Tony’s
got a To-Do list, and he’s not afraid to use it.
The
Eighth Doctor has, since his first and almost only appearance on our screens,
been the great Potential Doctor.
His on-screen span was
short but up until the point of his replacement by Christopher Eccleston as the
Ninth Doctor in the revamped show in 2005, Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor was still
the current Doctor, meaning from curtailed beginnings, he was the
Doctor who kept the torch alive more than any other in the fans’ imaginations,
out there somewhere in the multiverse, having adventures, just waiting for the
world to fall in love with Doctor Who again.
If this seems a frivolous
point, it shouldn’t – McGann’s Eighth Doctor was the subject of a whole range
of ‘New Adventure’ books, building a whole universe of stories outside the
scope of his until recently single TV appearance. And when Big Finish began
producing new audio adventures for Classic Doctors, McGann was an early
recruit, and has been a faithful friend to both the company and its fans ever
since – he’s still having Eighth Doctor adventures to this day on audio, for
all they’ve grown from one or two disc releases into something a bit more grand
and epic in scale.
So the time for the Eighth
Doctor to make his debut at Titan Comics is long overdue, and this year, he
made it, in the hands of well-respected Who writer George Mann, and artist Emma
Vieceli.
Across five issues, Mann
and Vieceli became, in a way, Doctor and Companion themselves (though which was
which would be telling), establishing a less random travelling pattern for the
most Tiggerish and enthusiastic of Doctors, by the simple device of a To-Do list
written by one of his other selves and hidden in his own Welsh cottage – yes,
folks, the Doctor owns a cottage in Wales now. They established a story arc
that would take the Doctor through those five issues, and delivered him a great
new companion in Josie Day, an artist with technicolour hair and, as she was to
prove, a striving gift for goodness. With those elements dropping quickly and
neatly into place, the Eighth Doctor and Josie were set up to have a short
series of very episodic, tonally different adventures, each of which had a
strong hook, a philosophical core, a good bit of running, and a broad scope for
them both to show their personalities to any potential new readers, while
allowing seasoned Eighth Doctor fans to nod sagely at how fundamentally right
the Eighth Doctor sounded.
He sounds very very right,
because one thing George Mann knows is tone. From the Doctor’s first appearance
in this five issue series, he’s as we know him – bouncy, enthusiastic,
impossible, occasionally mystical, name-dropping, slightly divorced from reality,
slightly alien, but with a fierce emotional intelligence when he understands
what’s required of him in any given situation.
The situations range from
the kind of ‘companion training wheels’ story that many New Who companions have
had in order to bed them into our consciousness – here, Josie’s artworks start
coming to life, which would be all fine and dandy if she drew landscapes. She
doesn’t. For some reason she can’t understand, she draws monsters, plucked from
her imagination, but familiar to every Who-fan. When the subjects of her
paintings step from their frames and go off to terrorise the local village,
it’s Josie who has to find a way to defeat them, which she does in a satisfying
manner.
The second story here
takes us off into the wilds of space, to a world under devastating bombardment
by lethal shards of crystal. What complicates matters is that if the crystals
get you, and you don’t die, you begin to change your state into something…else.
The Doctor and Josie find themselves trying to act as honest brokers between
two powers who are chronically misunderstanding one another, and again, while
the Doctor leads the way, it’s actually Josie who succeeds, the purity and
simplicity of her heart and her message managing to find a way forward for both
the inhabitants of the world and those who are raining crystal down on their
heads. There’s a little of the good bits of The Rings of Akhaten here, only
Mann, free from the strictures of TV, delivers something with emotionally
satisfying notes all along the way, including the Eighth Doctor up against the
odds, struggling to maintain his temper.
Issue 3 gives us a bit of
gothic horror, not in fog-swirled London, but in that other bastion of
Victorian mystery, Edinburgh (home of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde). There’s more
than a hint of that story here, with dark doings beyond the glass of a
magician’s mirror, alternative versions of people escaping from the mirrorworld
and the originals, the things of which the others were reflections, being kept,
imprisoned and drained, in a dismal dimension on the other side of the looking
glass.
It’s a story that does
well to contain itself within a single issue, and which could if need-be return
to plague the Eighth Doctor in future adventures. It’s also the issue in which Vieceli
on artwork really starts to put her indelible stamp on the style of the
adventures – given a visual challenge she rises to the demands of a world of
mirrors excellently well, conjuring both the vibrancy of Victorian Edinburgh
and the brightness of its theatres, and the dinginess and washed-out sense of
the mirrorworld with aplomb, and also delivering a mindless plague of
shudderworthy creatures in a way that still gives us the creeps, disembodied
hands seeming to reach through the panels, escaping into the reader’s world.
Vieceli’s art is very
strong in the fourth issue too – in fact, as we shift to an English country
house mystery in the early 1930s, Vieceli’s art is crucial in delivering the
menace, and once you’ve seen it, you won’t be able to immediately look away.
You’ll want to, because again, she brings the shudders in issue 4, but you
won’t be able to. Storywise, Mann’s on relatively easy street in this issue –
there are creepy creepers aplenty, making use of the sci-fi trope of malevolent
plant life, and there are also some solid riffs on the idea of alien technology
mistaken for folkloric reality. Mann also manages to get in a socio-political
point about the nature of the British upper classes along the way to defeating
the spirits of the forest in what is essentially Who Does Fairy Tale Much
Better Than In The Forest Of The Night.
The fifth story here has
resolutions to deliver, and it delivers them, via a tale set in the future,
that channels some David Tennant stories into its DNA, especially New Earth,
aboard a space-floating Bakri Resurrection Barge, where the 0.0001%ers in
society come to get themselves recreationally reborn. There is rebellion, there
is the threat of carnage, and the Doctor throws his weight around trying to
broker a peace, but there are genuinely resolutions to find, and some of them –
in particular as they apply to the truth about Miss Josephine Day – will take
you entirely by surprise before this issue, and the series is out. And just in
case you were silly enough to relax at that point, there’s an additional Easter
egg appearance that gives the whole mini-series more satisfying sense even than
it’s had up to now.
The Eighth Doctor’s first
mini-series at Titan is an unqualified success; Mann’s capturing of the McGann
Doctor’s voice and his essence is delightful, Josie’s a great modern companion
who more than stamps her personality across the series, and who saves the
Doctor, on average, about as often as he saves her. The issues feel carefully
selected to give windows into different types of Who story, and the whole is
lightly, wittily illustrated by Vieceli, who comes into her own as the series
progresses, giving some of the creepies a dose of realism that makes you
shudder.
Pick up The Eighth Doctor,
Volume 1 today and add to the sum total of Eighth Doctor stories you own with
five tales less bogged down in epic sturm und drang than some of the more
recent Big Finish box sets, letting the essential puppydog bounce of the Eighth
Doctor a little more to the fore.
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