Who Reviews Gaze of the Medusa, Part 2 Comic Book by Tony J Fyler

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.

Who Reviews The Heralds of Destruction Part Two by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s still loving the practically perfect Third Doctor.

Call us fickle if you like, but the Third Doctor comic-book may be our new favourite thing.

The first issue was that rare and glorious experience – a comic-book that has the Poppins Factor, and is practically perfect in every way. Most especially it evoked everything it needed to evoke about the early seventies adventuring of the Third Doctor, Jo Grant and the UNIT boys, while simultaneously updating the pace and punch of its presentation to make it easily, greedily devourable by a New Who audience of 21^st century fans.

But one of the challenges of a practically perfect first issue is where on Earth you take it from there. It’s what bands know as the ‘difficult second album’ problem.

You want the headline? The second album of the Third Doctor comic-book is as good as, though not better than, the first. What it does is build on everything we loved in the first issue and take it in exciting new directions, rather than simply trying to re-deliver the same emotional beats of that debut issue.

After the cliff-hanger at the end of issue #1, we knew there was going to be a certain amount of banter in issue #2, and we knew roughly what form it would take – if it didn’t, it wouldn’t strike the right nostalgic notes. Paul Cornell’s not a writer ever likely to slip up on so obvious a banana skin, so the voices in this issue are absolutely pitch perfect, without ever actually going over old ground. It’s important to note that we’re not just talking about the voices of those involved in the cliff-hanger – the Third Doctor and his unexpected guest. Jo Grant here is especially believable, her dialogue en pointe for Katy Manning’s squeaky, ever-optimistic portrayal, with just the right note of occasional ‘I’m going to move the plot on while you bicker, if that’s quite all right.’ The Brigadier too is very well observed, his signature combination of pomposity and nous captured in the very bones of the storytelling, as well as in the dialogue Cornell gives him.

A familiar villain returns, whose presence was established in the first issue, but here they’re up to old tricks – but with a new, 21^st century Cornell twist, giving their involvement that same sense of magic as was interwoven throughout issue #1 – the combination of classicalism and modernity that manages to please the pickiest of both worlds. And while there’s little development in terms of understanding the actual storyline threat, what this issue does deliver are some very solid Pertweean second-act thrills that work as a kind of sub-adventure to show the nature, the speed, and the danger of that threat. The micro-machines that combine to form a bigger whole, which seemed almost incidental in the first issue alongside all the other highlights, here begin to flex their metallic muscles, and the one-line description of their fundamental nature – that they can convert anything they need into things like themselves and add to their whole – gains a rather more cybernetic, or even Borgian dimension when one of them touches Jo. Her descent into a mindless automaton is frighteningly fast here, prompting the Third Doctor to go on an adventure where he’s never been before – into what’s deliciously, psychedelically described here as ‘Josephine Grant’s Groovy Unconscious.’

You can’t fail to love a comic-book that takes you there, or calls it that. You simply can’t.

As well as providing an object lesson in the kind of danger these micro-machines are capable of embodying, turning organic matter into part of themselves just as easily as they do pre-existing circuits, and delivering the kind of fantastical psycho-adventure in which the Third Doctor rarely dabbled on-screen, this trip into Jo Grant’s unconscious mind to fight the will of the machines gives artist Christopher Jones and colourist Hi-Fi the chance to go absolutely psychedelia-wild and crazy, and it’s a chance they embrace with all available hands. It’s the kind of thing that stops the Third Doctor comic-book series being simply an exercise in slavish reproduction of the look and feel of a certain era of Who, allowing the art-wranglers to branch out and stamp a coherent, in-keeping but brand new stylistic vision on the comic-books. In a way, it’s precisely the fact that we now have forty years of distance and perspective on the time of the Third Doctor that allows Jones and Hi-Fi to do this. If Doctor Who had gone psychedelic and internalistic in the early seventies, it would probably have confused the bejesus out of the audience living through that time. Looking back on it, seeing Jo’s mindscape – which for all its initial hippy trippiness is for the most part surprisingly ordinary – makes perfect sense as a battleground. It’s a shift that actually took place much earlier in the viewing audience’s consciousness, and a difference of approach that, for instance, has the psychic battle between the Three Doctors and Omega rendered as more or less a lot of eye-closing and frowning, and the battle between the Fourth Doctor and the Deadly Assassin played out across a whole story of Matrix-induced psychological trauma. That shift of approach to showing us the battleground allows us to see the fight for control of Jo’s mind played out against the backdrop of her unconscious, and allows Jones and Hi-Fi to give us a lesson in the psychology of Ms Josephine Grant. While there’s a surface level of hippy dippy grooviness to get through, that’s more or less Jo being a child of her time. The actual buildings and landscapes of her unconscious are very realistically rendered, with no cunning, no guile, no monsters of self-doubt lurking down alleyways. Jo is exactly who she seems to be – the optimistic, almost-innocent, passionate believer in causes, in doing some good, and in protecting the good things and people of the universe against the bad. The Third Doctor’s best friend. There’s nothing in her unconscious to frighten or threaten either her or the Doctor – except the usurping force of the alien machinery.

All of which leads us to a double-whammy cliff-hanger which, while by no means as punch-the-air jubilant as that which closed issue #1 is still absolutely solid from every angle as a stake-raising, second episode moment of jeopardy, from which you genuinely wonder whether our heroes can come back, while all the while knowing they absolutely must.

Bottom line, run to your comic-book store right now, get issue #2 of the Third Doctor, pre-order issues #3, #4 and #5, and take the rest of the day off. You’ll have done a good thing, so you’ll have earned it. Cornell’s name is pretty much a guarantee of quality, and matched with Jones and Hi-Fi, he’s delivering us the Third Doctor we remember, but with a 21^st century punch.

Oh – and Easter eggs. The way the classic villain escapes is one, but there’s a lovely additional layer of fun to be had with a comment from Jo, and the Third Doctor’s response, that both explains one of the most skin-crawling phrases from the New Who world, and allows Cornell and the Classic fans to have a bit of a giggle with the short shrift the Third Doctor gives it. At the same time though, in explaining where the phrase comes from, there’s plenty of soggy sentiment to be retrospectively wrung from the later Doctors using it, in tribute to their one-time best friend when they were undergoing a painful period of exile. Paul Cornell, ladies and gentlemen; having it both ways, and delivering it both ways, to please absolutely all of the people, all of the time. Class. Pure class.

Reviews Torchwood Comic Book #2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony stands around a bit, looking moody.

The first issue of the Torchwood comic-book was very…blam! Very hit-the-ground-running, and very hit-it-till-it-doesn’t-get-up. It also very definitely took Torchwood on from the show that ‘most’ people will know – Jack, Gwen, Ianto and the rest of the Cardiff crew – forward beyond John and Carole Barrowman’s novel, The Exodus Code, and expected readers to either know the events and personnel of that story, or to get up to speed quickly in the middle of an action sequence involving jetski-ninjas.

Yes, jetski-ninjas – why not?

In essence, the comic-book, like the novel, took on-screen Torchwood into a world without budgetary constraints, and got Bondy, with a bit of some Tom Cruise-like futuristic sci-fi to boot. No apologies, no excuses – just get on board or don’t.

The second issue very much continues that vibe – the first whole fistful of pages are one long action sequence, and after that, there’s a straightforward scene-split, half the action revolving around Jack, Gwen, the crew of the Ice Maiden and their new accidental stowaway, and the other half focused on Torchwood House in the wake of a murder by a TV-familiar Torchwood character. There are searches for scientific notes, new, odd projects uncovered, and a call-back right to the very origins of Torchwood (appropriately enough, during its tenth anniversary period).

But here’s the thing – you end issue #2 not feeling like you’re very much further on than you were at the end of issue #1. And there’s something that aches a little in disappointment at that. The Torchwood House storyline is actually by far the more interesting of the two in this issue, though even this feels oddly paced and padded to make it fit the issue and end on a cliff-hanging note – there are, to be fair, only so many scenes of a dog sniffing round a flower-bed you can add into a sequence before it stops feeling like an appropriately sad grief and purpose sequence and starts turning into stock footage. Meanwhile, on the Ice Maiden, after the initial burst of action sequence, there’s a little inconsequential chat, then Jack getting particularly Bondy again, leading to quite a bit of standing about, and a reunion between Jack and Gwen that causes a couple of characters to reach for the sick bags – and importantly, we the reader feel the same, especially as Gwen’s just left Rhys on a windswept Welsh beach beside the ruins of their exploded caravan to go gallivanting on a world-saving adventure.

As we say, there is story development on board the Ice Maiden, there really is – but whereas in the first issue, the action and the story development went hand in hand, here there’s a sensation of ‘hurry up and wait’ – the action sequence is all action, then the story advancement comes more or less independent of that, through some talking that has a typically Torchwood monosyllabic quality. On the one hand, that gives it an authentic feel, albeit that feeling is authentically Torchwood up-itself, the members of the alien-fighting elite seeming to believe more than one word at a time is an unnecessary expense for people as cool and important as they are. But on the other hand, this standing about, monosyllabilising at one another seems oddly devoid of energy after all the toing and froing and James Bondery of the action sequence. In other words, the tone is unbalanced, leading to a feeling of deflation that makes the ramp-up to the issue’s cliff-hanger feel rather more forced than it should.

Now that said, it does look very pretty and effective – the action sequences have a Seventies, ITC quality about them, with just a dash of 21^st century GCI, meaning they wouldn’t be out of place in The New Avengers, Danger Man, or The Saint, if any of those shows got a modern remake. Antonio Fuso and Pasquale Qualano on artwork do an excellent job of giving this version of Torchwood its own unique visual aesthetic, a combination of later on-screen versions (particularly Miracle Day – yes, I know, but still…) and something entirely beyond the confines of the screen, something of a size and complexity to match the Barrowmans’ imaginations. And if anything, Marco Lesko on colourwork deserves even more credit this time round, bringing a vibrant life to some sequences that need it, while still allowing the gathering of shadows to represent and enhance the mood of grief and purpose in the Torchwood House scenes. As in issue #1, there’s a solidity to the world Fuso, Qualano and Lesko conjure, at least in the Torchwood House storyline which underlines its indefatigable presence on the map, whereas in the action sequences, there’s a genuine sense of motion, speed, and urgency.

All of which does something to mitigate the storytelling imbalance in this issue – but whether it quite does enough will probably depend on your previous familiarity with the crew of the Ice Maiden. For relatively casual Torchwooders, who take only the four on-screen series as being ‘real’ or ‘canon,’ this is likely to be a sticking point in this issue, the gulf of understanding between our appreciation of the TV Torchwood characters – Gwen, Jack, Rhys…at least one other – and the Exodus Code Torchwood characters proving difficult to bridge as we go along while there’s action to deliver, and broody, cheekbone-heavy monosyllabic speech to engage in. It’s probably one thing too many to ask of the casual, or even relatively geeky reader. Trying to deliver an equality of Torchwood pedigree to characters who went through four series and characters who appeared in one novel doesn’t work here as well as it practically promised to do in issue #1. But for those who live, breathe, eat and sleep Torchwood, and are completely up to speed with the crew of the Ice Maiden, what we’ve got here is…still unbalanced in terms of the ‘hurry up and wait’ element, but several adventure-hooks to take us forward – seriously, jetski-ninjas, what the hell is that about? Why has someone committed a murder at Torchwood House? What was the previous master of the house investigating, and what did it have to do with weird astrological constellations and something happening in a galaxy too close for comfort? And what on earth is going on with the world’s GPS data?

See? Told you there was plot advancement. All that and more is in this issue, but you’ll still likely feel that lull after the adrenaline-rush of the first action sequence.

All in all, Torchwood #2 fails to live up to the punch and the promise of issue #1, and might well leave the more casual Torchwooder behind. Hardcore Jack-junkies though? Strap in and hold on to whatever comes to hand – despite the odd pacing, there’s plenty here to whet your appetite for He of The Insanely Good Coat.