Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: The Child of Time (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 34)

23 January 2023

The Child of Time (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 34)

The Child of Time: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Jonathan Morris, Martin Geraghty, Dan McDaid, et al.

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2010-11
Acquired: December 2013
Read: November 2022

So, Doctor Who is back on screen. David Tennant regenerated into Matt Smith on New Year's Day, and the show once again has regular episodes and a regular companion; the strips reprinted here span from "The Eleventh Hour" to "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe," the entirety of series 5 and 6.

You might expect the strip to return to its pre–Crimson Hand format, which was well honed by the time of The Widow's Curse: unconnected stories featuring the tv TARDIS team, by a rotating group of writers and artists. But, surprisingly, the strip opts to go for the Crimson Hand format again: a single writer and linked stories. It seems to be that off the back of the success of The Crimson Hand, they must have wanted to try that approach again.

But it's not exactly the same. The strip using a single writer with continuing story threads hadn't been done while the tv show was on since Steve Parkhouse's run (#53-99, June 1981–Apr. 1985)!* As writer Jonathan Morris notes, this did cause some issues: when Rory became a regular companion during series 6, the strip couldn't accommodate this, as the entire run was set during series 5 when Rory had been erased from time. (Steve Parkhouse, of course, solved this kind of problem by pretending there were no such people as "Adric," "Tegan," "Nyssa," "Turlough," or "Peri.")

So while The Crimson Hand was a success, the run of strips collected in The Child of Time is a bit hamstrung in a way its predecessor was not.

from Doctor Who Magazine #423

Supernature, from Doctor Who Magazine #421-23 (May-July 2010)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Indeed, it gets off to a rocky start. I remember this one from its original appearance in DWM... and I remember not liking it. The usually strong Mike Collins once again pencils the DWM debut of a new Doctor, but he seems to struggle with the faces of Matt Smith and Karen Gillian in a way that wasn't true of Eccleston, Piper, Tennant, and Agyeman. On top of that, while the introductory stories for all the previous new series companions do a good job of highlighting them, this sidelines Amy quite a lot, complete with a very Colin Baker–era transformation into a hideous creature. The story never really engaged me, and neither did the side characters.

Props, though, to the excellent joke about the gun held together with screws, that made me laugh, and Morris does a good Moffat pastiche in the recurrent glimpses of the colony's emergency message. (Oh, and in the gratuitous Amy nudity.)

Planet Bollywood!, from Doctor Who Magazine #424 (Aug. 2010)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Roger Langridge, colours by James Offredi

Somewhat surprisingly, I would argue, screen Doctor Who has never given us a musical episode. Morris delivers a fantastic one here: the lyrics are good fun to read, the technobabble excuse for it all is actually convincing (enough), and of course Roger Langridge was born to draw it. (His stylized art is also the perfect fit for Matt Smith's chin.) I particularly liked the "Technobabble" song but they're all good. Might be the best story in this volume, except for the next couple.

from Doctor Who Magazine #426

The Golden Ones, from Doctor Who Magazine #425-28 (Sept.-Dec. 2010)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Sometimes the strip very much tries to pastiche the kind of thing Moffat was doing on screen (see: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night). At other times, though, it does its own thing: this is a fast-paced contemporary sci-fi thriller, the kind of thing Moffat wasn't interested in, but Russell T Davies gave us on screen in Aliens of London/World War Three or The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. Or, to put it in DWM referents, it's like The Flood or The Age of Ice. It's very well put together, and I really enjoyed it. Good twists, quick jokes (you can tell Morris has got the hang of the Eleventh Doctor), nice moments for Amy, amazing visuals. The whole thing looks excellent; Martin Geraghty just ups his game every time he comes back. It's neat seeing the eleventh Doctor and Amy in a slightly different genre, and this is a good example of it.

from Doctor Who Magazine #429

The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop, from Doctor Who Magazine #429 (Jan. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Rob Davis, colours by Geraint Ford, letters by Roger Langridge

This is, I think, the first comic strip you might call a Christmas special, but there will be more to come over the years. It's a good tradition to start, and who could draw it better than Rob Davis? There's not much of a story, to be honest: C. S. Lewis tells the Doctor and Amy a story about two kids meeting a man with a bookshop that leads to another world, with lots of references to Narnia and other children's fantasy stories; the story is a bit simple, though it has a pretty clever resolution. But it looks brilliant and feels evocative, and well, this is a comic strip after all. Davis's bookshop interior is in particular amazing, and the thing is shot through with the chilliness of winter.

from Doctor Who Magazine #431

The Screams of Death, from Doctor Who Magazine #430-31 (Feb.-Mar. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Dan McDaid, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Dan McDaid is back! And what a story for him. Again, it oozes with creepy atmosphere; it's like a better version of The Vampires of Venice. The villain's plan is convolutedly great in a way that makes perfect sense. Well, except for the bit where he uses flying hypnotized opera singers in their nightclothes as his minions! But all the time travel lark is a well-thought-through twist on a common trope.

from Doctor Who Magazine #432

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, from Doctor Who Magazine #432 (Apr. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

If I was feeling a bit mean, I might say that as a writer, Morris can sometimes be better as pastiching other's styles than having his own. But again, this is one of those stories that feels like it could have been on tv: it's straight out of the show that gave us, say, Night Terrors to have creepy ghosts in a retirement home. It's got some good stuff, but it all wrapped up a bit too easy: basically the Doctor and Amy find out what's up, and then the story is over.

Long-time DWM inker David A Roach (by the time this came out, he had inked 85 strips) makes his pencilling debut here. He's good at likenesses, and it's interesting to note that I think he uses finer lines on his own work than others'. I did sometimes find the action less fluid.

from Doctor Who Magazine #433

Forever Dreaming, from Doctor Who Magazine #433-34 (May-June 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

I don't have much to say about this one, except that Adrian Salmon does great both by Amy in a 1960s minidress and probably the creepiest-looking villains I can ever remember from DWM. The story is a bit of a confusing jumble of mental states; feels like it needed one more draft to sort it out.

from Doctor Who Magazine #435

Apotheosis, from Doctor Who Magazine #435-37 (June-Aug. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Dan McDaid, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

And here, the plot arc all comes to a head.

Plot arc? Indeed, I haven't mentioned any plot arc because there's not really a plot arc. In some individual stories, people would disappear between panels when touching the TARDIS: the TARDIS had been infected by the spores from the planet Basingstoke way back in Supernature. I don't think I noticed at the time, and I wouldn't have noticed now without the hints in the commentaries. This might be what you want with the show on the air: a viewer who picks up a random issue because they liked "Closing Time" doesn't want to be confused by a Glorious Deadesque epic, or even something like Uroboros or Mortal Beloved. So I would say there's not much of a plot arc to grab on to here, but I'm not sure there should be one.

As for its reveal in the story, it's done very well. It reminded me of that way that "Flesh and Stone" wrong-foots the viewer halfway through. You know, as a viewer of the revival's first four series, that series-long plot arcs never matter until the twelfth episode, so when the crack in time suddenly starts mattering, it really throws you for a loop. Similarly, you know that there's no plot arc at all in the strip when the programme is on tv, so the reveal about the TARDIS itself being the cause of problems is a great twist. What a cliffhanger! And the story has a lot of other stuff to like, both courtesy of Dan McDaid and Jonathan Morris. The nun warriors are well-handled: very Moffat but good fun.

from Doctor Who Magazine #439

The Child of Time, from Doctor Who Magazine #438-41 (Sept.-Dec. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

The problem with the arc, however, is that it's not really about anything. By which I mean, there's a bunch of events that have happened, but they don't really matter to the characters. This was very much not true of Majenta in The Crimson Hand, or Izzy and the Doctor in Oblivion. That means this story, aside from the fact that its villain Chiyoko had appeared before, is pretty much like any other one. Nothing is at stake here for the Doctor and Amy... even though the story arc means that the Doctor has been inadvertently responsible for a number of deaths! The story ends with an emotional climax, as the Doctor convinces Chiyoko to stand down... I wish we had seen more of her as a person throughout the arc, because I found this kind of unconvincing on its own. It felt like a lost opportunity to do something more.

That said, this is a pretty fun story on its own terms. The cliffhanger ending to part one is amazing, as is its resolution. (On the other hand, the resolution to part two is rubbish.) Alan Turing is a good temporary companion, and the Doctor flirting with him is great. The take on the Brontës is pretty delightful. I like that the backstory to Apotheosis is picked up and explained here, deepening the DWM universe. The Back to the Future shenanigans are fun. Overall, fun, but I am not sure it feels like the climax to a run of twenty in the same way Crimson Hand did.

Stray Observations:

I'm not being mean, but as I said when I reviewed The Widow's Curse, I'm a bit surprised Jonathan Morris was picked. Morris had done some solid strips, but they had all been one-offs, with the exception of a single two-parter. It seems a big leap from that to twenty!
Mike Collins draws the colonists in Supernature wearing jumpsuits pretty similar to the one Rose wore in The Cruel Sea.
It probably wouldn't have been to the story's benefit, to be honest, but it might have been nice to work the UNIT crew from The Age of Ice into The Golden Ones.
In the extras, Morris talks a lot of rejected concepts. One of his ideas for Apotheosis was a story where the Doctor and Amy find frozen versions of what they assume to be their future selves, but are in fact their past selves. Editor Scott Gray rejected it for being a bit too like Morris's audio drama Cobwebs, but Morris would reuse the idea as the central twist of his audio drama Cortex Ice anyway.
The typeface used in the Apotheosis logo is the one used the covers of all collections since The Crimson Hand.
Apotheosis is, alas, Rob Davis's last DWM contribution. I don't know what he's up to these days, but it seems a crime he never got a run of his own, or at least more stories. Like Dan McDaid, a great writer-illustrator double threat.
"YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Aside from making his pencilling debut for DWM, David A Roach works on eleven strips as inker, more than the two artists featured on the cover, Martin Geraghty (8) and Dan McDaid (5).

* I almost wrote Alan McKenzie, but in fact his run (#100-10, May 1985–Mar. 1986) entirely fits into the hiatus between Revelation of the Daleks Part Two and The Trial of a Time Lord Part One.

This post is the thirty-fourth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Chains of Olympus. Previous installments are listed below:

Science's Less Accurate Grandmother

23 January 2023

The Child of Time (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 34)

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