Who Reviews Comic Book Review The Eleventh Doctor Volume 2 - Serve You

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.

Who Reviews Comic Book Review Eleventh Doctor Volume 3 - Conversion

Tony’s converted.

Mad Chinese dragon-style mood-dogs. David Bowie as a Tardis traveller (or near as dammit). A regenerated Uber-Bessie. Robert ‘sold his soul to the Devil’ Johnson. A black, female Eleventh Doctor. A companion made of what looks like Silly Putty. An entity that can give you whatever you desire. The theme park of death. A war between two races rapt in wonder. The Doctor turning evil. World of the happy smiley zombie people.

If you’re just joining us in the adventures of the Eleventh Doctor in Titan Comics, that’s just a quick summary of some of the stuff you’ve already missed.

About that whole ‘book early to avoid disappointment’ thing.

Fortunately of course, Titan’s a full-service bunch of groovers, and when enough issues of a Doctor Who comic have been released and you’ve either bought them or somehow missed them, the company releases a collected edition. So you can still catch all the mood-dog, David Bowie, Robert Johnson Uber-Bessie, Evil Doctor, female Doctor Silly Putty theme park of happy smiley zombie people death action in Volumes 1 and 2 of the collected editions of the Eleventh Doctor comic-book.

And now there’s another one.

Bet you’d like to know what’s in that one, wouldn’t you?

Let’s see – it’s difficult to pick a headline, really. God-fearing, vision-showing Cyber-armies? The first Christian Roman Emperor, and why he changed the world? A self-writing story-virus? The Tardis splitting in four? The Tardis locking the Doctor out and disappearing into time and space. The Doctor’s mother popping back to remonstrate with her errant son?

All that and more is here in Conversion, the third collected edition of Eleventh Doctor comic-books, and the one that finally, no, really this time, puts the cork in the bottle of the ServeYouInc storyline that took so gorgeously long and twisty a path to tell, you could mistake it for a Moffat season of hardcore Matt Smithery.

In fact it’s no exaggeration to say that you might well gain a clearer appreciation for all the subtlety and nuance of the Matt Smith Doctor from reading these comic-books than you’d get from rewatching his on-screen seasons. The whole reality of the tireless work he put in during his time in the Tardis is somehow clearer in this two-dimensional format than it is on-screen, the strands less cluttered and yet equally or sometimes more rewarding, frenetic, and powerful. Perhaps that’s the ultimate accolade: You’ll know and understand the Eleventh Doctor better reading these comic-books.

The storyline here involves quite a lot of travelling through space chasing something enigmatically called The Entity, in the intimate company of its detached brain (did we mention the comic-books are able to take more creative risks than the on-screen show, being limited only by the imagination of writers and artists?). Along with someone who’s David Bowie in all but lawsuit and a library assistant from Hackney, London. The main thrust of the story involves a Doctor trying to recover from an episode of selfishness, and the struggle of those around him to try and trust the bow-tie wearing young professor of time and space again. The most action-packed episodes include an enormous Cyber-invasion of the Earth, with Cybermen enhanced by the power to show you the things you want most in all the world. That’s where we meet Constantine the Eventually Great, as he becomes both a Christian and the undisputed Emperor of Rome. The Doctor’s response to that threat is what gives us the idea of there being a bunch of Cybermen somewhere in the galaxy fervently believing in a Cyber-God (Oh please let that be a future on-screen story), but it’s also another black mark of mistrust for Captain UltraChin, and it’s an action that makes the Tardis run off and leave him to think about his actions, stranded in fourth century Rome, while another of his friends is in mortal danger and apparently beyond his help.

The writing, from Al Ewing and Rob Williams, is almost ridiculously good. Honestly, you’ll read it and your mouth will drop open, as you ask why they don’t write for the on-screen Who. Certainly, knowing what we know about the on-screen version, these two have got an impeccable ear for Matt Smith’s Doctor, because his lines are crafted in such a way that there isn’t one of them that goes into your head without a Smithian voice track. Meanwhile, Smith’s Doctor is clearly eminently drawable, beyond ‘Big chin, floppy hair,’ because Simon Fraser, Boo Cook and Warren Pleece render him in all his moods in very recognisable ways here – again, reading this comic-book will help you identify everything you know about Matt Smith’s Doctor but had never particularly thought about – there’s the bandy-legged Chaplin walk, there’s the pointy-finger, there’s the considering face, there’s the rage, there’s the suddenly intent stare, there’s the collapsed-souffle face of realisation that something bad is happening – all nailed into two dimensions for you, and accessible in a much more immediate, intelligible way: the comic-books allow you to recognise these things as ‘things’ – parts of the Eleventh Doctor’s make-up, where on screen, they can sometimes pass you by as part of stories.

In particular, apart from the Cyber-story, look out for Chapter 11 here, called Four Dimensions. This allows Boo Cook on artwork and Hi-Fi on colour to really show off their skills, with pages split beyond the normal panel-structure, and sections delivered in monochromes, to indicate four separate environments. Beautiful, evocative stuff. There’s beauty of another kind too in later panels of the Doctor’s sadness and contrition, which takes the story full circle to when Alice Obiefune first met the Doctor, as he crashed colour into her ash-grey life of mourning for her mother. She’s able here to repay the favour when he loses the Tardis (to his mother – we mentioned that, right?), and feels entirely unable to move forward again. If the ultimate test of a companion is the effect they have on the Time Lord, then all three of the members of this Tardis team have done excellent work – there are plenty of occasions throughout the long story arc of ServeYouInc where they have saved the Doctor in some way or other, but this last one from Alice is particularly poignant, galvanising the Doctor for a moment of older man self-definition and surety, defeating his own self-doubts and guilt with the help of her belief in him.

Conversion is a must-have for Collected Issue fans, but it’s also pretty special if you’ve been collecting the issues one by one – not only is there a sense of more permanence having the collected issues on your shelf, but (and this was a delicious surprise), you also get the ‘Free Comic Book Day’ release, Give Free Or Die, which you’ll have missed if (like us) you were simply going issue by issue.

So update your complete collection – get Conversion today.

Who Reviews Martha in the Mirror by DJ Forrest

Written by Justin Richards

Published 2008 for BBC Books

Castle Extremis – whoever holds it can control the provinces either side that have been at war for centuries.

I can never fault the imagination of Justin Richards. Not once. Ever. And once again he proves the point. I enjoyed this story from the very beginning to the very end – even if I did have to read the beginning in daylight because from the very first page, I had a feeling I was going to have nightmares.

The story has that kind of feeling you’ve read something similar before, and from the instant the man is shot in the first paragraph, to Janna and Tylda, and the goings on within the castle grounds, I had the feeling, it was very Harry Potter-ish. But that’s not a bad thing, because if you can recall something familiar, as it paints a picture in your mind of castle interiors and strange goings on, then it helps.

I also enjoyed the goings on of the two robots that I couldn’t help but imagine were the android versions of the Chuckle Brothers, and if I heard either of them saying ‘To Me’ ‘To you’ I’d have died laughing.

The 10^th Doctor has brought Martha Jones to an adventure theme park, or an adventure theme park before it was even considered to be one. It’s at the very early stages of a peace treaty between the Zerugians – a reptilian race, not unlike a crocodile in features, and the Anthiums who seemed humanlike. The castle itself is at the ‘head of the Sarandon Passage. If either side (the Zerugma’s or the Anthiums) wish to rule over the other, they have to take the Castle first.’

So, someone did, very secretly, with a mirror that nobody thought existed. That everyone thought had been banished into deep space and destroyed.

It’s a really clever idea, and somewhat familiar if we think back to the girl with the red balloon in the Family of Blood story some time ago, with Martha and the 10^th. It’s mentioned in the book.

The Mortal Mirror is meant to be a fake. A replica of the old. Merely just a one way mirror, nothing creepy about it at all. I like the idea behind the mechanics of the Mortal Mirror. It again reminded me of another Harry Potter scene in a later book. But again, this is a good thing as it builds on the imagination further.

I did get a little confused over the little girl Janna, but that was answered towards the end of the story.

And the very end of the story, there’s a little gem of a chapter that takes you by surprise, and leaves you wondering – did he really plan that? Wow!

Martha in the Mirror is an ingenious idea, and the fun and games within the pages, and the amount of thought that has gone into the story, the ideas, deserves the highest award. It’s fantastic, brilliant and I can’t wait to read another. Although, I’ll have to wait until the 11^th incarnation for that to happen.