The Betrothal of Sontar (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 31)

The Betrothal of Sontar: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Mike Collins, Gareth Roberts, Tony Lee, John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis, Roger Langridge, Martin Geraghty, Jonathan Morris, et al.

Collection published: 2008
Contents originally published: 2006-07
Acquired: November 2008
Previously read: December 2008
Reread: October 2022

This collection spans the entirety of the tenth Doctor and Rose era of DWM, which initiated when "The Christmas Invasion" aired and ran all the way to "The Runaway Bride," and it also includes a (kind of) companion-free storyline from between "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones," making for a nice sizeable chunk of DWM. Like the comics collected in The Cruel Sea, these are definitely trying to ape the storytelling of the Russell T Davies era on screen, but I also felt there was a more concerted effort to play to the strengths of comics here: more stories that do things so big that they could never have been afforded on screen, or stories with lots of different locations. Overall, it's a pretty pleasing package.

I've read this collection before, way back in 2008 when it came out. This is (part of) what I wrote at the time:

Either way, this collection is a bit of a jumble. The title story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis is fine for the most part, though the resolution is highly disappointing. Tony Lee's "F.A.Q." is an absolute mess, and the usually-dependable Mike Collins isn't up to scratch with "The Futurists"-- it has some nice ideas, but they don't really cohere. Jonathan Morris's "Opera of Doom!" is too slight to be effective. Morris's other effort, "Interstellar Overdrive" is quite fun and mostly faultless, but something always bothers me about stories where our protagonists would have died but for a convenient time loop that lets them do things over (as in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Cause and Effect" or Deep Space Nine's "Whispers"). It's fun to see the Brigadier in Alan Barnes's "The Warkeeper's Crown", but as I write this review, I can't remember anything else about the story, good or bad. [...] The standouts of the collection are the two "comedy" one-parters: Gareth Roberts's "The Lodger" has the tenth Doctor moving in with Mickey for a week, with hilarious consequences, of course. And Nev Fountain's "The Green Eyed Monster" puts Rose on a reality television show exploring her jealousy of the Doctor's other women-- especially Jackie!

I was curious to see how much my impressions of some of these stories shifted this time around!

from Doctor Who Magazine #365

The Betrothal of Sontar, from Doctor Who Magazine #365-67 (Feb.-Mar. 2006)
story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This sees the first appearance of the Sontarans in the DWM strip since 1993's Pureblood (and even reuses that story's title term); it's about a group of low-quality Sontarans who run a mining rig instead of getting glorious soldiering duty, a neat look into a different dimension of Sontaran society than we've ever seen on screen. The cosmic maguffin wasn't super interesting, but I liked the two principal Sontaran characters. I'm not sure why in my review above I called this story's resolution "highly disappointing." Like, rereading it I have no idea what my beef was at all.

from Doctor Who Magazine #368

The Lodger, from Doctor Who Magazine #368 (Apr. 2006)
story by Gareth Roberts, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This was fun; you can see why Moffat picked it up to make it into a tv episode, and though being a 45-minute story gave it more room to breathe, this version has the benefit of pairing the Doctor with a familiar character—and not having to work in an alien threat of some kind. More of a series of vignettes than a story, but a very solid series of them, and the kind of thing that (somewhat ironically) only DWM could do, I think.

from Doctor Who Magazine #370

F.A.Q., from Doctor Who Magazine #369-71 (May-July 2006)
story by Tony Lee, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I was dreading this one going in. I remembered my negative review from last time around, and having since suffered through Tony Lee's run on IDW's Doctor Who comic book, my opinions of Lee as a comic writer have only diminished. But... I actually kind of liked this? I wouldn't say it's a work of genius or anything—the stories on either side of it are better—but it's fun enough. It has the grounded sensibility of the RTD era, focusing on an ordinary family affected by alien powers, shades of "Fear Her" (a story that I really like). Rose gets some good spotlight moments. The main thing I don't like is the reveal about the teacher who didn't really exist, which seemed kind of pointless. Like, it's spooky, but it doesn't really seem to make a character or thematic point.

from Doctor Who Magazine #373

The Futurists, from Doctor Who Magazine #372-74 (Aug.-Oct. 2006)
story & art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I really don't know what I was thinking when I wrote my above review, because this story was on fire. Good ideas, great visuals, neat contrasts (black Romans in Britain vs. a fascist Italian state), fast pace—four different key locations in three installments!—nice themes, and above all, good characterization for Rose and some genuine laugh-out-loud jokes. Loved gags about the Silurians, how many people were in the resistance, the use of the resistance, and especially the clever use of the psychic paper. "But Darius... you can't read..." "Oh." I can imagine it playing out perfectly on screen. Rose leading the captured Silurian women in revolt is great, and her voice is captured very well. Exactly the kind of story the strip ought to be doing when the tv show is leading, and the volume's highlight. I don't know how I got it so wrong fourteen years ago.

(Wait... fourteen years ago!?)

from Doctor Who Magazine #375

Interstellar Overdrive, from Doctor Who Magazine #375-76 (Nov.-Dec. 2006)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I do love time loop stories. They're one of my favorite sf subgenres. TNG's "Cause and Effect," Groundhog Day, SG-1's "Window of Opportunity," Discovery's "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," Russian Doll season one, Palm Springs, I love them all. I am a total sucker for them. I even love the chronic hysteresis bit in Meglos.

Um, except this one. I think it's a noble attempt. But it has two things going against it, I reckon. One is that the repetition just isn't as interesting when it's solely visual. Here the scenes are all shown from a different angle, but that means you don't really get that uncanny echo that makes these kind of things work on screen. The second is that since it's only two parts, the loop only repeats once, and so it's less a time loop story, and more a story where something happens once, and then the characters get a do-over. It feels cheap, I guess, if it's that easy to get out of the loop. Seeing the iterations is what makes these kind of things fun!

But there are some good jokes and the part one cliffhanger is a good one.

from Doctor Who Storybook 2007

Opera of Doom!, from Doctor Who Storybook 2007
story by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This story is a delight. Quick, fun, good gags. A little too quick, maybe—the fact that people were disappearing into the alien opera house maybe should have been set up better—but I really enjoyed it. The really terrible musician who becomes amazing is a fun character with lots of good jokes.

The Green-Eyed Monster, from Doctor Who Magazine #377 (Jan. 2007)
story by Nev Fountain, art & letters by Roger Langridge, colours by James Offredi

Rose's last appearance in the strip is a good one, bringing Mickey back again and also marking Jackie's only strip appearance. It's a kind of contrived story about an alien jealousy monster and a talk show, but it's all worth it for the incredible sequence where Rose thinks that the Doctor has settled down with her mother. The ending gag of Jackie wanting a second kiss is delightful.

The Warkeeper's Crown, from Doctor Who Magazine #378-80 (Jan.-Mar. 2007)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Rose of course stopped appearing on screen way back in July 2006, but DWM seems to have considered "The Runaway Bride" her official cut-off point as the current companion—the first episode without her as a lead, I guess. So here we get a companion-less story to bridge the gap before Martha, and DWM brings back the Brigadier to serve as a temporary companion. Though the Brigadier appeared in the "past Doctor" early of the early 1990s, I think this is his first present-day appearance since The Mark of Mandragora.

from Doctor Who Magazine #380

It's okay. I liked the first part all right, which pulls the Doctor, the Brigadier, and the wrong Mike Yates together; I liked the last part, where the wrong Mike Yates tries to remake Britain. The middle part, though, lost me in the complicated exposition about the relations on the alien planet, and the whole story suffered as a consequence. I didn't really get the ending, for example. It seemed like things ought to have been simplified. The idea of the Doctor meeting the Brigadier for the first time after he himself fought in a war seemed squandered in a single panel. (Shades of Big Finish's own attempt to do this story, Way of the Burryman, which I read Warkeeper's Crown in the middle of, coincidentally.)

Other Notes:

• #367 is one of the rare issues from this era I actually do own; I picked it up to get the free Big Finish CD that came with it. I have no memory of reading The Betrothal of Sontar part three on its own, but I have to imagine it made no sense.
• John Tomlinson previously wrote for DWM way back in 1989, scripting Nemesis of the Dalek. (He also wrote two Who strips for The Incredible Hulk Presents and a prose story from the collection Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer.) At 210 issues, that's the longest gap between contributions for any DWM writer/artist as of 2014's strips. His cowriter here, Nick Abadzis, would go on to the primary writer of Titan's The Tenth Doctor comic.
  
• From #363 to 368, we have three stories, two of which were by Gareth Roberts and got adapted for television! Plus The Love Invasion inspires a scene in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" on screen. Quite a hit rate for him. The Lodger is, however, his last contribution to the DWM strip.
• I was all prepared to admit I was too hard on Tony Lee as a writer, and then I read his behind-the-scenes I comments. I don't know how one manages to write a bad creator's commentary, but somehow he does. Lots of very belabored jokes, with the kind of self-deprecating humour that comes across as false modesty.
• Jonathan Morris gives an incredible amount of detail in his creator's commentaries, down to entire lost scenes from both his stories. I can't think of another DWM graphic novel with this level of detail. Though I enjoyed Opera of Doom! the lost joke about the very slow gondola chase would have been amazing.



from Doctor Who Magazine #377


• The Green-Eyed Monster opens with a caption reading "Quite a while ago...", which confused me at first, but I guess it's meant to indicate that this goes between "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Rise of the Cybermen," which was broadcast many months prior. Placement notes aren't really the kind of thing DWM typically goes in for, and it didn't even occur to me we weren't going in chronological order prior to that, since I think every strip here could comfortably fit between "Tooth and Claw" and "School Reunion."
• At the time I read this volume, The Warkeeper's Crown was seemingly Alan Barnes's last contribution to the strip, but he is the writer of the current fourteenth Doctor strip, Liberation of the Daleks, that began in issue #584. In between these points, he wrote one million Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish and script-edited ten million.
  
• David A. Roach works on literally every story in this volume except for one ten-page strip, more than any other writer or artist... and somehow does not deserve cover billing!

This post is the thirty-first in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Widow's Curse. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
24. Ground Zero
25. End Game
26. The Glorious Dead
27. Oblivion
28. Transformers: Time Wars and Other Stories
29. The Flood
30. The Cruel Sea