Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension by George Mann, Cavan Scott, Rachael Stott, Mariano Laclaustra, et al.

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: September 2021

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: September 2021

Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension, Book One

Writers: George Mann, Cavan Scott & Nick Abadzis
Artists: Rachael Stott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson, Mariano Laclaustra, Carlos Cabrera, Leandro Casco, & I. N. J. Culbard, with Pasquale Qualano, Mony Castillo, Klebs Jr, JR Bastos, & Fer Centurion
Colorists: Rod Fernandes, Marco Lesko, Dijjo Lima, & Hernán Cabrera

Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

 

Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension, Book Two

Writers: Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby, George Mann & Cavan Scott
Artists: Ivan Rodriguez, Wellington Diaz, Rachael Stott & Mariano Laclaustra, with Anderson Cabral, Marcelo Salaza & Fer Centurion
Colorists: Thiago Ribiero, Mauricio Wallace, Rod Fernandes & Carlos Cabrera, with Mony Castillo
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

 

Titan's Doctor Who crossovers got bigger every year. This one is eight issues and two collected editions, and crossed through its ongoings (instead of just featuring characters from them), taking in issues of The Tenth Doctor: Year Three, The Eleventh Doctor: Year Three, and The Twelfth Doctor: Year Three. It also features the ninth Doctor, Rose, Jack, Tara, Madame Vastra, and Jenny; Jenny, the Doctor's daughter; the fourth Doctor and second Romana; and River Song in a set of specials. Plus every other incarnation of the Doctor puts in at least a one-scene cameo. Is that enough already?

 

It is, in fact, too much. It follows the Big Finish model: the characters are mostly separate for most of it, which means they undertake pretty generic adventures, and then the characters come together at the end, which means the narrative doesn't have room for anything other than simple solutions and generic Doctor sniping... something we've seen twice in the past two years! I have posited in the past that Big Finish's nostalgic crossovers are pointless because they bring together characters we see in ongoing adventures all the time already, and the same is true here. There is no novelty to bringing "back" the tenth Doctor, Gabby, and Cindy when I read their adventures already. The only characters we don't already see all the time in Titan adventures are Jenny, the fourth Doctor and Romana, and River, but the first of those I had no desire to see come back, and the others I listen to the adventures of already via Big Finish. (Plus, I didn't find the stories or dialogue very good; the River story in particular was confusingly written and poorly illustrated.)

 

If we aren't getting nostalgia, then we're not getting anything, because this story isn't really about anything. A dimension turns people into mindless zombies... as Doctor Who threats go, it's definitively bottom tier and generic. Does this story have any interesting themes or clever characterization? Basically, no. The one exception is the Eleventh Doctor issue, which isn't by any of the regular Eleventh Doctor writers but is at least by regular Eleventh Doctor artists Leandro Casco and I. N. J. Culbard. It's a decent tale of the eleventh Doctor and Alice being trapped on ancient Gallifrey and becoming inadvertently involved with the Time Lord's early TARDIS experiments. The rest of it all is sound and fury, signifying nothing. I'm glad that after three goes, Titan finally abandoned these annual events; I had mixed thoughts about Four Doctors, but it was overall pretty interesting. The latter two have been exercises in tedium.

 

(If, like me, you are curious about what issues are collected where, the collected editions give incomplete information, and the Tardis wiki is flat-out wrong. Book one collects what was originally published as parts 1-4 and 7: The Lost Dimension: Alpha #1, Ninth Doctor Special #1, The Tenth Doctor: Year Three #9, The Eleventh Doctor: Year Three #10, and the Jenny and Alice stories from The Lost Dimension Special #2. Book two contains parts 5, 7, 6, and 8 in that order: the fourth Doctor story from The Lost Dimension Special #1, the River Song story from The Lost Dimension Special #1 and 2, The Twelfth Doctor: Year Three #8, and The Lost Dimension: Omega #1. Thanks to a friendly Gallifrey Base poster for working this out for me. Not confusing at all! I also have a feeling the credits are incomplete or inaccurate.)

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Tenth Doctor: Facing Fate: The Good Companion

Review: Doctor Who: Sin Eaters by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, and Cris Bolson

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Acquired: January 2020
Read: July 2021

Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 4: Sin Eaters

Writer: Cavan Scott
Artists: Adriana Melo & Cris Bolson

Colorist: Marco Lesko
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This is the last volume of The Ninth Doctor, making it the first of Titan's Doctor Who ongoings to draw to an end. As a result, it has to tie up all the various threads Cavan Scott has introduced since the series began. It consists of two stories. The first, "Sin Eaters," is about the Doctor, Rose, and Tara investigating a space prison that extracts people's bad thoughts and injects them into separate bodies; the Doctor goes undercover as a criminal, and Rose as an inspector. I thought the central premise of this one was pretty silly, and Doctor Who stories about evil Doctors rarely convince me, because evil Doctors don't act very Doctor-ish, and just act like the kind of stupid bad guy the Doctor stops all the time. The last chapter of "Sin Eaters" switches perspective to Jack, and shows us some flashbacks of his time as a Time Agent, with a small appearance by the Doctor. It was fine, and mostly serves to set up the next story.

"The Bidding War" is about a con being played on the TARDIS crew, to capture and auction off the Doctor's memories. Again, it was fine. It feels rushed, like the series was cancelled earlier than expected... but it had fifteen issues, so surely Scott should have known "Year One" was up even if he had expected to get a Year Two, and Titan Who comics usually reset at the end of each year. Some of the explanations for what we saw at the year's beginning don't entirely convince, and I think the incessant continuity references interfere with this comic's attempt to recapture the tone of the 2005 series.

Having read the whole series now, I'm not really sure what the point of Tara, the new companion (a 1970s UNIT nurse) was. She never really seemed to do much (these stories already have three leads), and I never got a real sense of her personality. Her writing-out here is pretty perfunctory. And again, having a companion who is friends with Harry Sullivan really cuts against the 2005 vibe. This was probably the weakest of Titan's ongoings; at least The Tenth Doctor has had the occasional enjoyable story for all its flaws.

Also, what's up with the right side and bottom of the cover of my comiXology edition? Why is there that weird mirroring?

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: Time Trials: The Terror Beneath

Review: Doctor Who: Official Secrets by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, and Cris Bolson

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016-17
Acquired: March 2020
Read: May 2021

Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 3: Official Secrets

Writer: Cavan Scott
Artists: Adriana Melo & Cris Bolson

Colorist: Marco Lesko
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This is better than previous volumes of The Ninth Doctor, though I still don't get what this comic is going for. I mean, there's no reason it needs to evoke Saturday tea-time 2005 per se, but plunging the ninth Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack into a 1970s UNIT adventure doesn't strike me as particularly interesting, either-- or rather, what writer Cavan Scott does with it isn't interesting. DWM did something neat with a post-Time War tenth Doctor meeting the Brigadier way back in the day. What was it like for the Doctor himself to finally be an old soldier, meeting the man he'd always denigrated for his military mindset? But the ninth Doctor here doesn't really act much different than any Doctor would. Harry Sullivan is a focal character, but I don't know why, and he doesn't always ring true as being very Harry-y.

The second story, about the TARDIS team in Brazil during the era of Portuguese slavers, struggles with length, feeling both too long and too short. Too short in that a lot of its ideas get short shrift: it's about the Doctor confronting slavers, and about alien refugees, and about Rose discovering some of Captain Jack's secrets from his Time Agency days, and about new companion Tara's first trip in the TARDIS. Most of this is rushed and/or underexplored. The conclusion has the Doctor happily mentally subjugating some aliens to another group of aliens, seemingly just because finding a better solution would take more pages than the comic has. But it's also too long in that not much actually seems to happen; it mostly feels like two long scenes, one of Rose and Captain Jack looking at a computer, and one of the Doctor and Tara wandering around the jungle. The more I read of The Ninth Doctor, the more I feel like Cavan Scott doesn't get how to tell a comics story, but he seems to be quite experienced, having written dozens of Star Wars comics for IDW, so I dunno. That might have mostly been after this, though?

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Tenth Doctor: War of Gods

Review: Doctor Who: Doctormania by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson, et al.

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2016
Acquired: September 2018
Read: April 2021

Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 2: Doctormania

Writer: Cavan Scott
Artists: Adriana Melo & Cris Bolson [with Mariano Laclaustra]

Colorists: Matheus Lopes & Marco Lesko
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

I didn't care for vol 1 of this series, and I feel much the same about this. In my review of that one, I wrote, "[t]he plot seemed to pile complication on complication and incident on incident for the sake of it." The same is true here. More specifically, the stories read like they were made up as they went along, with no attempt at unity of character or theme. The first one, "Doctormania," is about the Doctor, Jack, and Rose arriving on a planet where everyone is a big fan of the Doctor; it turns out that this is because a Slitheen is running around in Doctor skinsuit. But the story isn't really about this in any meaningful way, the implications and permutations of this concept aren't explored. Instead, they're discarded and it becomes a story about Rose being stuck on a jungle planet with a Slitheen, and the climax of the story is about negotiations between different factions in the Raxacoricofallapatorius solar system. There's a brief return to the original hook at the end, but the permutations of the story feel arbitrary and inorganic. I hate saying something doesn't follow "rules" for writing, but it really doesn't live up to the MICE Quotient. It's an event story, but the event that is solved at the ending isn't the one that was a problem at the beginning!

The second story, "The Hunted," wastes a good premise too for no readily apparent reason. The Doctor is summoned by Mickey-- only it's post-"Journey's End" Mickey who's married to Martha, not the useless "Mickey the idiot" that he knows. I think there's potential here for a story about how the Doctor has misjudged Mickey, but it's not used, it's just a random continuity detail, not a storytelling concept. Worse, Martha is there to just be a mute woman in distress for Mickey to worry about! Like, she's a protagonist in her own right, you shouldn't be treating her like this... except that, of course, she's a woman. The actual plot of the story (something something superpowers something something mutations something something a wormhole) is too dependent on techno-gubbins to be interesting. I think a lot of writers who try to imitate Russell T Davies-style Who don't get that, for all its flash and speed and color, his stories were about something, they were about people in real and meaningful ways rarely equaled on television. These stories have flash and speed and color, but aren't about anything at all.

This also contains what was originally published as a Free Comic Book Day story, "Hacked." There are no credits for it anywhere in the book: if I was artist Mariano Laclaustro, I'd be pretty hacked off.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: The Twist

Faster than a DC Bullet: Birds of Prey, Part XVI: The Death of Oracle

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2012 (contents: 2011)
Borrowed from the library
Read May 2013

Birds of Prey: The Death of Oracle

Writers: Gail Simone, Marc Andreyko
Artists: Ardian Syaf, Vicente Cifuentes, Guillem March, Inaki Miranda, Pere Pérez, Jesus Saiz, Diego Olmos, Billy Tucci, Adriana Melo, JP Mayer, Eber Ferreira
Colorists: Nei Ruffino, Bob Schwager  
Letterers: Travis Lanham, Dave Sharpe, Swands, Carlos M. Mangual

Like some of the previous Birds of Prey volumes, this is a loose collection of individual stories, so I'll handle them one by one. The first of these is the titular one, "The Death of Oracle," where Barbara decides that these days too many people know there is an Oracle, and that just that bare fact opens her up to too much, and so she executes a masterplan that will allow the world to think that Oracle is dead. Of course, this masterplan goes awry, as the Calculator pulls some unexpected allies in, but not too awry. It's an okay story, with a couple good moments (I love the roles of Savant and Creote in the reconstituted Birds of Prey, and Dove getting drunk for the first time is enjoyable), but mostly it feels like one long fight scene stretched out over four issues. The way the Calculator's henchmen turn on him in the last part comes out of nowhere, too.

It's let down by some inconsistent and often-terrible art. Ardian Syaf and Vicente Cifuentes do a good job on the first chapter, and Guillem March isn't bad on the second, but I find Inake Miranda's work to be plastic and artificial, especially his faces, which seems incapable of conveying real emotion, and his linework is all the same thickness. Especially bad is the scene where Oracle reveals the full extent of her plan to Batman, Batman, Batgirl, Red Robin, and Misfit,* and all the characters stand in a succession of poses.

It's also let down by the fact that it doesn't really matter. The Birds don't seem to operate any differently with a "dead" Oracle, and indeed, they're pretty sloppy about keeping her up the necessary appearances, talking about Oracle right in front of villains they're fighting. What's more, at first Manhunter is specifically shown as one of the characters they're deceiving, but by the end of the book, she's not only in on the deception, she knows that Barbara Gordon is Oracle-- something she didn't know before Oracle was "killed." Some heightening of security.

"Which Reason Knows Not Of" continues the development of the flirtation between the Huntress and Catman begun in Dead of Winter. Their interplay is good, though Catman's triple-bluff plan here is a little too complicated to be believable, and I'm not sure why he even wants the result that he gets, which seems unnecessary given how superficial his relationship with the Huntress is.

"Hostile Takeover" is probably the best story in the book, a simple two-issue caper featuring the Birds teaming up with the Question. Fun and not too complicated, just like I prefer my stories, though there are too many characters. (On the other hand, this is the only time Hawk ever feels interesting.) Jesus Saiz does good art on the first issue, though Diego Olmos's backgroundless panels feel phoned-in. I don't get why the Huntress replaces the Black Canary as field leader, though.

The book (and this incarnation of Birds of Prey) wraps up with "War and Remembrance," a two-part callback to the Golden Age. A post-WWII mission of the original Black Canary, the Phantom Lady, and Lady Blackhawk turns out to have modern-day repercussions. A good idea, but ultimately the story's kind of a muddle, and it ends on a lame "joke" where all the characters laugh. Also, since when was the original Black Canary active during World War II? The art is done by like five different people, and I liked some of it.

Ultimately, I don't know how necessary this revival of Birds of Prey was. Though I didn't like the way that the original series wrapped up, this reincarnation seemed to stagger around without clear direction or purpose. And why go to the bother of getting Gail Simone back if you're just going to pair her with an ever-changing cadre of subpar artists?

* Speaking of Misfit, why is this her only appearance in this whole book? She supposedly moved in with Helena during Oracle: The Cure, but we haven't actually seen her since then, and End Run mentioned she was with foster parents. I miss her!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Birds of Prey, Part XV: End Run

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2011 (contents: 2010-11)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2013

Birds of Prey: End Run

Writer: Gail Simone
Pencillers: Ed Benes, Adriana Melo, Alvin Lee
Inkers: Ed Benes, Mariah Benes, J. P. Mayer, Jack Purcell
Colorist: Nei Ruffino
Letterer: Steve Wands

Can you go home again? That's the question asked by End Run, as Oracle, Black Canary, the Huntress, and Lady Blackhawk reunite as the Birds of Prey once more. Black Canary is fresh off of a disastrous Justice League tenure and an even more disastrous divorce... who knows what everyone else has been up to, except that Misfit is sadly nowhere to be seen despite being left in the care of the Huntress in The Cure. The answer seems to be yes, as we're treated to about eight thousand caption boxes where Oracle, Black Canary, and Huntress express their happiness as the reunion ad nauseam.

It's also the question asked outside of the comic, as this brings Gail Simone back to the title-- alongside Ed Benes, her original art partner. End Run provides a decent story, as the Birds battle the mysterious "White Canary," and it seems like some very near and dear to them have suffered because of them. (They have, though not quite in the way they imagined.)  The plotline with Oracle trying to figure out what happened to Savant and Creote is probably the best part of this; I found myself less enamored with the Birds' field team being constantly attacked again and again.

For all that parts of this book work, other parts just don't add up. Black Canary is threatened with exposure of her civilian identity... but back in Simone's first run on the title, Dinah actually published a book about her life as the Black Canary! She also frets over being a murderer like Ollie... you know, the guy who killed a man who killed millions but is demonized for it for no readily apparent reason. Also, Hawk and Dove join the team, and as to who Hawk and Dove are and why you should care and why Oracle picked them... well, don't look for any answers here. I guess it's because they've got bird-themed names?

(There are captions for the first appearance of each character. Not just in the book, but in every. single. issue.  But I've read "Hawk: Avatar of War" six times now, and I'm no closer to knowing what it means or who he is. Cut these things out of the collection, for goodness sake!)

I did like the two-issue story at the end, where Dinah is forced to fight Lady Shiva for the sake of her adopted daughter Sin... only the Huntress has other plans. Any plotline that showcases how awesome the Huntress is is fine by me, and this is definitely one of them.

Like I said earlier, Ed Benes is back, but I'm not sure why. He manages to complete one whole issue; a couple more he starts, and someone else finishes. (I can't tell who, because there's no individual art credits.) Benes, of course, can't draw a picture undefined by the male gaze, but he did good work on this title in the past, and this isn't up to those standards-- his faces are blank and dull and filled with pouty lips. The storytelling is confusing and sloppy, and as always, anyone pretending to be Benes is even worse than Benes. The overly-done coloring seems to work against the whole effect, too.

End Run isn't maybe as bad as this review makes it sound, but it could be a lot better, and I don't of yet see the point of the Birds' breaking up and reunifying. (I'm sure there wasn't one, but still...) This great return hasn't yet convinced me it was worth the effort.