Who Reviews Comic Book Review Eleventh Doctor Volume 1

Tony Fyler finds a lost season.

The Eleventh Doctor had a very conspicuous style.

We say this here because it’s only really with hindsight that it becomes apparent. Matt Smith’s Doctor very often seemed to be a ragbag collection of mannerisms and surprises – that was part of the appeal of him: you never quite knew what you’d be getting next. So it comes as a shock with hindsight to get the feeling that you know, inherently, who the Eleventh Doctor is, what’s right for him, and what’s wrong.

Happily, it’s a positive shock in terms of Titan Comics’ first collection of Eleventh Doctor stories, like having the Doctor pop out of a cake at your stag do, or tumble out of your chimney on Midwinter’s Eve. There’s a stylistic familiarity to Al Ewing and Rob Williams’ storytelling, particularly as far as the first chapter here is concerned – it starts in shades of grey to show the life of a forty year-old woman who cared for her mother, who lived in a rented flat, who worked as a lowly library assistant. In the wake of her mother’s death, everything goes wrong for Alice Obiefune. After losing her mother, she’s sacked due to budget cuts, her landlord wants her out to turn her building into luxury flats – Alice is not so much at the end of her rope as aware that she has plenty of rope left, and only sadness left to propel her on with it.

Then Bang!

There he is, yelling out while running down the street, chasing what looks like a Chinese dragon but happens to be a great big mood-eating dog-like creature from outer space, and the change in Alice’s world is rendered instantly by colourists Gary Caldwell and HiFi, who go from grey to full colour in the space of two panels, with Alice herself remaining the only truly grey element. Subtle stuff, this, and it works a treat.

The Doctor and Alice chase down the big alien mood-dog, which as it turns out feasts on negative emotions (a theme that resonates from the Tenth Doctor Collection, Volume One) – and gets noticeably bigger after paying a quick trip to the House of Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions. The story though doesn’t throw Alice’s grief away – far from it. There’s a beautiful heartbreaking scene in which the Doctor – particularly the Eleventh Doctor – does none of the things that the Eleventh Doctor usually does. He doesn’t bounce off walls. He doesn’t come off like the cleverest or most important life form in the room. He just makes a cup of tea, and listens. This is an Eleventh Doctor humanized to some degree by where he is in his timeline – he’s just left Amy and Rory, letting them settle in to wedded bliss. But the rest of his character is very much intact – his ‘Ta-Dah!’ moment as he introduces Alice to the Tardis is priceless, his rejoinder to the UNIT forces about to disintegrate the great big alien mood-dog is spot on, and his quiet talk with Alice (in the Tardis swimming pool!) is a flash forward to the Eleventh Doctor of later years, with Amy in The Power of Three and with Amy and Rory both in The Angels Take Manhattan. The solution to the issue of the great big alien mood-dog has a sweetness that Hide was trying to achieve, but it works much better here in comic-book format, because the logic of the resolution feels less forced and less grown up.

Chapter two continues to strike the right Eleventh Doctor notes, even though they’re entirely different notes – and you begin to realise again, possibly more than you did when watching his TV episodes, how layered and varied and yet oddly coherent Matt Smith’s portrayal really was. The story of a paradise planet turned into a noxious amusement park and a bunch of toxic waste mines (we’re never quite sure why anyone would actually mine toxic waste, but that’s a small niggle) has a self-contained, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship feel, with a chunk of nastiness at the core that even vaguely harks back to The Happiness Patrol. There’s also a hefty dose of Eleventh Doctory Timey-Wiminess here, as we meet an adversary who’s met the Doctor before, though we’ve not seen that encounter. The threat is credibly built, if, when it comes down to it, rather rapidly disposed of, but the ideas of plastic, happy, always-smiley people concealing something rotten inside is as old as The Stepford Wives, and arguably as old as Dorian Grey. The thing that makes this chapter unique though is the Eleventh Doctorness of the whole thing – shooting a toy pig to win a paper target, for instance, is a deliciously backward-thinking, oddly sense-making Eleventh Doctor thing to do.

Chapter three is ‘the odd one’ in this collection of five interconnected chapters. Bringing together a pop star who’s the thinnest David Bowie parody you’ve ever seen (it actually gets quite wearing when John Jones starts singing almost-Bowie songs, and it tips the balance at one point when Space Oddity is rendered as a trip to the bathroom), with legendary bluesman and (naturally) friend of the Doctor’s, Robert Johnson, the people behind the ghastly amusement park in chapter two turn up again with a plan to recruit the Doctor – and they briefly succeed. It takes Alice, Jones, Johnson, the power of rock and roll and oh yes, did we mention, a regenerated Bessie to save the Doctor this time.

Chapters four and five are very much one two-part story, which follows the thread of the overall arc, but takes it back in time, to show us the first meeting with that adversary from the amusement park, and introduce us to the newest shape-changing companion of the Doctor’s, ARC, or the Autonomous Reasoning Center (It’s not lost on us that a set of comics based in the world of Moffat-Who have both an arc and an ARC). They work as a proper whodunit, allowing the Doctor to pull some proper smartest man in the room shenanigans, as well as to have a moody strop and a moral judgment moment, before saving the day with a gesture of simple communication.

All of this feels very distinctly right for the Eleventh Doctor – the five chapters have a thread running through, and the thread extends into comics going forward. The tones and topics and artwork and colour-choices are all very different, but they all work – the style of the Eleventh Doctor in Titan Comics is generally crisp, concise, and detailed, whether the artwork is supplied by Simon Fraser, as in chapters one, two and three, or by Boo Cook, as in chapters four and five. Indeed while stylistic differences are there, it’s hard to pick a favourite between Fraser’s work, particular in chapters one and two (look out for a great two-page comparison of worlds with the Doctor divided between them), and Cook’s in chapters four and five (in particular the rendering of ARC).

Coming off the back of David Tennant’s high octane chatterbox Doctor, Smith’s incarnation was always a surprising oddity – he could be bouncy by all means, but he took more time, had odder reactions, said altogether odder things, had a snappier temper, and on the whole did more in the way of quiet introspection. It’s by no means an easy mixture to convey in the comic-book form. But both in the artwork here, and the storytelling and dialogue by Al Ewing and Rob Williams, there’s a real sense of delivering unseen Eleventh Doctor stories. Indeed, with a Tardis full of new companions, each of whom is given a credible origin story within the pages of this first collection of stories, it feels as though we’re seeing the first half of an entirely credible unseen season of Smith scripts brought to life.

You know you want that, don’t you?

The download version of this first volume of collected Eleventh Doctor stories from Titan Comics is coming soon – significantly sooner than the hard-copy version. The choice is yours whether you get the electronic version, the swanky proper paper-book version, or both. But one way or another, this ‘lost season’ of Eleventh Doctor stories belongs with you. 

Who Reviews The Four Doctors Hardback Edition Comic Book Review by Tony J Fyler

Tony stiffens his spine for The Four Doctors.

How are your shelves looking?

If you think that’s an odd question, you haven’t been on social media lately. Who-fans love their shelves. It probably started with the Target books, all lined up, rigorously chronological for the most part, with the odd maverick preferring to line up their stories by author, or those who simply didn’t have the necessary touch of OCD to be a real fan going simply Doctor as a way of declaring their more bohemian, laissez-faire credentials (and freaking out any of their fussbudget fan-friends any time they hung out). Then there’d be the annuals – did you put them all together in one semi-collection of their own, or intersperse them through the Target books? The weird little books like Terry Nation’s book of Daleks, the Doctor Who Cookbook and Knitwear guide, the slablike wonders of the Peter Haining books. Then, holy of holies, videos! And videos begat DVDs, and DVDs begat blu rays (all together, or strictly chronological?), begat audio CDs, begat action figures in a range of sizes, begat bobble heads, begat remote controlled Daleks, begat voice changers, comic-books for five Doctors, begat part-works, begat autographed art, begat an insanity of wonders that has reached a pitch where Who-fans are sharing pictures of their collections, their shelves of glory, all over the social world.

What’s the point, you wonder?

The point is that shelves are important. Even in our Kindletastic, streamaholic, vaguely ephemeral age, shelves are important to Doctor Who fans. There’s something altogether different about the feeling of possession, of ownership you get when something chunky and glorious sits on your shelf to the feeling you get from owning it in any other way. It feels like a proper part of ‘the collection’ then.

Comic-book collectors of course have a tricky conundrum when it comes to their collection, simply because of the relative flimsiness of the medium. Do you stand them all up, as you would do with books? Tricky. Do you lay them flat, one on top of the other? Mmmmaybe, but there’s a feeling of a lack of care that niggles along with the idea of them being ‘a pile,’ rather than given their proper place. Do you invest in plastic covers, as most comic-book stores do, to keep them pristine? And then oh the joys of numbering and storage.

When these two geekdoms collide, the challenge becomes quite severe. How do you handle your Who comic-books as part of your shelves?

Titan Comics regularly helps a geek out – while we’re unlikely to be able to wait for the next instalment of comic-book adventuring, and so duly buy the flimsy 30-odd page issues as soon as they’re out, every now and again, Titan puts out a ‘collected’ version, with sterner spines that can stand as part of the collection, that feel more kin to ‘books’ than they do to ‘comics.’ The collected versions are more like graphic novels, and stand on your shelves perfectly well. But every once in a while, there’s a need for something even more permanent, more memorable.

2015 was a great year to be both a Who fan and a comic-book fan. Not only did we really get into the swing of Doctor Who comic-books from Titan, we added the Ninth Doctor to the mix, then the Eighth followed (I’m still waiting for this to be extended further back in the timeline – we know there are Fourth Doctor comic-books coming, but will there be Fifth, Sixth, Seventh? Be still our beating hearts, will there be First, Second and Third?). But even among the embarrassment of riches we got in 2015, one series of five comic-books stood out.

The Four Doctors, written by Paul Cornell, drawn by Neil Edwards and coloured by Ivan Nunes, was in many respects the belated Fiftieth Anniversary Special many fans had been hoping for. While I bow to no-one in my appreciation of what we actually got for the Fiftieth on-screen, you just know it would have been more fun had there been more active snark between the Doctors, a la The Three Doctors. And you equally know that the Series 8 Twelfth Doctor had exactly the kind of snark that would have really brought the whole thing to biting life. In fact, you don’t have to just know it any more, because here it is, proven for you across five issues of unadulterated joy. Cornell well and truly knows his Doctors, and gives them each the very voice you remember. What’s at least as much, the story is mad and wonderful, allowing Edwards to go to the coolest parts of town and live there – soaring edifices, weird machines, tampered timelines, pesky paradoxes, dark moments from the history of New Who, the majesty of Paris, Dalek mazes of death, a fantastic – indeed possibly the best – Ninth Doctor villain, a reinvigorated First Doctor enemy that looks better than ever and *cough, cough* ready for a comeback, and ultimately, more Doctors than you can shake a sonic stick at. To call it something special doesn’t really do it justice. It’s must-own comic-bookery.

So the truth is, you probably already own it. But now you can own it again.

No, it isn’t. I know what you’re thinking, and no, it really isn’t just a way of getting you to pay twice for something you’ve already read. The hardbacked edition (did you get that – hardbacked. Ohhh, here is my money, please take it) of The Four Doctors takes a thing of beauty and effectively dips it in chocolate. Which is to say it makes it better. Now The Four Doctors is grabbable as a five issue, unhook-the-phone, grab a beverage and revel experience that stands, proudly, on your shelf when you’re done with it, as a marker of the year that 2015 was, as a marker of Cornell’s insane and glorious imagination, of Nunes’ rich, evocative colourwork and Edwards’ dedication to filling every square inch with something interesting to look at. As a marker of your being there, and being a fan in 2015, in exactly the same way as the DVD of Terror of the Zygons stands there, or the blu ray of Spearhead From Space, or your entire Target collection, or your Peter Haining books. The hardbacked Four Doctors takes event an event comic-book and makes it a must-have book. With releases like this, Big Finish going into overdrive, and the Fourth Doctor soon joining his later incarnations in Titan comic-books, one thing appears clear about 2016.

You’re gonna need a bigger shelf.

Who Reviews The Ninth Doctor Comic Book Review Vol #1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s been weaponized.

Fact 1: Cavan Scott is a man who knows his Who.

Fact 2: Cavan Scott is a man who, if anything, knows his comic-books even better.

Welcome to the good times.

The Ninth Doctor got a staggered start in Titan’s comic-book output – Doctors Ten, Eleven and Twelve were already romping about their respective universes when Titan dipped its toe in the Ninth Doctor’s pond with a short run, a mini-series to see whether, a decade down the line, anyone would particularly buy a Ninth Doctor comic-book. You can see their point: while we yield to no-one in our admiration of Eccleston, his performance or the Doctor he built, you have to be very very careful when delivering that Doctor in the comic-book medium. You need him to be quintessentially himself, and to be – as he was defined on-screen by being – accompanied by at least Rose. You need that broodiness, that occasional shouting, moments of sudden silliness, you need it all. But you have to balance it with the different demands of the comic-book medium to those of on-screen storytelling. Even if people wanted to read more stories with the Ninth Doctor, it’s a very delicate balancing act to pull off to make him fundamentally himself all the way through and still deliver an engaging comic-book story.

You got the part where Scott knows both his Who and his comic-books, right?

In hindsight, you don’t need us to tell you he succeeded. So far, the Ninth is the only Doctor to have started with a mini-series and graduated to a full monthly run, despite exemplary work on behalf of the Eighth, Fourth and now Third Doctors (Seriously, Titan – First, Second, Fifth, Sixth? Seventh if you feel you absolutely must…). Weapons of Past Destruction was the proof of concept, the proof of market that pushed the brooding Northern Doctor into full-time production. And the fact is, you can see why that happened. Cavan Scott’s storyline starts off with a bang and a conflict between two madly outer-space species, the Lect and the Unon. The Lect look like robotic Kinder Eggs, and the Unon, to quote Scott’s Ninth Doctor, look like ‘Flying space-centaurs, all gleaming armour and pointy sticks.’ The cause of their disagreement though? That’s where things get interesting. There’s enough post-Time War angst and shouting from the Ninth Doctor, but there’s also the Ninth Doctor on fire, as he was towards the end of his life in Bad Wolf and The Parting of The Ways, absolutely riffing it, heading into danger with a yell, a mad laugh, a flared nostril and a plan he cobbles together as he goes, based largely on the idea that the universe owes him a victory and the knowledge of his own brilliance. There’s that touch of Time Lord arrogance about him, convinced he has the right stuff in every situation, and that many other life-forms are tiny and ‘made of clay’ by comparison. But in the moments when he finds his outrage, as he does fairly early in issue #2 of the story, it helps focus him, helps remind him who the Doctor is, and how he acts, even in this body, to stand between the good people in the universe and those who seek to squash them under arrogant feet.

There’s plenty of timey-wimey in the story too – at one point, Rose gets lost in the vortex and ends up working at a bazar for a while, under the tutelage of a giant octopus, making her way in a barmy universe till the Doctor and Jack come to collect her. That also hits the ‘Companion doing their own thing’ note that was relatively new to on-screen Who when the series roared back into the public consciousness in 2005.

And what Scott combines are a hundred gracenotes of the Ninth Doctor’s time with a plot that’s suitably complex to fit alongside the Bad Wolf arc, and above all, an ear for voice. Oh man, Cavan Scott has an ear for voice. Check out this extract and tell us you don’t hear the Ninth Doctor.

   ‘I see the legends about you are true.’

   ‘Legends? Got to love a good legend. Go on then – what do they say? Please don’t tell me they mention the ears.’

   ‘They speak of your incessant babble.’

   ‘It serves a purpose. Self-preservation.’

   ‘To stop others hurting you?’

   ‘To stop me hurting them.’

How perfect is that? A Doctor that babbles not because he wants to, but because it’s what the Doctor used to do, and right now, in this war-scarred life, he needs every reminder he can get to claw his way back to being that man, to stop the fury and the rage and the anything-goes power of the alternative overwhelming him.

Both Rose and Jack are very true to their on-screen selves throughout this mini-series too – and importantly, they’re true to themselves at the time when this story’s set, rather than ever dipping into Torchwood Jack and Tenth Doctor Rose. Scott’s a far better writer than to allow that to happen.

Is the story perfect?

Mmmmm It’s close, but no – the first issue does involve quite a lot of not-very-much in story terms, and relies a little too heavily on the artwork and the sheer novelty of Ninth Doctor comic-books to be quite perfect, but it never even considers dabbling with the idea of badness, and it gets a lot better from the second issue on, filling its time with that delicate balance we were talking about: the Ninth Doctor imprinting himself on your consciousness just as he did on-screen while still delivering an issue-by-issue deepening of the backstory, a raising of the stakes, as war becomes complex, Rose Tyler stands between the opposing forces, and time’s new champions make a play to replace the Time Lords as arbiters of fairness in a universe of post-war chaos.

From a standing start it ramps up into a story you simply can’t stop reading – and that’s the hidden sales pitch of this collected volume. The issues, when they were released, made you want, and want more, and more, and left you at the end feeling utterly satisfied but still eager for more Ninth Doctor adventures. Here in the collected edition, you can absolutely binge on what is essentially Series 0,75 – a whole arc of moral complexity, anger, yelling, arrogance, plans, fun, silliness, humanity, teaching and Jack…being Jack. It’s the second series you always wanted Eccleston to do, and by the honesty of the voices and the complexity of the storyline, it stands up to everything Russell T Davies delivered.

Can we talk art? Oh go on, let’s talk art. We could talk about the art of The Weapons of Past Destruction till your eyes glazed over and you shuffled away with a nervous smile on your lips, in search of anyone, anyone else to talk to. Artwise, you’re looking at Blair Shedd and Rachael ‘Had a really good 2016 on the Twelfth Doctor comic-books’ Stott. You’re talking colour, vividness, strong, accurate portrayals of the Tardis crew – which when you’re reaching back ten years for your connection-point with a readership is even more important than it is when you’re delivering figures from current multi-media pop culture. Normally we’d pick out a couple of the best and most dynamic panels for you, but in Weapons of Past Destruction, the challenge is finding panels that aren’t dynamic, extraordinary or poster-worthy. If we’re absolutely pushed, there’s a fantast triptych of Doctors, Eight Nine and War on the same page, and there’s another, almost opposite panel including Troughtonesque Cybermen and Tennant Sontarans that sends a particular thrill up the geeky reader’s spine. Is the art perfect then? As with the story, there’s one issue that stops it claiming that honour, in this case the overuse of silhouette shots far beyond the point at which they’re an interesting inversion to accent the action, and into the realms of intrusive overkill of an artistic idea. But you’d be splitting nano-hairs, either with the storytelling or the artwork, to claim any issue of Weapons of Past Destruction was ruined for you by the flaws that stop it being entirely perfect.

The Weapons of Past Destruction was exciting when it was released in issue-by-issue format. Gathering the whole thing together in a single volume is a (ahem) fantastic idea, and makes it something rather more special than any of the usual collected Who volumes. This storyline, this artwork, helped fans remember their love affair with a brand new Doctor – and a brand new Doctor Who to boot. This collected volume is a ridiculous, compelling, ‘Don’t-talk-to-me-till-I’m-finished’ pleasure that (*cough* Just saying *cough*) would keep any Who fan quiet for a good few hours on Christmas Day.

Who Reviews The Eighth Doctor Comic Book Vol #1 by Tony J Fyler

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.