Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano
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Collection published: 2019 Contents originally published: 2018 Acquired: March 2020 Read: November 2021 |
Artists: Christopher Jones, Jessica Martin, John Stokes
Letterers: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt
This is Titan's first and last The Seventh Doctor volume (they have by this point stopped optimistically putting "Vol 1" on every title page), collecting a three-issue miniseries. The miniseries is written by Andrew Cartmel and illustrated by Christopher Jones (who illustrated Titan's Third Doctor series); Ben Aaronovitch is credited as "executive producer" but there's no indication of what this might actually mean even though he gets first billing on the cover! Anyway, I went into this not quite sure what it would be like. On the one hand, I suffered through Cartmel's attempt to recapture this era in his execrable Big Finish Lost Stories; on the other hand, I recently read Cartmel's early 1990s DWM comics for the first time, and found them really interesting and striking.
This is somewhere in between. Cartmel's not interesting in pushing the boundaries of Doctor Who or comics like he was thirty years ago, but this does a much better job of pastiching his own era than the Lost Stories did. It's a fun, if somewhat underdeveloped and simple story, about the Doctor, Ace, and the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group (of Remembrance of the Daleks fame) dealing with a crashed alien spaceship in the Australian outback. It has a sense of scale tv wouldn't have attempted in the 1980s, but I did feel that something thematically interesting could have been done that didn't happen here. Christopher Jones does a lot to enliven the material; he's a good tv tie-in artist, in that he can do both likenesses and action well.
The collection includes some other things, foremost among them the "Hill of Beans" back-up strip about the Doctor and Ace meeting Mags the werewolf from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy again... with the gimmick that the story is illustrated by Jessica Martin who played Mags! Since her acting days, she had actually become an independent comics artist. It's okay; it's a bit jumpy and incomprehensible at times, which I blame on both writing and art. My guess is that sci-fi action does not play to Martin's strengths as an illustrator. But hey, I do like Mags, and this probably does better by her than her incompatible reappearances in Big Finish's trilogy.
Finally, it contains two things I've reviewed elsewhere, so I won't go over them again: the Seventh Doctor strip from 2018's Free Comic Book Day issue and the First Doctor story "In-Between Times." Except that I will complain that the FCBD issue is a prologue to Operation Volcano but for some reason collected all the way at the end of this volume!
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 Road to the Thirteenth Doctor
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