going on here: it's set in the future era of The Talons of Weng-Chiang (but also the time Earth is evacuated due to solar flares), there are gangs on the surface, there's a living sun, there's a malevolent android. But in all of this, the Doctor and Izzy don't really do anything they just get told what's going on by other people, get out of jams due to luck, then leave. It might ape Stars Fell a bit, but Stars Fell works as a story in way that this does not.

A Life of Matter & Death
This begins what becomes a bit of a trend for the strip, if I recall correctly: the celebratory adventure on a special occasion. (There was a celebratory nostalgia strip before, Party Animals, but not for any particular reason.) Here, the 250th issue of DWM sees the Doctor and Izzy in a weird alien dreamscape where the Doctor is attacked by many of his old foes, and defended by old allies—all ones from the television series. It's not much of a story, and honestly not much of a celebration, either. The old villains get some good jokes (especially Dogbolter), but there's too much time spent on the actual story, which is not up to much. I liked Sean Longcroft's art in The Fangs of Time, but found it hard to distinguish characters here. I do like that whenever the strip celebrates its own past, it gives the impression that the Doctor's past from the comics is more important than that from the television programme. When he dreams up old enemies, he never dreams up the Master!

Fire and Brimstone
This follow-up to The Keep folds in the Daleks and alternate Daleks and the Threshold. It has some great moments—the cliffhanger where the Doctor is exterminated, the appearance of the Threshold—but there was so much going on, that as in End Game, I ended up feeling a bit lost. Stars exploding, wormholes forming, fire elementals, ancient Time Lord secrets. On the one hand, full of energy and verve... on the other, what was this actually about? Felt like that got lost in the cracks somewhere...

By Hook or By Crook
The Doctor and Izzy land on an alien planet, and the Doctor is promptly arrested for murder while trying to buy jam, so it's up to Izzy to get him out. Izzy is always good for a couple good jokes per story, but she's absolutely delightful here. Gray's script is one of the funniest DWM tales I can remember, from the moment Izzy sees the Doctor forlornly looking out the window of the police cruiser, to the clever but perhaps all-too-obvious way she ultimately solves the mystery. My favorite story in the volume.

Tooth and Claw
Well, this one is The Dogs of Doom; like there, one of the cliffhangers is that the Doctor himself has been converted into a monster. There a werewolf, here a vampire. Plus we get the introduction of short-term companion Fey Truscott-Sade. I thought this one was fun... except Martin Geraghty uncharacteristically let the side down on art, as I often had to work hard to figure out which one of the myriad characters was speaking. Like, Izzy or Fey? Fey or seductive woman? Marwood or airplane pilot? Not sure what the issue was (too much crammed into panels?) but it ruined the effect of the story. On GallifreyBase, Martin Geraghty himself materialized to tell me: "I was moving house slap-bang in the middle of pencilling this story and the woman whose house I was moving into suddenly decided she wasn't leaving, forcing me to spend an extended period of time living at my brother's surrounded by boxes and sans drawing board.

"So yes, work done under some degree of pressure..."

The Final Chapter
And this one is, of course, The Tides of Time, down to the return of the Higher Evolutionaries and Shayde and Tubal Cain, though it goes in for much more Gallifrey stuff than Tides of Time actually did. A bit too much, to be honest. It's fine, but a bit bewildering and a bit noisy, and once again, the mechanics of things get a bit amorphous as we move toward the climax.

Wormwood
The Threshold story comes to a climax. This has got some clever stuff in it, some great visuals, and at six parts, the story doesn't feel overstuffed like many of the previous ones have. The regeneration fakeout is excellent and really well done—and as the notes note, really only would work in comics. (Well, the audios actually did something similar recently, but they couldn't commit to it for so long!) The Threshold base on the moon is great, I loved the simplicity of the Threshold plan, the use of the Time Lord translation gift was excellent, Abraham White is a great villain. The characters get the space to breathe here. The reveal of what the Threshold are is dementedly clever. Solid stuff.

Stray Observations:

• Okay, some people say "Endgame" not "End Game." But, 1) look at that spacing between the "D" and "G" scrabble tiles, and 2) the running foot uses "END GAME" as well.
• I like this era of strip collections for including full credits breakdowns on the table of contents. On the other hand, I don't like the way the strips are reordered, to move the ones not part of the main story to the end. I guess this is supposed to provide a more continuous reading experience... but those "bonus" strips are mentioned in the "main" ones so it's actually more jarring!
• One thing I like about the DWM collections is their branding often prioritizes artists; the spine here read "GERAGHTY • BARNES • GRAY • SALMON," giving first billing to an artist, not a writer. But just to the penciller; poor Robin Smith is not so honored!
• I can't exhaustively list who cameos in A Life of Matter & Death, but I noticed Sharon, Gus, Ivan Asimoff, Shayde, the Time Witch, the Free-Fall Warriors, and even the little robot from The Iron Legion. No representation from anything post-John Ridgway that I noticed, though, and not even a Frobisher cameo, surprisingly.
• I guess I don't know where it would actually happen, but I'm surprised we've never gotten one of Fey's pre–Tooth and Claw encounters with the Doctor detailed anywhere. Maybe when the show is cancelled again and DWM resumes rotating past Doctor strips, they can give us that.
• No strip in #261! I think #184 was the last time?
• A member of the Order of the Black Sun appears, yet another reference to the strip in DWM's early days. Only, this comes from (Alan Moore–penned) backups that have yet to be collected, so I haven't read them. Someday, please, DWM?
• Overall, though, there is very much an attempt to create a DWM universe for the first time since Muriel Frost in The Mark of Mandragora. That said, I think nearly every single back-reference that's not just a cameo is to something Steve Parkhouse wrote, so it's a very limited universe.
• Alan Barnes is very much a master of the final page cliffhanger. So many good ones... undermined by the fact that they are usually placed on the right-hand side, so there's not a page-turn reveal. Not sure how they would have looked on original publication.

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