Doctor Who: Alternating Current by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata

Doctor Who Comic: Alternating Current

Collection published: 2021
Contents published: 2020-21
Read: January 2022

Writer: Jody Houser

Artist: Roberta Ingranata

Colorist: Erica Eren Angiolini

Flatter: Sari Chankhamma

Letterers: Richard Starkings & Sarah Hedrick 

I usually read these Titan Doctor Who collections in publication order, and the issues collected here came out after those collected in Defender of the Daleks. But if it hadn't been for COVID delays, this would have come out first, and for the thirteenth Doctor, it goes between A Little Help from My Friends and Defender of the Daleks, so that's where I read it.

It follows on directly from Little Help: returning to the present day, the thirteenth Doctor and fam discover that the Earth was taken over by Sea Devils in the past; at the same time, the tenth Doctor learns the same thing, even encountering an alternative Rose Tyler who is a resistance fighter. Supposedly this happened because of the events of Little Help, but exactly how two Doctors meeting in the 1960s would have lead to an alternative timeline is never explained; characters just keep saying "paradox" again and again... but what is the actual paradox here? Even by Doctor Who terms, this didn't cut it for me. After two issues of Sea Devil avoidance, it suddenly switches gears entirely and becomes about going back in time and recreating the events of "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror"... but why? The story doesn't do anything interesting with the events of that episode, and again, how would shenanigans in the 1960s cause the Skithra attack on New York in the 1903 to happen differently? I don't know, it's all pretty blah and unsatisfying.

Also Ingranata continues Titan's proud tradition of Star Trek: Voyager swipes: the Skithra engine core is very obviously Voyager's warp core.

I guess injecting the tenth Doctor into the thirteenth Doctor series must have caused a sales boost, but this has taken an already mediocre series and made it even worse. And evidently not enough of a sales boost, because after this, the (I think somewhat weirdly titled) Doctor Who Comic became a rotating anthology series, dropping the thirteenth Doctor.

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: Time Lord Victorious: Defender of the Daleks