03 August 2022

Missy: The Master Plan by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata

Doctor Who: Missy: The Master Plan

Collection published: 2021
Contents published: 2021
Read: May 2022

Writer: Jody Houser
Artist: Roberta Ingranata
Colorist: Erica Eren Angiolini
Flatter: Sari Chankhamma
Letterer: Richard Starkings

After Alternating Current, Titan's redundantly named Doctor Who Comic became a sort of anthology feature, resetting its numbering and its focus every four issues. Doctor Who Comic vol. 2 #1-4 focused on Missy, Michelle Gomez's incarnation of the Master. The story sees Missy breaking her earlier self, in the form of the Roger Delgado incarnation, out of prison while pretending to be a future regeneration of the Doctor who needs his help recovering a fragment of the Key to Time. Missy trying to bamboozle her past self into thinking she's the Doctor is about as delightful as one might expect—she is, quite frankly, not very good at it. I was thoroughly entertained by this, and found that Houser and Ingranata did a great job of capturing the characters of both incarnations. There are a number of good cameos her, especially by other Master incarnations, and some invocation of the Master's own history in Titan comics.

One thing didn't work for me: the story seemed to not climax so much as just stop. The Master works out who Missy is and.... that's it? The Key to Time thing was, unless I was reading carelessly, basically forgotten. I had thought Houser's storylines were like this because she was pastiching the Jodie Whittaker era, but here we're doing a Peter Capaldi and the writing is still like that, so maybe that's just how she writes things. Frustrating.

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: Empire of the Wolf

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