Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: February 2023

27 February 2023

The Blood of Azrael (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 37)

The Blood of Azrael: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Mike Collins, Adrian Salmon, and David A Roach

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 2013-14
Acquired: August 2015
Read: December 2022

Here, we settle into what becomes the structure of the strip for the next several years: thirteen-strip arcs designed to fill out the new, smaller, graphic novel size. This one takes us up until the end of Matt Smith's run, and feels a bit like an appendix to the rest of it, picking up some characters and concepts from the previous volume, but not being as big as what had come before. Which, to be fair, is how Clara's tv run with the eleventh Doctor feels too!

Scott Gray, I think, keeps pushing himself here. It's interesting to read the backmatter, because he's always looking for opportunity to squeeze a bit more characterization; he notes, as I did as a viewer, that Clara feels like a bit of a nonentity during her first series, and so he tries to delve into her a bit more... coincidentally foreshadowing her transition into being a teacher that would come with "The Day of the Doctor"! He also zooms in on the eleventh Doctor's occasional bouts of mopiness, his relationship with the TARDIS as a character, and his self-doubts.

He also keeps on building up the DWM world. A lot of DWM fans say they like the comic's building up of its own world, but I think what they really mean is they like the way the comic did that when they were twelve: they like Maxwell Edison and Stockbridge and Dogbolter and the fact people say "mazumas" and the DWM version of Gallifrey. It would be easy for the strip to continuously go back to these things, as it did during the Izzy era. But Gray and his artistic collaborators (mostly Mike Collins here) keep pushing the DWM universe forward. Here, we get more about the Lakes from The Broken Man and Hunters of the Burning Stone, and more about Horatio Lynk and Cornucopia from The Cornucopia Caper, and we get the addition of Amy Johnson to the DWM recurring cast. It's great stuff, and I love that the strip keeps doing it instead of resting on the laurels of nostalgia. Cornucopia is a great setting.

from Doctor Who Magazine #464

A Wing and a Prayer, from Doctor Who Magazine #462-64 (Aug.-Oct. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Like Rose and Martha, Clara is introduced into DWM with a fast-paced, lively story with some good moments for her character, illustrated by Mike Collins. It's the only way to do it, I guess! This is a good solid story that one expects from DWM at this point, which makes it easy to overlook how good it is. Good jokes, good characterization, neat concepts, and an excellent climax. An enjoyable take on the celebrity historical with a delightful ending. If they were all like this, we'd be in great hands.

from Doctor Who Magazine #465

Welcome to Tickle Town, from Doctor Who Magazine #465-66 (Nov.-Dec. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, art & colour by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

Now, it pains me to say this, because normally I have nothing but praise for him (indeed, I own a piece of his original artwork, the only comics artist for whom that is true), but... I don't think Adrian Salmon was the right person to draw this story. Tickle Town is a Disneylandesque amusement park, only its inhabitants have been held captive for twenty years, kept in line by cartoon characters. Salmon of course draws great cartoon characters: the frog cowboy is a particular highlight. But it seems to me the power of the story visually comes from the contrast between the cartoons and the real people, but Salmon's style is sufficiently realist to make it work. Maybe with regular DWM colourist James Offredi it would have stood out more? But I can't help thinking there's a better version of this out there, where (say) Martin Geraghty draws all the human characters and Salmon the cartoons, and the contrast is striking.

But still, it's decent fun, particularly the song about the world being a nuclear wasteland set to the tune of "It's a Small World, After All."

from Doctor Who Magazine #467

John Smith and the Common Men, from Doctor Who Magazine #467 (Nov. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, art by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Back in the Paul McGann days, once senses Scott Gray tearing his hair out trying to come up with new premises for anniversary strips. In 2013, he had to come up with two! Hunters of the Burning Stone was a fiftieth-anniversary story, and now we have a one-off for the anniversary itself. I have fond memories of this one from back in 2013, a sort of sideways take on the concept: less about Doctor Who the show with its characters and aliens, and more about Doctor Who at its core: the values it promotes. John Smith is a government drudge who can't help anyone even when he wants to; the story depicts his slow awakening to something being wrong in the world and how he stops it. David A Roach excels on art, giving us an army of bow-tied bureaucrats, and an atmosphere of all-consuming drudgery. A clever idea for an anniversary story, not derivative at all, and well-executed.

from Doctor Who Magazine #470

Pay the Piper / The Blood of Azrael, from Doctor Who Magazine #468-74 (Jan.-July 2014)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Pay the Piper is a short, seemingly standalone story that ends up leading into a bigger story to come. In the backmatter, Scott Gray calls Pay the Piper a "Utopia"... but of course DWM was doing this kind of thing long before the television programme was (e.g., Stars Fell on Stockbridge, Darkness, Falling, The Keep, Me and My Shadow). Pay the Piper is fun at first: the Doctor and Clara at an auction in cyberspace complete with comedy alien cab driver, then kind of horrifying when the Doctor gets "erased" and it turns out genocide and cannibalism are on the menu. Then it shifts again and you learn that two different guest characters are members of MI-6's "Wonderland" project from Hunters of the Burning Stone... and there's a hell of a cliffhanger when the Doctor accidentally sells the TARDIS!

This all leads into The Blood of Azrael, another Cornucopia-focused story that brings back Amy Johnson, Annabel Lake, and Horatio Lynk, all becoming firm favorites, and gives Matt Smith's Doctor some really interesting stuff to do when he's rich but TARDIS-less. Gray shows real insight into the character of the Doctor, and the story itself is a decent one, with some good twists and nice themes about xenophobia and money and amazing visuals from Mike Collins and David A Roach. The bit where Amy goes to her death is genuinely emotional! She does not die, but I did not remember that.

The complaint I have is a bit unfair: it's just not as good as Hunters of the Burning Stone! I think this is down to the characterization of the climax; the Doctor apologizes, and... that's it, the TARDIS accepts it. I kind of wanted more of a reckoning... but that's probably outside the scope of what the strip can actually do. The last page, with Matt Smith dancing is celebration, is excellent.

Sometimes DWM is superior to the television programme. That was not the case during the Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant eras, even at the strip's best. But I think we actually got pretty close to that again during this latter-era Matt Smith run. It might be dancing in show's shadow... but boy can it dance like no one else.

Stray Observations:

The relationship between Clara and Amy (not that one) had romantic/sexual chemistry in my opinion, Scott Gray picking up something that I don't think was really hinted at on screen until series eight!
I like Cornucopia as I said above. One of the benefits of evolving a setting in a comics medium is that every time the artist changes, the world expands. Dan McDaid's Cornucopia is not Martin Geraghty's is not Mike Collins's. But they all coexist. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like Gray made a slight mistake in removing the "crime is legal" schtick from Corncuopia's first appearance. It's a bit less interesting without it! I like that we get a return from those of those crimelords here.
Yes, my dates above are correct. Like most magazines, DWM is usually cover-dated a month or two ahead of release, but the fiftieth-anniversary issue (for I guess obvious reasons) was cover-dated to the actual month of release.
Scott Gray notes he considered having Annabel disguise herself as Majenta Pryce in Pay the Piper. I see why he didn't, but what a twist it would have been!
Whoever wrote the Tardis wiki article on Amy Johnson didn't read all the way to the end of The Blood of Azrael, because it claims she dies!
"JUST A TRACER" WATCH: We have cover credit! Yes, for the first time, after eighty-eight previous artistic contributions to Doctor Who Magazine in ten previous graphic novels, David A Roach has finally got his name on the cover! Is it because inking has finally been recognized as a valid part of the comics experience? Well, no. It's because he pencils and inks one strip here. Pencilling one strip > inking eighty-eight. I'll be continuing to monitor this key facet of DWM.

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

24 February 2023

Reading L. Frank Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland Aloud to My Son

Dot and Tot of Merryland by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Donald Abbott

Once again, my four-year-old son and I ended up with a gap between finishing one Oz book and getting ahold of the next. After a streak of three Thompsons came to an end with Giant Horse of Oz, our copy of Jack Pumpkinhead was not even shipped. So I proposed that we read my very last "borderlands" book, Dot and Tot of Merryland.

Originally published: 1901
Read aloud: September 2022

Like many of Baum's early books, you can (retrospectively, at least) look back and see why Wonderful Wizard worked and this did not. "Dot" and "Tot" are two small children—she a child of privilege whose father buys a country estate just so she can get some fresh air, he the child of the estate's gardener—who fall asleep in a boat while exploring, which comes unmoored and drifts down an underground river into Merryland. Merryland is a country divided into seven valleys, which are home to, in turn, clowns, candy, babies, dolls, cats, wind-up animals, and lost things. Dot and Tot basically drift from valley to valley, interacting with each one's inhabitants and then moving on; there's no real quest here except for a vague sense they want to get home. It's nowhere near as purposeful as Dorothy's trip to Oz; it's much more akin to the seemingly purposeless wanderings in The Sea Fairies, The Enchanted Island of Yew, and The Master Key.

On the other hand, it lacks the violence of the latter two, and for a kid hearing a chapter every day, that kind of focus matters less. He had fun hearing about each strange place in turn, which is clearly what Baum wanted.

Baum's wild imagination is on display here; though some of the valleys aren't very interesting (cats, clowns), others are filled with neat ideas and evocative imagery, such as the Valley of Babies, where babies fall from the sky in giant blossoms, and are tended to by storks until they are ready to be carried to the outside world to be born. Mr. Split, the man who can split himself into two parts is a great concept, and the Valley of Lost Things is suitably creepy and forlorn. In the Valley of Dolls, Dot and Tot are joined by the Queen of Merryland, who goes to the remaining valleys with them, thus removing what modicum of danger there was. The idea that she kind of needs to force them to stay by adopting them is interesting, but at the end of the book, she just changes her mind and lets them leave anyway.

We read the 1990s Books of Wonder edition, which replaces the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow with new ones by Donald Abbott, which are clearly designed to emulate Denslow's as much as possible. They're nice enough.

(Worldbuilding implications: the book indicates that there are "real" clowns from the Valley of Clowns in Merryland, who go into the outside world to entertain children, and fake clowns, who are just humans putting on make-up. This means Notta Bit More from Cowardly Lion is a fake clown... which is, frankly, not too surprising. Does the Valley of Clowns have any connection to Oz's Play City, a settlement of pierrettes and pierrots in the Winkie Country from Grampa in Oz?)

We went to my son's Oz continent map to see where Merryland was... but it was one of the places he had elected not to draw. So he decided to draw his own map of Merryland. I don't think he really gets what a "valley" is, actually; he clearly conceptualized it as a series of islands. He carefully counted out the seven valleys, but having done that kept going and added three more: the Valley of Dogs, the Valley of Ducks, and the Valley of Cats, Dogs, and Ducks! Room for sequels, I guess!

(The official Oz Club map puts Merryland between the Deadly Desert and the Nonestic Ocean, even though Dot and Tot get there via an underground river from Massachusetts. Even if you argue that the river is magic or something, the placement is a bit tricky, since the clowns get to the outside world by rolling down the mountains that surround the country. Hopefully none of them roll into the Deadly Desert!)

I have seen some Oz marathons incorporate all of Baum's other "Nonestic" fantasies in publication order, but this creates the problem that he mostly published them early in his career, and thus it takes a long time to get to the actual Oz novels. Or you could chuck them all at the end, but that creates the problem that you end up reading a lot of quite honestly mediocre novels in a row. Thus, I've been pretty happy with how we've ended up pausing the Thompsons every few books to take in one of them, even if it was kind of an inadvertent plan. Baum actually wrote one more, John Dough and the Cherub, but I don't own it, as it wasn't in print when I was an Oz-obsessed child. Since then, though, there's been an edition from Hungry Tiger Press, so I imagine I will pick it up and we will give it a go sooner or later.

Next up in sequence: Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz

22 February 2023

In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

If I particularly enjoy a book I read for the Hugo Awards, I make it a point of trying to pick up any sequels when they come out; part of the reason I started voting was, after all, to gain better exposure to contemporary sf&f. I read Rachel Hartman's Tess of the Road in 2019, when it was a finalist for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and I ranked it first. Tess was about a young woman named Tess learning to find her place in the world after a horrific event, and it ended with the promise of further adventure, with her signing aboard a sailing ship on a voyage of discovery. In 2022, the sequel was finally released, chronicling that sea voyage.

Published: 2022
Read: December 2022

Sequels are tricky business, and maybe especially in science fiction and fantasy. I feel like there is a tendency for a first book to be focused on a single point-of-view character and their adventures, and then the sequel opens up the world a bit, both by sending the protagonist into a different part of it, but also by adding new viewpoint characters. This happened in Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, it happened in Seth Dickinson's The Monster Baru Cormorant, the sequel to The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and it happened here. In all three of these cases, alas, it did not work for me. While the first book in each of these series feels focused and gains power from its singular focus, I found myself uncertain in each follow up about what the book was trying to do.

In the Serpent's Wake follows not just Tess, but various other people, both on her ship and off, searching for the last Serpent. Tess finds conflict on the ship, and off it, as it visits various colonies of her home country, and she discovers that colonialism is a complicated force, even when you sympathize with the colonizers... and it turns out that the naturalist she is apprenticed to is actually married to her rapist! It's kind of a lot, and I felt like the book didn't have a lot of momentum as a result. Like, in theory we're on this big quest, but the characters don't really do much on the quest because they're always stopping places. I think this is all intended to add to Tess's character arc, but I felt like what this arc actually was was nebulous in a way that was not true of the clear arc of Tess of the Road.

There's a lot of good worldbuilding, but there's a lot of other stuff in it, and I didn't really know what it was all for. The book is trying to demonstrate Tess's growth, but also explore issues of imperialism, and these things didn't have a clear link. The return of the rapist really derailed the narrative, too; it seemed too consequential to really fit in here, like it should have changed the book more than it did. And then also Tess happens to bump into a different man who was awful to her! The book is trying to say something about masculinity and power and empire, but it was too muddled for me to follow the thread of it. I wish there had been a clearer focus on the ship characters, who at the beginning of the novel seem quite important but eventually fall by the wayside and thus the work spent setting them up comes across as wasted.

Also there's a bit where one of the characters paraphrases the Star Trek narration: “And who knows what new life we will find beneath the sea? What strange creatures and lost civilizations? We Ninysh shall go—dare I say boldly?—where no one has ever gone before.” I get what Hartman is doing, she's critiquing these colonialist narratives of exploration (someone always already lives where you are going) but it totally threw me out of the book.

So what worked for me about the first was just not present in the sequel. I don't think I can fault Hartman for this—sequels should also not slavishly reproduce the first book over again—but I was sadly disappointed in this book, given how much I enjoyed Tess of the Road. I wanted to love it again but it isn't what I loved before.

20 February 2023

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Absent Enemies

Star Trek: Titan: Absent Enemies
by John Jackson Miller

November 2385

Published: 2014
Acquired: November 2020
Read: January 2023

And we're back to the ebook novellas, a format I have come to appreciate: when they're good, they're fun, and when they're bad, they're short. Absent Enemies is... neither? The Star Trek prose fiction debut of the writer of my favorite Star Wars ongoing comic (and my wife's, in that it's the only one she has ever read) is a short Titan story picking up shortly after The Fall. The Fall gave us a new status quo for Titan: Riker is now an admiral with increased scope of responsibilities, though he seems to be plating his flag on Titan for now, and Vale is in command, but hasn't been permanently assigned as CO yet.

This seems like potentially fertile ground for a story, but Absent Enemies didn't make much use of it. With Riker leading a mission to a planet while Vale remains in command of the ship, you could imagine this playing out basically exactly the same way in the previous status quo.

The book is fun enough: Titan is set to a planet the Enterprise-D visited back in the day; the planet was initially settled by the Vulcans but abandoned and then claimed by two feuding groups of colonists. The Federation comes periodically to service the equipment but can never make any headway with negotiating a peace. The Enterprise's trip was right after "The Next Phase"... and the settlers filched La Forge's draft paper about interphase and in the past decade managed to work out how to do it themselves! Riker and Tuvok and company have to figure out how to deescalate a war, get the settlers to stop using this dangerous technology, and stop the Typhon Pact from taking advantage.

It's fun but it's all a bit, well, insubstantial. There's nothing really at stake for the characters. There are some good action sequences using interphase, but I feel like the idea of two civilizations existing on top of each other is one that could have more done with it, a sort of Star Trek science take on China Miéville's The City & The City (but see below). This isn't a bad ebook novella (e.g., Q Are Cordially Uninvited..., Shield of the Gods), but it's also not the format at its best (e.g., The Struggle Within, The Collectors). I hope future Titan novels explore the characters more, particularly what it means for Riker to be an admiral now.

Continuity Notes:

Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "Wow it's a shame that instead of helping deal with the galactic terrorism crisis where millions of people are being killed we're babysitting dilithium miners and dealing with whiny settlers." Hmmmmm...
Various commenters have pointed out that when this book was released, it contained a number of continuity errors: characters present who shouldn't have been, incorrect bits of backstory. One of the benefits of the ebook format is that the publisher can push a change out, so that the edition I read was fine!

Other Notes:

I think the book's attempts to play the enmity between the two groups of settlers as comic is belied by the fact that 90% of them died in their civil war. Like, that's a horrific humanitarian crisis, not a comedy inconvenience.
I did like the bit where Riker realizes he's become a bit pompous now that he's an admiral.
Full disclosure: I have never actually gotten around to The City & The City. But I have never read anything by Miéville that wasn't good and interesting, so I am sure it is good and interesting. I am working my way through winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel; at my current rate I should get to The City & The City in 2052, so I'll report back then.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic by Jeffrey Lang

17 February 2023

The Joy of Parenting

Two recent stories for you:

Son One, I presume like all four-year-olds, is a master of procrastination when it comes to bedtime. I don't think he even really means to do it. It's just that, if you say "get your toothbrush," why wouldn't it be more interesting to just lie on the floor of the bathroom singing?

Now that both kids share a bed, they go through bedtime together. Hayley and I trade off who is in charge, and that person reads two books in bed after they're ready; each boy gets to pick one. For some reason, Son One deeply deeply cares about whose book gets read first, so I came up with the idea that to incentivize him to move quickly, the rule would be whoever was in bed first got to pick which book was read first.

This kind of worked. Son One could be cajoled to move more quickly, but he wasn't really going through the routine quickly. Indeed, he started do this thing where he would, like, jog in place as he performed certain tasks because he was doing them "fast"... but if you are bouncing your whole body around while you wash your hands, it actually slows you down! So most nights "Son Two" was still ready before him.

One night he had a brilliant idea, though. Son Two was already in his pajamas and ready to brush teeth, but Son One of course hadn't even started getting dressed. So Son One ran to the bathroom and shut the door and locked it. Now Son Two wouldn't be able to brush his teeth and he would lose his head start over Son One!

Then he got even smarter... He locked the door to the bedroom so that Son Two wouldn't be able to get out of it.

The problem here is that we were all in the kids' bedroom... and the bedroom locks from the outside! This is how it was when we bought the house, and we have kept it that way (even though we replaced all the doorknobs) because we want to be able to lock the kids in the room for time outs and for enforcing sleep training.

It's one of those locks you can open from the other side with a small flathead screwdriver, or that small tool thingy that comes with the doorknob. We used to have one of those on the doorframe inside the room, but at some point it got put on the doorframe above the bathroom door instead. (I think because I used to get Son One out when he locked himself in.) So we were searching through the room for something we might use, while in the meantime Son One was getting crazier and crazier, delighting in what he had done.

Finally, we had to admit we had no way of unlocking the door. So, we would have to go out through the window. I wasn't really sure how to remove the screen, and I ended up breaking its frame in the process. (Maybe it can't be removed from the inside?) I boosted Hayley out the window, she went around the house to the garage door and came in that way and let us all out.

Son One did not get his book picked first; he didn't get it read at all.

At the time we were pretty angry, but a few hours later and I had to admit it was pretty clever.

It's also a good example of Goodhart's Law: once a measure becomes a target, people begin to manipulate the measure in such a way that it is no longer a good measure.

We've really been in for it with kid sickness these past few weeks. Son Two had a brief fever of some kind. Then Son One got sick, and was out of school from a Friday to a Tuesday. He was back on Wednesday... and then Friday, Son Two got a fever and was out of school Friday to Wednesday. He went back on Thursday, and I allowed myself to breath a sigh of relief. Both kids fevers went pretty high at various point, and Son Two even went to the pediatric urgent care.

I had student conferences on Friday, and as I lead them, I felt that my eye was a bit itchy. When finally I got a break at lunchtime, I looked in the mirror and realized they were totally read; as the afternoon went on, they got increasingly gunky. Clearly, I had pinkeye. But the kids hadn't had pinkeye, just fevers. How had I got it? (I've had pinkeye twice since becoming a parent, both times picking it up from a kid, and both times I treated it just by using their leftover eyedrops.)

I stopped by the minute clinic on the way home. The doctor said I was right, I had bacterial conjunctivitis, and asked if I lived with other people. I said I had kids, but they hadn't had it. She asked if they had been sick, and when I said yes, asked if they had slept in my bed. Son Two had indeed slept in our bed a couple times.

So, apparently, if your child had a bacterial infection and sleeps in your bed, they can get bacteria on your pillowcase, and then your face rubs on it all night. Gross! Obviously we should have washed the pillowcases and sheets, but this had never even occurred to me! It's the worst pinkeye I've had, my eyes were so gunky I couldn't focus them on my computer screen when grading, and I rapidly developed a headache.

After a day of antibiotic eyedrops, it was mostly back to normal, and I think the remaining irritation might be down to the eyedrops themselves, to be honest. I threw all the sheets in the house in the wash as soon as I got home.

I talked to a friend about it, also a parent, and she shared with me the fun fact that if you have two kids, there's a 50% chance you have a viral infection at any given time. This isn't to say you have symptoms, but you have a virus.

So! Parenting! Good stuff.

15 February 2023

Hunters of the Burning Stone (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 36)

Hunters of the Burning Stone: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Mike Collins, et al.

Collection published: 2013
Contents originally published: 2012-13
Acquired: July 2014
Read: November 2022

The relationship of the Doctor Who Magazine strip to the television programme upon which it is based is occasionally a strange thing. The strip is often at its best where there is no tv show—or when it's pretending there is no tv show. But even when it's tied into the show, it rarely delves into its history: very few strips are direct sequels, Big Finish–style, to tv stories; recurring monsters from the show are used pretty sparingly. I think you could have quite successfully read all the strips from #355 to now and not even known there was a Time War, for example! This collection features multiple stories that take a very different approach... but then, it is the fiftieth anniversary of the tv show. If the strip is ever going to celebrate the show, this is the moment!

Again, it's always interesting to me to compare reading the strip in collections against my memory of reading it as it came out. I have vague memories of The Broken Man—mostly the two-dimensional aliens—but very strong ones of Imaginary Enemies, one of my favorites. I remember liking Hunters of the Burning Stone, but the impact of the part one cliffhanger was muted by the fact that I live in America, and thus read all about the surprise on GallifreyBase long before I got to read the issue!

from Doctor Who Magazine #452

The Broken Man, from Doctor Who Magazine #451-54 (Oct. 2012–Winter 2012/13)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

By this point, I think we have to accept that I am just simpatico with Scott Gray's approach to the strip, and I will like everything he does. Add in Martin Geraghty and David Roach, and how can you lose? I don't think Moffat would have done something like this story on screen—maybe if it was a bit more stylized, like a spy movie, to fit in with the "every week's a new film" vibe of series 7A—but Gray and his artistic collaborators perfectly plunge Moffat's TARDIS trio into a Cold War espionage story with a strong character focus. There's a likeable British spy, an evil Soviet mastermind, creepy two-dimensional aliens, lots of good bits for Amy, a charming protestor, a creepy golem disguised as an alien robot. Good twists, great jokes. Is it in my top ten? No. Is it a solid adventure, just what one wants DWM to deliver month-in, month-out? Absolutely. I breezed through this and had a great time, but it is seasoned with real horror and tragedy, too.

from Doctor Who Magazine #455

Imaginary Enemies, from Doctor Who Magazine #455 (Jan. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

I'm not a big fan of the River Song story arc of series 6. One thing that doesn't work for me is the retrospective reveal that Amy and Rory were friends with their daughter all along, a reveal that not even Moffat does anything with beyond the confines of the single story in which it appears. We have no hint that this gave them any kind of retrospective closure. So I appreciate this for being the one Doctor Who story in the entire universe to actually be interested in Mels. It's a Doctor-less flashback adventure set at Christmastime, about Amy and Rory coming under threat from the Krampus. Cute stuff, and a fitting send-off for Amy, especially that gorgeous final page montage of Amy and Rory growing old in twentieth-century America. It is so tv-heavy, though, it is kind of jarring to read. My hypothetical strip-only reader would probably be more confused than ever!

from Doctor Who Magazine #461

Hunters of the Burning Stone, from Doctor Who Magazine #456-61 (Feb.-July 2013)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

There were a lot of fiftieth-anniversary spectaculars in 2013. Every tie-in medium was obligrated to produce one. DWM's was one of the most interesting and clever of the lot, I reckon. Instead of focusing on the fact that it was the fiftieth anniversary of all Doctor Who, Scott Gray zooms in on the fact that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Doctor Who story. Hence: the long-awaited sequel to 100,000 BC! (Yes, because this is what the story is called in DWM-land.)

I imagine it could be dumb. It is in fact great. As I said above, this is a lot more focused on what was happening on screen than we usually get in DWM: return appearances by Ian and Barbara, plot points turning on specific details from a tv story, lots of montages from the history of the show, not the strip. But it works because of one of Gray's usual strengths: his focus on the character of the Doctor. On screen, the eleventh Doctor was largely without the Time War angst that characterized his two predecessors, but there were hints of it, and Gray picks up on those hints with a story that focuses on the Doctor rediscovering who he was from the beginning. There are lots of clever reveals and turns; the whole police box thing is cheeky but inspired. It's great to get "London 1965" Ian and Barbara back, the kind of thing that only the strip could do, and their interactions with the eleventh Doctor are pitch perfect. The Tribe of Gum returns... and why not? The Doctor has been woven into the history of humankind, and it all started with them!

And yet, the story also manages to reflect the history of the strip and to face forwards as well. This is also a sequel to The Flood, picking up on the MI6 thread of some eighth Doctor strips, and it deftly pulls together the threads Gray had been weaving since his return to the strip with The Chains of Olympus. Plus, a return to Cornucopia, and the return of the Lakes indicate that this is no nostalgia fest: the strip is continuing to develop its own ideas and settings as it always has.

I will say Gray's weakness as a writer is that many of his stories have this bit where everything stops so someone can explain a complicated backstory, and I am not always sure I follow it. Why did the aliens want the Tribe of Gum to be flying around in space? Probably the answer is in here, but I am not sure I got it. But this is again great stuff, well illustrated by the dependable Geraghty/Roach team, with amazing visuals and strong character work.

"What is buried in man?" I am so glad I forgot about that reveal so that I could experience it all over again!

Other Notes:

I imagine this was more obvious reading this at the time, but I wouldn't have known without the backmatter. Scott Gray indicates that the stories in The Chains of Olympus take place during series 6, while Amy and Rory are actively travelling with the Doctor, while The Broken Man takes place during series 7A, when he just picks them up for occasional adventures.
With a run as (one of) the strip's main companion(s) from #421 to 455, Amy has the third-longest of any companion, below only Izzy (#244-328) and Frobisher (#88-133), though Ace beats her out if you combine her two runs (#164-92 and 203-10). I don't think I would have guessed offhand that Amy would have had the longest run of any of the tv companions. In every other tie-in medium, it's always Ace who racks up the big numbers!
Issue #456 debuted a new size for Doctor Who Magazine, which was slightly shorter and slightly fatter. But as the editorial staff knew Hunters of the Burning Stone would be collected alongside strips in the old size, Martin Geraghty had to draw his pages to work at both sizes! This meant content along the top and bottom of each page that could be cropped off to appear in the actual magazine, and only appear here. He says in the backmatter this means more of people's legs and space above people's heads! Exclusive to this collection, folks!
"JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Just three artists on this volume, only one of which works on every story, but only two on the cover. Don't make me say it!

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

13 February 2023

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prometheus: Fire with Fire

Star Trek: Prometheus: Fire with Fire

by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
translated by Helga Parmiter

29 October–16 November 2385

Translation published: 2017
Originally published: 2016
Acquired: November 2020
Read: January 2023

I am in the somewhat unusual position here of having experienced this book before. Back in 2018, Big Finish Productions released an audiobook read by Alec Newman, which I reviewed for Unreality SF. I did not like it very much, either the novel qua novel or as an audiobook. But I wanted to actually read the book in its chronological context, so here I am giving it a second go.

It is a bit odd reading it here; it picks up right from The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms. That novel ended on 27 October with zh'Tarash being elected president of the Federation; this opens on 29 October with her inaugural speech. But that book also ended as a sort of send-off to the political thriller aspects of Star Trek novels and continuous galactic crises... and this book plunges us straight into another political thriller and galactic crisis. Alien terrorists are suicide bombing Federation (and, later, Klingon) facilities in what surely must be an even less subtle 9/11 allegory than Enterprise's Xindi arc.

So if you have space politics fatigue when it comes to Star Trek novels, this is not the one for you... On top of that, the space politics are not very interesting. There are occasional chapters devoted to what the Klingon High Council or Federation Council is deliberating; this is pretty much never interesting, as characters we don't care about have conversations about things we already know. The scenes seem primarily used to make it clear that the authors did indeed read Articles of the Federation, but serve no real purpose in the actual story.

That is a criticism you could aim, in fact, at a significant portion of this book. The authors love to write chapters about irrelevant characters learning or doing things (e.g., a retired Romulan spy, a sneaky Ferengi, Martok, twice Miradorn mercenaries, a Federation communications office on a starbase); these characters are pretty much never interesting. Meanwhile, the actual main characters don't seem to do very much at all. Captain Adams of the Prometheus talks to Ro on DS9 about the inauguration... but why? A group of Prometheus characters watch Quark dither with a broken viewscreen... but why? I think you could lop the first seventy-seven pages off this book and begin with the current chapter seven, and no one would have even noticed. Even after that point, it drags. Basically one thing of importance happens in this book: the Prometheus does some investigating, and some members of its crew are captured, and they get away and learn one interesting thing in the process. That's a few chapters, not an almost 400-page novel.

Part of the issue seems to be that the writers of the book aren't quite sure what it wants to be. Is the Prometheus trilogy a single story about a galactic crisis? Or the pilot for an ongoing set of adventures about the USS Prometheus? (Similar to how the first four New Frontier novels worked.) If it's the former, the scenes of characters around the galaxy kind of make sense... but the scenes of the Prometheus crew do not, as they don't really add anything to the story. We learn about the tactical officer's love life, and the engineer's heritage, and how one guy really likes juice, and so on. But if this is meant to set up the cast of the Prometheus as a ship, it fails there because these people are utterly uninteresting as characters, and because nothing they do really seems to matter.

I was vaguely hopeful that divorced from Alec Newman's plodding, mispronunciation-filled reading I might like this more... but to be honest, I didn't think I would, and I didn't. The main benefit of reading it myself is that it didn't take me eleven hours to get through it.

scan courtesy The m0vie blog
from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Celebrity Series: Blood & Honor #1
(script by Mark Lenard, art by Leonard Kirk, Ken Penders, et al.)

Continuity Notes:

The book often reads like it was written by Roy Thomas, with the characters taking pains to think about or mention totally irrelevant continuity points, like the Ferengi on Alpha Eridani II who has to think about the fact that before the planet became a Romulan subject world, it was an Earth colony terrorized by the Redjac entity because that was mentioned in "Wolf in the Fold."
There are a lot of deep cuts here. When O'Brien meets the Prometheus's Kirk-descended chief engineer, he mentions that another Kirk descendant once served on DS9, referring to a one-off Malibu comic from twenty years prior.

Other Notes:

Titan changed the cover from its original German publication, replacing the image of the Prometheus with a less dynamic one, but thankfully getting rid the original's silly flaming logo. (Though the new logo is a very boring one.) Weirdly, the Big Finish audiobook reverts to the German cover and logo.
Alexander Rozkenko is in this book. I couldn't tell you why; he doesn't do anything. Also the authors seem to think that the Federation ambassador to the Klingons is someone who works for the Klingons.
On top of that, Spock is here too. But, again, who knows why.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Titan: Absent Enemies by John Jackson Miller

10 February 2023

Reading The Giant Horse of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Giant Horse of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

Say what you will about Ruth Plumly Thompson, but she was a writer who knew what kids liked. To whit: the title character of this book is honestly not all that important to the plot, but he is memorable. A horse big enough for five people to sit on comfortably (even when one is a giant statue), whose legs can extend telescopically, and who has an umbrella for a tail. Every time High Boy did something, my four-year-old son was delighted. High Boy, like the best Oz animal characters, has a strong sense of personality, too: conceited and impatient but determined and loyal. He feels like a horse. (Was Thompson big on horses? She has one more book with a title horse, The Wishing Horse of Oz, and I recall there's also a significant horse character in The Silver Princess in Oz. On the other hand, she never seemed all that interested in the Sawhorse.)

Originally published: 1928
Acquired: August 2022
Read aloud: August–September 2022

In this book, Thompson is clearly taken by a question that has bedeviled me: whatever happened to the Good Witch of the North? The first Oz inhabitant Dorothy ever met got a couple cursory mentions across the subsequent five books, and then was promptly never mentioned again, even though she was the ruler of the Gillikin country. Similarly, there was a Munchkin ruler mentioned in a couple early Oz books, who also faded away. So what was going on in those countries?

Thompson provides answers, even if those answers don't always make sense with what came before. As I said in my linked post above, books after Emerald City circumstantially indicate there just must not be a Good Witch of the North anymore, as she is never included among the list of permitted practitioners of magic, and the Gillikin country is often indicated to have no ruler. But this book makes it clear that the Good Witch of the North (here named "Tattypoo") has been ruling the Gillikins and practicing magic all along... just unmentioned, I guess. Similarly, Thompson tells a story of the disappearance of the King of the Munchkins, and the isolation of the Munchkin capital, Sapphire City, but sets these incidents twenty-five years prior, before the events of Wonderful Wizard, so this can't be the Munchkin king mentioned in early Oz novels.

Does this matter, though? Not really, I think. Sure, if you are like me, and want to write a political history of Oz, Thompson doesn't make it easy. But if you are my son and want an entertaining Oz adventure—or even if you are me, and try to just take each book as its own experience—then the answers Thompson provides are satisfying on their own merits... mostly. I liked the look we got into the Good Witch of the North. She lives in Mombi's old cottage (though this must be a different cottage than the one we saw in Marvelous Land) with a friendly dragon and a two-tailed cat. Yes, she rules the Gillikins, but this mostly seems to be in an advisory way: people come to her for help, and she helps them. The chapter told from her point of view is an intriguing one. My main objection is that "Tattypoo" is a terrible, terrible name! When reading it aloud, I substituted "Locasta," the name Baum gave the character in the Wizard of Oz stageplay, but which never made its way back into the books. I only slipped up once, I think! My son seemed to really like the little dragon and the two-tailed cat.

Similarly, I always like Thompson's take on Mombi, and even though Mombi is dead in this book, she casts a long shadow. (Though you may recall that when I read Lost King aloud, I edited it so that Mombi was dunked in the Fountain of Oblivion and lost her memory. Thus, whenever someone in this book said, "oh we can't ask Mombi what she did because she's dead," I had to change it to, "oh we can't ask Mombi what she did because she's forgotten all her wickedness.") Mombi fell in love with the Cheeriobed, prince of the Munchkins; when he refused to marry her and instead married Orin, a minor Gillikin princess, Mombi took her revenge by destroying Cheeriobed's father and kidnapping Queen Orin and isolating the Sapphire City with use of a sea serpent with the head of a dragon and the body of a fear fish. Thus, by the present day, no one knows about Sapphire City or the Ozure Isles on which it stands in Lake Orizon. It's an evocative location, and gives enormous power to Mombi. (Thompson doesn't say this, but I like to think Mombi had political motives for all this, too; perhaps she was helping her ally the Wicked Witch of the East by deposing a source of resistance to her rule of the Munchkins. Someday I want to write Mombi of Oz and weave all of Baum's and Thompson's hints into a coherent history.)

So we learn some neat stuff about the rulers of both the Gillikins and the Munchkins. What works less well for me is the way it is all tied together at the end. It turns out that when Mombi kidnapped Orin, she tried to turn her into a wicked witch. Like... why? We know Mombi likes transformations, but even a wicked witch would be a rival, I would think! She couldn't turn Orin wicked, though, so though Orin became an old woman, she became a good witch... Tattypoo. Without her memory, Tattypoo eventually defeats Mombi and takes over the Gillikin country, and then at the end of this book, is disenchanted and becomes Orin again. So having set up Tattypoo as an interesting character, Thompson promptly takes her out of play permanently! I guess if anyone ever wrote an Oz novel set before this one, they would have this set-up to work with, but I find it disappointing to create an interesting character, and then replace her with a less interesting one. (Something I've seen Thompson accused of before, in Kabumpo and Grampa, but this is the first time I've agreed.)

This does mean Ozma needs to appoint a new ruler for the Gillikins; she somewhat inexplicably promotes Joe King, ruler of Up Town, to be in charge of the entire country. She's never even met him, only his horse! She also confirms Cheeriobed as ruler of the Munchkins, which makes a bit more sense.

As for the rest of the book, it's pretty solid. What kicks the whole thing off is that Quiberon the sea serpent decides he wants a mortal maiden to tend to him, so Akbad the soothsayer uses some magic wings to fly to the Emerald City, where he kidnaps Trot. Meanwhile, Prince Philador of the Ozure Isles goes on a quest for the Good Witch of the North, reasoning that since she defeated Mombi before, she can do it again. So Trot and the Scarecrow have to escape from the Ozure Isles, while Phil has to find the Good Witch, and of course the two parties acquire extra members as they go, and eventually join up. Trot is joined by a living statue from Boston that the Scarecrow nicknames "Benny." Benny is a great character, strong but lacking in confidence; he complains a lot, and wants to be made "real" by the Wizard, only to decide at the novel's end that he already is real. Phil meets Herby the Medicine Man, who has (in prime Thompson form) a literal medicine chest! I already praised High Boy, and there are lots of other good characters, and some nice incidental encounters, especially the eternally circling Roundabouties. On the other hand, it does kind of feel like the characters breeze in and out of situations without ever being in danger.

Just like how in Hungry Tiger Thompson seemingly decided she never used Betsy for anything, so why not give her something to do, Giant Horse focuses on Trot. But also like Hungry Tiger, Thompson's Trot feels very generic. I mean, I don't think this is entirely her fault: Dorothy, Trot, and Betsy are basically all the same character as written by Baum. But what can distinguish them is their companions, and just as Hungry Tiger made the weird move of giving us Betsy without Hank the Mule, Giant Horse makes the even weirder move of Trot without Cap'n Bill. I would have liked to have seen the old sailor-man here! Not sure he was even mentioned. (Also, Thompson always says that Trot, like Betsy, came to Oz after a shipwreck... which is not how things happened in Scarecrow at all!)

My son seemed to enjoy it overall: he liked High Boy, he liked the escapades in the Roundabout Country and Up Town and the underground places beneath the Ozure Isles, he liked the chapter about the Good Witch of the North, he seemed boggled by the twist that Orin was the Good Witch. The main thing he did not like was Quiberon, who goes around breaking things—always his least favorite part of any Oz books. By and large, a solid Thompson, I think. Always entertaining, even if I disagree with her approach to some of the worldbuilding.

Giant Horse is still under copyright, meaning the only accessible edition is the Del Rey one from 1985. We bought our last couple Del Reys from the Oz Club, but they didn't have this one, so I bought it new on Amazon, which turned out to be a print-on-demand edition. I guess they don't do POD at the size of the original Thompson Del Reys, because this was about an inch taller than them, and proportionally wider. When I shelve all of my Thompsons together, they are going to look very higgledy-piggledy. And, of course, it omits the color plates. But if you want to read all the Thompsons, what else can you do?

Next up in sequence: Dot and Tot of Merryland

08 February 2023

The Chains of Olympus (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 35)

The Chains of Olympus: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Mike Collins, Martin Geraghty, Dan McDaid, et al.

What the heck happened!? It's so... tiny.

Collection published: 2013
Contents originally published: 2012
Acquired: July 2014
Read: November 2022

This era sees the strip expand to twelve pages per issue, a sign of unprecedented faith in it. (Compare to the dinky strips we get these days... assuming we get any at all!) But on the other hand, we get the smallest collection I can remember. If you were reading this in the mag, I'm sure it wouldn't matter. (And indeed, I remember liking this era quite a bit... a decade ago.) But it's hard to not feel disappointed when you've reached the end of a collection and read three whole stories!

What happened is that the twenty-issue collections weren't selling well. (At least, I guess, since the collection hiatus between The Widow's Curse and The Crimson Hand.) The problem was they had to be priced so high they priced most people out. So, smaller collections could have lower prices and people would be more likely to pick them up. In the future, collections of about thirteen strips would become the norm, but the problem here is that the story arc had been designed with a twenty-issue collection in mind, so it had to be split up into two chunks of roughly ten strips apiece, but based on where the stories divided, we ended up with a nine-issue collection here, followed by an eleven-issue one in Hunters of the Burning Stone. (They were, however, released simultaneously, so you could at least get all twenty strips at once.)

Thirteen strips is more satisfying, but in this case there wouldn't be a way to get to thirteen strips that wouldn't be awkward. If you chucked The Broken Man into The Chains of Olympus, you'd get up to thirteen, but then you'd end up with a pretty weird volume for Hunters of the Burning Stone if it went from #455 to 467. One Amy and Rory story, one companion-less anniversary story that brings an arc to a climax, and then a couple Clara stories.

It seems a weird paradox that the actual strip was doing well enough to get its page length increased while at the same time the reprint sales fell off enough that they needed to be slimmed down!

from Doctor Who Magazine #442

The Chains of Olympus, from Doctor Who Magazine #442-45 (Jan.-Apr. 2012)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Rory makes his DWM debut... but more importantly, Scott Gray returns as scripter of the main strip for the first time since The Flood way back in 2005! There have been many good writers of the strip in the interim, of course, but something I like about Gray is his interest in the character of the Doctor himself. The Doctor goes through a little arc here, which is nice, in terms of his attitude toward Socrates. The plot itself is fun: the beginning sets you up to think that either the Greek gods were aliens all along, or aliens are impersonating the Greek gods, but the answer turns out to be neither, and more tragic. And of course Gray is great at peppering his very serious story with moments of levity, like the Doctor's double-take when he meets Plato, or the blacksmiths who make Rory's magic sword seizing an opportunity to advertise.

Mike Collins is back on art. Since Supernature, I think he's gotten a better handle on Matt Smith... I still feel unconvinced by his Karen Gillan. But he's a great illustrator regardless: lots of big expansive stuff here that he and inker David A Roach capture perfectly. One of the selling points of the strip is it's like what you see on screen but with an unlimited budget, and Collins is always great at that kind of thing. I like the inverted design of the Greek gods; nice work from colourist James Offredi there. Good, breezy fun with a strong undercurrent.

The final moment doesn't just point to a new story arc; it also points at an aspect of the Doctor's character. I like Socrates's evaluation of him.

from Doctor Who Magazine #447

Sticks & Stones, from Doctor Who Magazine #446-47 (May 2012)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

This is a highly effective two-parter, giving us two styles of story at once: an urban thriller featuring the Doctor and a domestic base-under-siege featuring Rory and Amy. An alien graffiti artist attacks London, spraying his name first across London landmarks and then across language itself: soon everyone finds themselves unable to say any word other than "MONOS" and then everyone finds themselves becoming the word "MONOS." It's a great concept, one of the things that plays very well to the strength of the comics medium, and everyone here works together to make it work: artists Martin Geraghty and David Roach, letterer Roger Langridge, and even DWM art editor Richard Atkinson, who supplied a panel of brand logos turning into "MONOS" again and again. The eventual resolution is quite good, too.

I like how for Rory, almost the entire story takes place in a supermarket. It's very human, and plays to the strengths of his character. I like that, however, meanwhile the Doctor is in a flying van, careening around London landmarks! Again, Gray is great at peppering his writing with small jokes, like Rory complaining about Amy's driving, or all the stuff about Amy's cooking. Geraghty is usually strong at this kind of urban escapade thing (see The Flood, The Age of Ice, The Golden Ones), but he also does well by the story's human elements, capturing all three regulars very well.

I have one complaint: if this had been on screen in, say, the Russell T Davies era, I think the characters trapped in the supermarket and the police detective the Doctor teams up with would have had a bit more material. This was plotted as a three-parter before Gray realized he could do it in two... but I wonder if three parts would have made these characters pop more and make a strong story even stronger.

Oh, I just got the title. Nice.

from Doctor Who Magazine #448

The Cornucopia Caper, from Doctor Who Magazine #448-50 (June-Sept. 2012)
story by Scott Gray, art by Dan McDaid, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The strip moves from strength to strength with another fun one with serious undercurrents. This brings us to the city of Cornucopia, which becomes the second of the strip's recurring settings alongside Stockbridge, and introduces someone who I am pretty sure goes on to be a recurring character, the unlicensed monkey thief Horatio Lynk. Lynk is an intstantly likeable character: telling the first part through his narration was an inspired move, and his flirtatious repartee with Amy Pond really sings. I loved all their escapades together. The Doctor and Rory get a nice subplot, too, with the Doctor on the back foot but still clever. And, I can't say this enough, lots of good jokes! I always genuinely laugh out loud at least once when reading a Scott Gray story.

I do think that unlike some other strip writers, Gray rarely tries to overtly mimic the style of the tv programme itself, though sometimes the strip resonates a bit with particular aspects of the screen version. Rather, it seems to me that back when he wrote his amazing run of stories from Ophidius to The Flood, he honed in on what a Doctor Who comic strip truly was and ought to be. So now, returning to the strip, he doesn't try to do Moffat on the page, he just takes his Scott Gray formula and applies it to a new set of characters, while still keeping those characters true to their screen counterparts. I imagine it's harder than it looks to strike this balance, but the result is, I think, the platonic ideal of the DWM comic strip.

Plus, of course we get some sweet Dan McDaid goodness. I love his Amy Pond; his less realistic style means he captures her perfectly without being beholden to Karen Gillan's actual likeness! The energy he imparts Lynk, the grubbiness of Cornucopia, the ominousness of his alien Ziggurat, the grotesequeness of his villains, it's all perfect.

Stray Observations:

Actually, at 129 pages (including commentary) the length of this collection ties for smallest with The Cruel Sea, The Land of the Blind, Ground Zero, Evening's Empire, and The Good Soldier. But I think it feels smaller, because 1) the extras I am pretty sure are a bit longer than normal, so there's less actual strip content, and 2) because the actual strips are longer than they have been, that means fewer actual strips and fewer actual stories are collected here.
Karen Gillan is a good-looking woman, of course, but I am not convinced she has the breasts that Mike Collins gives Amy. Indeed, I don't think that's true of any of the female companions!
I like how Gray manages to build up that sense of a DWM universe without obtrusive continuity references: this collection features a return of the Moblox from Ophidius et al. (#300-03) and the Necrotists from The Way of All Flesh (#308-10).
The three issues of The Cornucopia Caper didn't really come out across four months; DWM changed its way of doing cover dates with #450 (going from specific dates to just months), meaning there was no issue with a cover date of Aug. 2012.
A city where crime is legal but must be channeled through bureaucratic guilds... it's Ankh-Morpok from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, isn't it? Gray doesn't mention that as an influence, though, so maybe it was just somewhere in his subconscious. I think Izzy was established as a Discworld fan, wasn't she?
"YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: There are exactly four artists who work on this volume. All but one of them receives cover credit. Who could have been left out???

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