Review: Doctor Who: The Weeping Angels of Mons by Robbie Morrison, Daniel Indro, and Eleonora Carlini

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2014-15)
Acquired September 2018
Read December 2019

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 2: The Weeping Angels of Mons

Writer: Robbie Morrison

Artists: Daniel Indro & Eleonora Carlini
Colorist: Slamet Mujiono
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

The Weeping Angels seem to me to be a uniquely televisual monster. Their whole gimmick is that they don't move if you can see them-- so you need a medium that clearly delineates movement. It's particularly clever, because Weeping Angels aren't just frozen when characters see them, but when you the audience are looking. Big Finish have done okay by them, but it's definitely been diminishing returns, and the way Big Finish must indicate movement by stings of music is often inadvertently hilarious, and people have to say things like, "Gosh, that statue wasn't there a second ago!" aloud.

Comics, I think, start out from even more of a disadvantage, in that in a comic nothing is moving when the viewer is looking at it. Possibly a clever writer could make use of this somehow, but judging from The Weeping Angels of Mons (not to mention Terrorformer), Robbie Morrison is not one. This is a generic Doctor Who pseudo-historical. Plus, if you think about it, a Weeping Angel actually isn't that scary in terms of what it does: yes, it plucks you out of time... so that you can live a long and fulfilling life! Most of the tv and audio episodes featuring them manage to get around that, but this one's setting flags up the problem. If you're a soldier in the trenches of World War I, this is actually a step up! Again, a clever writer could probably make something of that, but this story does not.

from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor #7 (art by Daniel Indro)

One of the real high points of Titan's first Tenth Doctor volume was the Doctor's new companion, Gabby Gonzalez, who felt like a real person with a distinctive voice. Unfortunately, there's none of that present here, where Gabby could be literally any young female companion. This isn't just a writing problem, but an art one, as she suddenly looks like a generic non-Hispanic white woman.