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Collection published: 2016 Contents originally published: 2015 Acquired: September 2018 Read: November 2020 |
Writer: Paul Cornell
Artists: Neil Edwards, with Arianna Florean, Marc Ellerby, Rachael Smith, and Neil Slorance
Colorist: Ivan Nunes
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt
Not to be confused with Big Finish's The Four Doctors, Titan's Four Doctors is actually unique among multi-Doctor stories. Most feature a "current" Doctor and a number of "past" Doctors; the current Doctor's story is still being told, but the past Doctors' stories no longer are. Or, as in the way Big Finish often does it, all the Doctors are past Doctors. But in a sense, the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Doctors are all "current" Doctor because they were all featuring in ongoing series at the time they appeared in Four Doctors; this is a proper crossover in that it crosses over all three of Titan's then-ongoing series. So we have the tenth Doctor with Gabby (presumably fresh from the events of The Fountains of Forever), the eleventh Doctor with Alice (late of Conversion), and the twelfth Doctor with Clara (though this must go before the events of Hyperion, as there was a reference to Danny Pink being dead in that collection, which hasn't yet happened here). So in a way we don't normally see with multi-Doctor stories, this could have ramifications for the ongoing adventures of the earlier Doctors, not just the current ones.
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| from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #4 (art by Neil Edwards) |
All that said, I felt the story didn't actually do that. It's nice to see Gabby and Alice here, but in this crowded story, they are generic companions, with none of the flavor of their main series, except for a brief excerpt from Gabby's sketchbook. This is much more a twelfth Doctor story, as the story turns on a choice he made in the television program being changed to create an alternate timeline.
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| from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #3 (art by Neil Edwards) |
Cornell's story is a bit too complicated at times, but really the whole thing is there to justify some multi-Doctor sparkle, and the story makes that work admirably. Cornell has a good handle on the voices of all three Doctors, and their banter is a delight. But it's not just banter, it's personality-- like I said, the whole story hinges on a believable but terrible act on the part of the twelfth Doctor. Plus, the story is actually about something, which is not true of so many of the Big Finish multi-Doctor stories I have heard; yes, the time shenanigans seem gratuitously complicated, but the whole story is about the Doctor's fear on the day that he forgets to fight it. Plus there are some charming ideas, like Clara trying to stop all the incarnations of the Doctor from converging on the same Parisian cafe.
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| from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #4 (art by Neil Edwards) |
Artist Neil Edwards is pretty good at likenesses, which is essential for a comic like this to really work, though I thought he did better at the companions than the Doctors. His Clara is perfect, and he also does a very good job with Gabby, even though she has no (as far as I know) real person referent. Definitely better than many of the artists of the actual Tenth Doctor ongoing! (Although there's a brief River Song cameo, and his Alice Kingston is unrecognizable.)
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| from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #5 (art by Neil Edwards) |
All this plus some jokes about the Doctors doing stand-up. And the Voord? I don't think this is perfect (too much time spent on time shenanigans), but as an attempt to do something interesting with the often creaky genre of the multi-Doctor story, it succeeds admirably.
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 Tenth Doctor: The Endless Song
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