Oblivion: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Lee Sullivan, John Ross, et al.
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Collection published: 2006 Contents originally published: 2001-03 Previously read: January 2008 Reread: August 2022 |
In my comments on The Glorious Dead, I wrote, "I don't have the
feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the
Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's
forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a
late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms." Now that we're in the
early 2000s, this is more true than ever. The tv show is dead, long
live the tv show—now what can the strip be like without it? There aren't
even really many callbacks to the previous history of the strip
anymore, just its own immediate continuity.
2001 is the year I became a Doctor Who fan, though I didn't discover the strip until I started picking up these reprint collections a few years later. What made me a Doctor Who
fan is the spiritual counterpart of this era of the strip: the Paul
McGann audio dramas. Like the comic, the audios had a lightly serialized
background story with strong character drama in the foreground... and
every single installment felt big, like you were watching a movie, or
if not that, like the writer was trying to make a statement about Doctor Who every week. Indeed, the very first issue collected here had a cover-mounted CD containing episode one of the very first Doctor Who audio drama I ever heard.
This volume consistently feels like it's cribbing in a way—it's cribbing
from the tv show that hasn't come back yet. The audios and the comics
of this time, like the show when it returned, reinvented Doctor Who to be like Buffy or Deep Space Nine, without ever losing what made it work in the first place.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #303 |
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge
This is like an RTD series opener. Well, maybe more accurately, an RTD Year Five Billion episode: "okay, you like us, now here's some weird colorful stuff only we can do." The arrival of color to the strip works perfectly in this bold, exciting story that launches a new story arc for the eighth Doctor and Izzy. Ophidius is a great setting, the Doctor and Izzy are both on fine form, and new character Destrii is great—I never read this without foreknowledge of what her true purpose was, but I suspect it works well, as she bonds with Izzy only to betray her. In fact, it's a lot like Moffat's The Impossible Astronaut: you think you're watching a standard series premiere only to realize something much more unexpected and unusual is happening.
The bodyswap plot is a great idea, and would only work in comics. On tv, you wouldn't want to write out one of your leads temporarily like this; imagine Billie Piper being replaced! On audio, you'd have a new character with a new voice, and I think the continuity of personality wouldn't come across. You could do it in a novel, but I don't think it would work as well, as you wouldn't have the clear visual reminder of what had happened. But in comics, you can swap character appearances without worrying about actors, and you can get the same character "voice" but with a totally different appearance.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #304 |
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge
This one-part story follows up Ophidius with the character implications. Scott Gray and Martin Geraghty are at the peak of their creative voices here: the character voices shine, the art is gorgeous. "I d-don't want to be strong... I w-want to be me..." is a devastatingly effective line; the sequence of the Doctor plunging Izzy into the TARDIS swimming pool is gorgeous. I don't really remember seeing much of the TARDIS interior in the McGann run up until this point, but they use it really well here. Again, this is the kind of story you could only do in the strip: with its highly variable story lengths, you can spend eight pages on a character moment and nothing else.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #309 |
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge
I remembered this one as being very bad, but upon reading it, realized I was confusing it with a different DWM story about artists in the early twentieth century, The Futurists. In this one, the Doctor and Izzy meet Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego, and discover evil aliens are using the Mexican Day of the Dead to harvest life-force. I don't have much to say about this one... in that it is yet again a solid, well-done story from the Gray/Geraghty team, enhanced by the way it plays off the ongoing character beats. Amazing visuals, nice conversations between Izzy and Frida.Character Assassin, from Doctor Who Magazine #311 (Dec. 2001)
story by Scott Gray, art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge
Another one of those largely continuity-free one-off strips celebrating something. (The last of the McGann era, if I recall correctly.) A fun but disposable adventure of the Master in the Land of Fiction.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #313 |
story by Scott Gray, art by Lee Sullivan, colours by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge
What can I say? Another strong outing from Scott Gray, this time joined by Lee "Best at Daleks" Sullivan on artwork. Opening with an extract with Izzy's diary is a clever move; it gives us some personality insight, but also lets us quickly and efficiently do some exposition. It has multiple great cliffhangers and several powerful visual moments. "Good Daleks" is a strategy many different Doctor Who stories have pulled (all the way back to Troughton's debut, but more recently Victory of the Daleks on screen and Dark Eyes on audio), but surely this is the only good "good Dalek" story? The way they are revealed and then that reveal is out-revealed is great; the humans' prejudice against Daleks being a driver for the story is very well done; everything looks fantastic underwater; there's a helluva cliffhanger; Izzy is once again on top form. Gray and Geraghty might be firing on all cylinders, but Sullivan can step up to the plate, too. The growing pressure on the Doctor as a character is nicely done as well; more on that soon.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #326 |
stories by Scott Gray, art by John Ross and Martin Geraghty & David A. Roach, colours by Roger Langridge and Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge
Technically, this is three separate stories: a one-issue prologue and then two big stories. But these eleven strips feel like the kind of three-part series finale that Russell T Davies and Steve Moffat would go on to write: this is the comic's "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" or its "Face the Raven"/"Hell Bent"/"Heaven Sent." A story even bigger than The Glorious Dead! Each part works fine on its own from a plot perspective, and there's a shift in approach and location between each installment, but in terms of theme and character, the stories all add up to one big story. Me and My Shadow is fine, a well-enough-but-a-little-confusing story about what Fey has been up to since she was dropped off at the end of Wormwood.
But then we launch into Uroboros and it's magnificent again. The reveal of Destrii in Izzy's body is great. We get more insight into Destrii as a character, and it very much intrigues. The characterization of the Doctor is excellent, being pushed in different directions but never becoming unrecognizable; I very rarely say this, but I would love to get to hear Paul McGann perform some of the anger here. The idea of following up a previous adventure and seeing its consequences is strong; at the time this was a Bush/Blair 9/11 allegory, but it reads even more prescient (unfortunately) these days. This is the kind of comics that just propels you from installment to installment.
It also propels you straight into Oblivion, the explosive finale: Izzy versus Destrii as we finally find out what exactly has been going on. I did get a bit muddled in the backstory of Oblivion and the nature of the threat here, but what really works is of course the character stuff. Izzy taking on Destrii is fantastic; the reveal about Izzy's sexuality, which makes sense of some pretty heavy-handed characterization from way back in End Game even moreso. Her decision to go home is great, and perfectly timed. The sequence paralleling the lives of Izzy and Desrtii is very well written and beautifully drawn.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #311 |
Other Notes:
- I was a bit surprised to recognize the Mobox in Ophidius: eighteen years later, Scott Gray would reuse them in a thirteenth Doctor strip adventure. When I read The Power of the Mobox, it had been over a decade since I first read this volume so I didn't recognize them at all, and so I experienced the callback in reverse order!
- Did the strip skip issue #305? No, that was the VNA throwback The Last Word, not collected until much later in The Age of Chaos, though I read it much earlier. It did, however, skip #307, which ran a TV Comic reprint. The backmatter here doesn't mention any script or art issues, but I feel like surely there must have been some.
- The appearance of what are clearly Martian tripods in "Character Assassin" is a bit cheeky—The War of the Worlds wouldn't come into the public domain in the UK for another sixteen years!
- Surely Izzy is—by a wide margin—the strip's best original companion thus far. Though I guess the competition here isn't exactly fierce. I mean, I do like Frobisher, but well-rounded person, he is not exactly.
- Making Izzy gay this way—not explicitly clear until her last story—probably feels a bit underwhelming to modern audiences who get much better representation on a regular basis. But she's Doctor Who's first clearly gay main companion, and dealing with that is made to really matter here. The tv show doesn't make it here until 2017; even the audios not until 2011. (I know all of these are arguable.) It does feel a bit like Scott Gray watched Willow come out on Buffy and thought he could do it too. In a good way.
- Destrii's Uncle Jodafra is a fun one-off character, and I seem to recall he returns along with her in the next volume.
- Interesting to note that in both Izzy and Destrii's stories, a picture of the Enterprise is used as a stand-in for escape. It's the sort of spot the TARDIS itself might be used normally, but of course they couldn't be watching Doctor Who, and I'd rather see Star Trek here than one of those dumb stand-ins the tie-ins use sometimes. So it's a bit jarring, but I also don't know what a better option would be. Anyway, I reckon Scott Gray would write an excellent Star Trek comic.
- Pretty amazing to think that much of this was running in parallel with McGann's second audio season (Jan.-June 2002), which was doing much the same thing as I said above, and has almost as good a hit rate. (I rate five of its six stories highly; actually, the bad one is a bad "good Dalek" story.) Charley dominates the audio companions for much the same reason Izzy does the comics ones, and the run manages to do interesting stuff with the Doctor as well, just like this. What a time to be a Who fan in general, and an eighth Doctor one in specific. (And though I haven't read the eighth Doctor novels of this era very systematically, most of the ones I have read are also strong: EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, The City of the Dead, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura. I guess on the other hand, though, you've got Escape Velocity and Time Zero in this era; the McGann comics have never done anything that bad for sure.)
- Uroboros/Oblivion is thus the Neverland of this run. I really like Neverland, but one thing that sticks out when comparing this comic run to the audios is that Gray is able to write big epic finales that don't need to draw on Time Lord mythology to have scale and scope. Though he did go to that well in Wormwood, neither this nor The Glorious Dead engage with that aspect of the Doctor Who mythos. I think the Time Lords can be crutch for writers looking for grandeur, and Gray is perfectly capable of working without it.
- I feel like my reviews here have kind of undersold this run. If you just read synopses of it all, I'm not sure it would come across better than any other era of DWM history. What makes this era sing is less the big stuff (though the arc is very well done) or the premise of any individual tale (though there are some good ones), but the way the dialogue shines and the story is paced and the art is perfect. It's just well done; I may as well have been grinning all the way through reading this.
This post is the twenty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers issues #180–89, 199–205, 219–22, and 228–34 of The Transformers UK. Previous installments are listed below:
- The Iron Legion
- Dragon's Claw
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
- The Tides of Time
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
- Voyager
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
- The World Shapers
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
- The Age of Chaos
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
- A Cold Day in Hell!
- Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
- Nemesis of the Daleks
- Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
- The Good Soldier
- The Incomplete Death's Head
- Evening's Empire
- The Daleks
- Emperor of the Daleks
- The Sleeze Brothers File
- The Age of Chaos
- Land of the Blind
- Ground Zero
- End Game
- The Glorious Dead
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