Review: Doctor Who: The Endless Song by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande, Eleonora Carlini & Leonardo Romero

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2015-16
Acquired: September 2018
Read: November 2020

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 4: The Endless Song

Writer: Nick Abadzis
Artists: Eleonora Carlini, Elena Casagrande & Leonardo Romero
Colorists: Arianna Florean & Claudia 'SG' Ianniciello
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

"Year Two" of Titan's Tenth Doctor series kicks off with this volume, which consists of three stories. The first, "The Singer Not the Song," is the best of them. This series's strength is in its nostalgia for the Russell T Davies screen era, and this story feels like it could have been produced by the man who gave us "Gridlock" or "Planet of the Ood": the Doctor and Gabby visit a planet of "conceptual beings" that can only be heard, not seen... but human music is being used to infect them with a conceptual plague. It's a fun science fiction idea, and the story does some fun stuff with it-- though I couldn't shake the feeling that a story about music would work much better on screen than on the comics page!

Then comes a story that mostly recaps Year One, as Gabby's friend Cindy (who stayed back on Earth at the end of The Fountains of Forever) reads Gabby's sketchbook. I usually enjoy Gabby's sketchbook excerpts, but this was less interesting than their normal use of giving the reader a window into Gabby's mindset during stories; plus, it all turns out to be in aid of foreshadowing something to do with the ongoing Osirian storyline... a storyline that has thus far utterly failed to interest me on any level.

The final story takes the Doctor and Gabby back to the time of the Neanderthals, where alien slavers are kidnapping them for slave labor. Some early shenanigans with the TARDIS translation aside, it's dull, plodding stuff.

from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor: Year Two #5
(art by Elena Casagrande)

Terrible cover model aside (I mean, I'm sure she's a nice person, she just doesn't look right), Gabby looks her proper self in this volume, which isn't surprising, as most of it is drawn by Elena Casagrande and Eleonora Carlini, who I think are uniformly excellent. Great faces, great facial expressions, beautiful vistas, solid storytelling. Something about Leonardo Romero's art turned me off; not enough expression in it, I think. Looks like he drew it with a computer. (I mean, I know probably everyone here drew with a computer-- but I don't like it when the inking is all the same thickness.)

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Eleventh Doctor: The Then and the Now