Any moths threatening
to eat Tony’s Doctor Who scarf
will be unceremoniously
told where to go.
There are such things as
OmniDoctor stories – stories into which you could more or less implant any
Doctor without much in the way of rewriting. Then there are those stories,
usually later in a Doctor’s run, which are written with a fuller knowledge of
the particular incarnation and the particular actor, their strengths and how to
play to them, that seem quintessentially to belong to that particular
incarnation.
You could write
the Fourth Doctor’s first comic-book adventure in a few decades with other
Doctors in it, absolutely. But the pacing, the dialogue and more or less the
entire feel of the thing would have to have its gears changed – up for Davison
and the other Baker, down for McCoy and so on. As it stands, what Gordon Rennie
and Emma Beeby have written in this comic-book series is a quintessentially Fourth
Doctor story, with a companion-strand that feels absolutely right for
investigative journalist Sarah-Jane Smith.
In Victorian London, the
Doctor and Sarah-Jane have been separated after tangling with what to all
intents and purposes look like cyclopses. The Doctor, meeting ‘chronautology’
enthusiast Odysseus James and his daughter, Athena, settles in for a handy spot
of backstory and housebreaking, while Sarah-Jane, having tea with the veiled
lady who appears to have statues of ordinary Victorian folk scattered about her
property, tries to not freak out about what she’s discovered, and get the woman
to talk about where the statues come from. Both sections neatly dovetail back
and forth, building up a picture of the shared history of Odysseus James and
the veiled woman, who reveals herself as the Lady Emily Carstairs, in the
multiply-motivated discipline of chronautology – that’s time travel to you and
me. The story centres around an elegant MacGuffin called the Lamp of Chronos, which
has proved itself capable of opening time windows into the past (is that
sounding familiar to anyone?), but which has had an unfortunate effect on Lady
Emily after she and James parted company, he having proved incapable of
locating the precise chunk of the past that most mattered to her.
The net result of all this
is that we have a much better understanding of what’s going on, and, due to
some particular callousness on her part along the way, we come to really rather
dislike Lady Emily, despite the sympathetic motivation that’s revealed for her
desperate acts.
But what makes it so
quintessentially a Fourth Doctor and Sarah-Jane story then?
Tone, mostly – the Fourth
Doctor is captured with a brilliant ear by Rennie and Beeby, so that even
seemingly innocuous Doctor Who phrases like ‘Come on!’ bristle with Tom Baker’s
performance in these pages. Wit, for another thing, and not only in the case of
the Fourth Doctor. Lady Emily’s dismissal of the Doctor as having ‘a
buffoonish, servile look about him’ is comical in itself, because we the reader
know the truth. A conversation between Athena and her father about the young
gentleman she admires is both witty and nostalgic when we discover he’s a
ship’s surgeon in the Navy, whose name is not ‘Henry’ – we wonder briefly how
far back the salt ran in young Harry Sullivan’s veins. And then of course,
there are the visuals.
There’s a degree to which
Rennie and Beeby’s story plays uniquely to the Fourth Doctor’s strengths in
that to some extent it prints the legend of a Saturday night in the
mid-seventies – the Doctor swanning about in a cloak and deerstalker, dank
Victorian streets and passageways, great townhouses with villainy lurking in
their parlours, trans-temporal adventuring through steampunk portals. In some
respects, it couldn’t get more Weng-Chiang without a giant rat in a sewer. But
firstly, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and secondly it allows the
Fourth Doctor comic-books to appeal to a wide market, even including people
who, through some natural perversion or a tragic circumstance in their youth,
have no real idea about the Tom Baker years.
It would be tempting to
claim that in printing the legend of the Tom Baker years, you can’t really go
wrong.
That would be arrant
nonsense and tomfoolery of course. Legends become legends because they key in
to something subliminal in the audience’s brain, and because they’re easily
accepted. Everyone thinks they understand a legend, and everyone does –
slightly differently. That means Brian Williamson’s job, of delivering the
visuals that make the Fourth Doctor and Sarah-Jane live again in a relevant,
familiar, believable way could go wrong with every move he makes – it’s
technically like painting tripwires in a minefield.
So be grateful.
Be grateful for renderings
of Baker’s Doctor that are for the most part spot on down to the expressions,
allowing the man’s voice to come almost unbidden from the page. Be grateful for
a Sarah-Jane that’s true to life and story. Be grateful for Williamson’s gift
of richness, imbuing the Victorian scenes with a scale, an opulence and where
necessary a grimy realism that pull you into the storytelling and lets this
feel like nothing more than a great Saturday night in 1975. That’s important
because the plot elements – Victorian veiled ladies turning to stone, giant
one-eyed monsters in the garb of Victorian gentlemen - are outlandish in a way
that’s suited to that period, and you need Williamson’s visuals to convince in
order to anchor them sensibly in your brain, rather than simply letting them
feel like bits of madness flung together on a page. Everything deserves for
them to be better than that – the real Baker and Sladen, the work they did
together in the seventies, and the legend that everyone carries of that period,
it all deserves that anchoring, and Williamson seems to understand that
responsibility. He nails it, page after page after page, getting that
combination right of fast, compelling storytelling through visual art, and
richness that makes the reader want to stick around on any given page to
examine it with a fine-toothed comb. If you’ll forgive me a sentence I never
thought I’d write, his one-eyed beasts in particular are a thing of beauty and
power.
There should be nods of
sincere appreciation too heading to Hi-Fi, taking colourist duties here,
because the combination of the dingy Victoriana and some of the more exotically
bright storytelling elements here – there’s a sequence in Odysseus James’
memory in particular – could, for a less experienced colourist be a challenge
to get right without the reader feeling like the bright elements are suddenly too
bright. But no, there’s a balance here that makes you greedy for pages and
makes the Fourth Doctor comic-book feel like a faster read than you might
expect.
Overall, there’s an
elegance in issue #2 of the run, in particular its intersplicing and
overlapping of backstory elements from two different points of view, while
Sarah-Jane for the most part sits still and the Doctor takes the necessary
steps to effect a rescue, that has an authentic and distinctive Fourth Doctor
feel to it, and makes your Inner Eight Year-Old want nothing more than to
devour the issue, then go out into the street and play Chronauts and Cyclopses
in the dying hours of the long summer sunlight. If the Fourth Doctor
comic-books are intending to hit a nostalgic note, they succeed. If they’re
looking to introduce newbies to the Fourth Doctor’s signature style from the
mid-seventies, they succeed. If they’re looking simply to tell an interesting
story in a dynamic way, they succeed at that too, and all with the added bonus
of Williamson’s anchoring, surreal but clotted cream-sumptuous illustrations to
give an added panache. Go now, and indulge yourself in a comic-book treat. Then
grab your Fourth Doctor sonic screwdriver and go fight the Cyclopses of Time.
Go on. It turns out you’re
younger than you think.
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