The Widow's Curse: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Rob Davis, John Ross, Jonathan Morris, Martin Geraghty, Dan McDaid, Roger Langridge, Ian Edginton, Mike Collins, Adrian Salmon, et al.
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Collection published: 2009 Contents originally published: 2007-08 Acquired: January 2010 Previously read: April 2010 Reread: October 2022 |
This is my era! In spring 2007, I took a three-week trip to the United Kingdom. I was excited to get to see Doctor Who
on the tv as it aired... but the person I was staying with didn't have a
tv! I had to torrent it just like I was back home in the States.
But the thing I could do was pick up Doctor Who Magazine
in any old shop. The three weeks overlapped with the on-sale periods of
#382 and 383, if I remember correctly, and I picked up both in the
bookstore while I was there. Once I was back home, I realized my local
Borders carried the magazine, so I just kept going with it. Soon, I
would switch to getting it through my local comic book shop, and I have
continued to get the magazine ever since. (I am not sure where my first
year's worth of issues actually is, though; the earliest one in my DWM boxes is #397. Did I... gasp... throw them away!?)
For me, this was a real high period for the magazine. The covers from
2007 are fantastic; great publicity photos well used (#386 is iconic, I
reckon), and I very much miss the in-depth set reports and episode
features of this era. And Russell T Davies's "Production Notes" were so good!
This means I would have joined the strip as a regular reader with part two of The Woman Who Sold the World.
I was probably very confused! To be honest, though I love reading the
strip in collected editions, I often struggle with it in the actual
magazine. I find it hard to invest in a story that I read in ten-page
segments stretched out across months. Still, I do remember some of the
stories of this era from my first read, particularly, Time of My Life from #399. (I also have negative memories of Universal Monsters
in the actual magazine, but I enjoyed it both the previous time I read
this collection and this time. Maybe I was just not yet an Adrian Salmon
devotee?)
It was kind of weird to read this right after watching The Power of the Doctor and seeing the 60th anniversary teaser trailer... Tennant and Tate nostalgia rules the land!
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #382 |
The Woman Who Sold the World, from Doctor Who Magazine #381-84 (May-July 2007)
script by Rob Davis, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge
This I found a bit tough to get into at first. It's one of those weird Doctor Who stories where at first there's a bunch of disparate elements and it's not clear how they relate to each other; you're sort of relentlessly thrown from bit to bit. I particularly found it hard to track how I was supposed to feel about Sugarpea and Sweetleaf, the old couple in the flying chair. But by the end of the story I had come around and was totally into it: great characters, so many great concepts packed in here, good jokes, and a real emotional ending like something that might have been done on tv at the time. Only this is so much madder and more expansive! In the notes, editor Clay Hickman says they were trying to get the strip to be like the Mills & Wagner days, and I can totally see it: it has that non-stop breakneck feeling, only with more of a genuine character focus. Only thing that doesn't work for me is the kid who accidentally kills his dad. Felt a bit too gruesome and dark.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #385 |
script by Rob Davis, pencils by John Ross, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge
A one-off gag strip, but a decent one. The Doctor tries to preserve the timeline from rogue time travellers by riding on a bus with a soup made from the Mayor of London, but it's all (mostly) told from the perspective of a passenger (we do have a couple cuts to what Martha is doing on Mars). The narration of the passenger sometimes lays it on a bit thick but overall it's an enjoyable conceit, well executed.The First, from Doctor Who Magazine #386-89 (Sept.-Dec. 2007)
script by Dan McDaid, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge
The Doctor and Martha meet Shackleton... and of course aliens made of ice. This is solid: it didn't wow me, but it felt like a reasonably good pastiche of an RTD-era "celebrity historical." I found the ending a bit confusing and rushed, but I enjoyed the experience overall. Nice as always to see Martin Geraghty on the main strip.Sun Screen, from Doctor Who Storybook 2008
script by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge
This story made me realize that I'm not sure one strip is really a good length for a Doctor Who comic if it's attempting to do the "traditional" Doctor Who story of the Doctor showing up somewhere, finding a bad thing, and fixing it. You can do a comedy story, you can do a character study, but eight pages for this kind of thing is so compressed that there's no interesting characters, no plot complications that aren't instantly resolved. Morris's other one-offs in this volume show better ways of handling it, though I guess a one-off adventure is what the context of the Doctor Who Storybook pretty much calls for.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #390 |
script by Jonathan Morris, art and letters by Roger Langridge, colours by James Offredi
Indeed, here we go. This one is fun: a bunch of old but rubbish foes of the Doctor get together, and are undermined by their own incompetence. Probably my favorite gag was the Mentor, totally not a knock-off of the Master.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #392 |
story by Ian Edginton, art by Adrian Salmon, letters by Roger Langridge
Again, if not a great story, a very solid one. I like how the story plays into all the horror tropes in parts one and two, and then undoes them all in part three, but does so without feeling gratuitous or contrived. And of course giving this story to Adrian Salmon is a stroke of genius, one of the best-ever artists ever associated with Doctor Who, and this plays perfectly into his wheelhouse.
One thing I do love about this story is how different it is in terms of tone. Since The Green-Eyed Monster in #377, I feel like the strip is reembracing that it is, well, a comic strip more. Though the two Rose volumes had some good and even great stories, I think the ones from #377 are more playful in tone and format in the way that only a comic strip can be. I don't think tv could do something like the shift from Death to the Doctor! to Universal Monsters to The Widow's Curse. Sure, you can shoot each episode like its own film (as the Moffat era did to good effect), but here you can even change how the characters look... but it's somehow all the same thing anyway.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #398 |
story by Rob Davis, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi
How good is this? Definitely the standout of this volume, except for maybe The Time of My Life. Great visuals, great concepts, great capturing of character. Westminster Abbey on a Caribbean island! Donna flying a Boeing 747! This is the stuff comics were born to do. On top of that, it's populated with a genuine cast of guest characters. This is actually something the strip doesn't do a lot, or doesn't do effectively; most stories I feel like just have one or two people in them who are fully developed. But we have a whole group of tourists and more here, each of which who gets a genuinely great moment. The way the title comes into play at the end is excellent. It's kind of weird to see DWM do such a close sequel to a screen story, but overall it works incredibly well. If Donna only got one multi-part story, I'm glad it was this one.The Immortal Emperor, from Doctor Who Storybook 2009
script by Jonathan Morris, art by Rob Davis, colours by Rob Davis & Geraint Ford, letters by Roger Langridge
Like Sun Screen, this is pretty breakneck. It works a bit better, in that I love the stylized art of Rob Davis, and a bit worse, in that I'm a bit skeptical of the fact that in one of Doctor Who's rare forays into the history of a non-UK country, every significant character other than the Doctor and Donna is evil.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #399 |
script by Jonathan Morris, art by Rob Davis, colours by Geraint Ford, letters by Roger Langridge
Again, how good is this? I love this style of storytelling, a number of quick one-page excerpts from unseen adventures that show off the Doctor and Donna at their best. Lots of great jokes and great concepts and beautiful moments. The page where they just have fun seeing the Beatles is probably the best, but they're all great. On top of that you get the amazing art and layouts of Rob Davis, which adds so much to each page.Other Notes:
In the past I kind of thought the early new series–era comics weren't very good... on this reread I haven't felt that way—they're good on the whole even if they're not great—but since #377 they've been on a definite upward trajectory, and I can't wait to see what happens next...
- Mike Collins's design for the space bank here (a giant space pyramid) is basically identical to his design for the Redeemer spaceships in the Star Trek comic New Frontier: Double Time.
- My hypothetical "only-knows-Doctor-Who-from-the-strip" reader must have been very confused reading Death to the Doctor! "Who the heck is this lady in white? Where's Sharon!?" But it is nice to see Frobisher and Izzy again. I think this is the strip's first post-2005 reference to its pre-2005 history, right? Am I forgetting something? And then a few stories later we get the freakin' zyglots! Only thing that could have been better would be making the Dan Abnett–style space marines in Time of My Life the actual Foreign Hazard Duty.
- Here we're back to a run with neither a consistent writer (there are four different ones across nine stories) nor a consistent penciller (six different ones). But unlike past instances of this, the strip still feels coherent. I think this probably comes down to 1) strong editorial work from Clay Hickman/Tom Spilsbury and especially Scott Gray, and 2) strong capturing of the voices of the regulars, especially David Tennant. All these various creators seem to be on the same page despite their varied styles, unlike, say, the early McCoy-era strips collected in A Cold Day in Hell!
- Universal Monsters is Ian Edginton's only contribution to Doctor Who Magazine. He has, however, written a mediocre Big Finish audio drama, Shield of the Jötunn. Outside of the world of Doctor Who, he is a prolific comics writer: I know him best from his Star Trek work (an excellent run for Marvel on the Captain Pike series Early Voyages, plus an IDW one-off), but his best-known work is probably Scarlet Traces, a series of The War of the Worlds sequels.
- This collection skips over Hotel Historia from #394, because it makes more sense to collect it in the next volume, The Crimson Hand, as we'll see. I guess because of when it was published, I always think of that story as featuring Martha... but it totally does not!
- I usually read the strips in these collections in order publication order; this means I should have moved The Immortal Emperor to the end. (It would actually properly go between strips in the next volume by publication order.) But it was clearly sequenced here based on reading flow, and in this case, I made an exception and bowed to book's position, which was the right choice.
- Both Martha and Donna had been written out of the tv show by the time their first comic story came to an end. At five strips, Donna has one of the shortest runs of any multi-story companion, tying Olla the Heat Vampire (#130-34). This is exacerbated by the fact that, as a tv companion, she just blips into existence... though she actually does kind of get written out.
- Two of the writers here would go on to become the "main" writer of the strip in the future. Dan McDaid, writer of The First, would do the tenth Doctor and Majenta Pryce run (#400-20), while Jonathan Morris would do the eleventh Doctor and Amy run (#421-41). No offense to either writer, though, who have both turned out strong work, but the surprising thing to me—based purely on the quality of work in this collection—is that Rob Davis never got a run. Two excellent stories as a writer in this collection, one excellent story as an artist, and some other solid work as well. Able to do big stories and little stories in a variety of styles; knows how to crash weird things together in the best DWM tradition.
- "YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: This collection has ten writers and artists. Nine of them get cover credit. The only one who doesn't? Inker David A. Roach, who works on thirteen of the nineteen strips. John Ross draws just one and still manages to snag cover credit. Indeed, he gets second billing!
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #386 |
This post is the thirty-second in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Crimson Hand. 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
- Oblivion
- Transformers: Time Wars and Other Stories
- The Flood
- The Cruel Sea
- The Betrothal of Sontar
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