Tony Fyler
goes on a comic book box-set binge.
The
second collected Eleventh Doctor comics continue the ultimately enormous story
arc from Volume 1, involving the Doctor’s amorphous companion, ARC, and the
thing of which it’s part, annnnd the horrifying corporation of wish fulfilment-merchants,
ServeYou Inc, who may or may not be behind the whole thing.
As
in Volume 1, there are stories here that are experienced out of sequence, and
the Moffatiness of the whole thing is really rather admirable if you happen to
be a fan of his time-twisting, consequence-avoiding, stake-building
storytelling style. It makes you wonder who in their right mind first devised
the overall arc of this monster, and whether along the way, various chunks of
the story were left greyed out, for the individual segment-authors to fill in
as they went along, like maps of unknown coastlines on the way to an ultimate
destination.
Certainly
there are plenty of treats here – a back-and-forth-in-time Nimon story, a
genesis story for the Big Bad of ServeYou Inc, the Talent Scout, and a journey
into darkness for the Eleventh Doctor when his ultimate wish is revealed – to
him and to us – and fulfilled. It takes his companions, ARC, Jones and Alice,
through hearts of their own respective darkness – grief for her dead mother in
Alice’s case, separation from the other half of itself for ARC, and the
haunting possibility of a meaningless existence for Jones the showman – and by
the end of this second collection we’re still not entirely done with the
convoluted story of ServeYou Inc. But along the way there are stories in the
future, stories in the past, stories in the present of 2015. Punch-in-the-gut
stories as Alice’s grief actually saves her life, and Jones’ too. Stories of
how you bring down a very unusual monster, and how, if you do it wrong, it
doesn’t so much bring you down instead, as swallow you up and make you smile
about the whole thing. There are happy zombies, three Doctors, the rock and
roll adventures of Xavi Moonburst, the return of the regenerated Bessie, and
did I mention the Nimon?
The
really sick, clever thing is that it all fits together to make a kind of sense
in context, even if, as in some of Steven Moffatt’s TV scripts for the Eleventh
Doctor, while it happens you have abbbbsolutely no idea how it will, or even
could in the long run. This is, if anything, the mark of the Eleventh Doctor –
he exists in a very tangential on-again, off-again relationship with causality as
we mere mortals understand it, so getting and keeping your head around the
story of his life is more than usually difficult. But it does, ultimately, make
a very beautiful kind of sense when you look back on it in retrospect, as these
collected issues give you the chance to do. More than reading the individual
issues as they come out, the collected editions give you at least a fighting
chance of seeing the whole story in a kind of grander, more objective way, a
20:20 vision that you can’t particularly achieve while you’re experiencing the
story episodically. In essence, the collected editions are your chance to
box-set binge your way through a story of intriguing individual tiles, and
finally see the full mosaic at a distance where your eyes can make some sense
of it.
While
writers Al Ewing and Rob Williams take us on a bunch of wild rides in this
collection, there’s also plenty for your eyes to feast on – the essence of the
Eleventh Doctor is here in the writing, from the talking to himself about how clever
he’s being, to the darkness, to the rage, to the slightly boyish old man
desperation for a purpose – but the images are what stay with you longer:
fantastic space battles, superb cityscapes, futuristic spaceshpis, places from
which you shouldn’t be able to look away (no pressure there, artists!), and so
very much more besides. Simon Fraser, Boo Cook and Warren Pleece do what should
be either impossible or insanely difficult, and render the many worlds and
scenarios of this demented collection in ways that make them believable and
fantastical at the same time – there’s barely a page without some delight from
which, story be damned, your eyes don’t want to move on. If the individual
issues are what you buy because the story intrigues you and you want to know
what happens next, immediately and hot off the presses, like the hard copy
versions of broadcast episodes, these collected editions are the box-sets you
still buy, despite having all the individual issues, because somehow they’re more
complete, and even though they’re the same stories, there’s that sense of
satisfaction, and scope, and (not least, in a story this long and convoluted),
easiness of back-reference that makes the whole thing right.
So,
should you buy this? Who are you kidding? You know you should – it’s the second
of three box-sets that together form a great lost season of Eleventh Doctor
madness, sadness and danger to know, on a scale the TV show probably, these
days, could conjure, but equally probably wouldn’t. Get it, put it proudly on
your shelf next to the first collection, then prepare your eyes for a feast and
your brain for a cool, cool bath.
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