Review: Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen by Cavan Scott & George Mann, Ivan Rodriguez, Walter Geovanni, et al.

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016
Acquired: September 2018
Read: May 2021

Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen

Writers: Cavan Scott & George Mann
Artists: Ivan Rodriguez & Walter Geovanni, with Alessandro Vitti & Tazio Bettin
Colorists: Nicola Righi with Erica Eren Angiolini

Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

Event Teasers Art by Dan Boultwood, Andrew Pepoy & Jason Millet, Mike Collins, Blair Shedd, Simone De Meo & Arianna Florean, Stephen Byrne, Simon Myers, Lee Sullivan & Luis Guerrero, and Rachael Stott & Marcio Menys

Like Four Doctors the year before it, this crosses over all of Titan's ongoing comic series, which now includes the ninth Doctor in addition to the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. It takes a very different structure, though; while Four Doctors had its three Doctors meet up by the end of the first issue and then treated them like a team, the four Doctors in Supremacy of the Cybermen never actually meet. Instead, each is involved in a parallel adventure of the Cybermen taking over the universe with Time Lord technology: the ninth Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack battle them on the Powell Estate; the tenth Doctor, Gabby, and Cindy encounter them at war with the Sontarans; the eleventh Doctor and Alice discover them in the Silurian era; and the twelfth Doctor visits Gallifrey to discover the root of the problem.

The issue this causes is that since each Doctor gets a totally separate story, they in effect each get just one issue of story. Only that one issue of story is spread across five issues, making it feel like nothing is actually happening, because when you finish an issue, each Doctor has experienced just one-quarter of an issue of events. The end result is a five-issue collection where nothing happens: the ninth, tenth, and eleventh Doctors each have very simple battle with the Cybermen; the twelfth Doctor resets it all. The end. Even though it reads fast, I quickly came to dread reading it, so little did I enjoy it.

(Weird that when the Cybermen take over Gallifrey again in "Ascension of the Cybemen," the Doctor doesn't mention that she just went through this!)

from Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor #4
(art by Lee Sullivan)

Titan also did one-page preludes for the pre-ninth Doctors, showing what happened to each of them in the aberrant timeline where the Cybermen took over the universe. These set the stage for the main story... but for some reason the collected edition puts them all at the back! One of the cool things about reading in PDF is that I just moved them all to the front and read them first, as was clearly meant to be. They are fine, mostly noteworthy because Titan gets in some good artists for them, especially Mike Collins and Lee Sullivan.

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 Ninth Doctor: Official Secrets

Review: Doctor Who: Weapons of Past Destruction by Cavan Scott, Blair Shedd, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2016 (contents: 2015)
Acquired September 2018
Read December 2019

Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 1: Weapons of Past Destruction

Writer: Cavan Scott

Artist: Blair Shedd with Rachael Stott
Colorist: Blair Shedd and Anang Setyawan
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

I felt like this failed to capture the tone of the era it's supposedly recreating. It felt too action-y, too continuity-y. The Doctor talks a lot about the Time Lords and the Time War in an era that on screen was content to mostly hint obliquely. The plot seemed to pile complication on complication and incident on incident for the sake of it. It's a shame because Cavan Scott did a great job capturing this era in Night of the Whisper.

I also didn't care for Blair Shedd's weird faces, or his tendency to use silhouettes for random panels, which I think is meant to look artistic but is actually done to save him time drawing things.

Review: Doctor Who: It Came From Outer Space by Tony Lee, Matthew Dow Smith, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, 138 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 2011)
Acquired May 2014
Read September 2014

Doctor Who, Volume 3: It Came From Outer Space

Written by Tony Lee, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Matthew Dow Smith, and Dan McDaid

Art by Josh Adams, Matthew Dow Smith, Paul Grist, Blair Shedd, Mitch Gerads, and Dan McDaid
Colors by Rachelle Rosenberg, Charlie Kirchoff, Mitch Gerads, Kyle Latino, and Dan McDaid (with Deborah McCumiskey)
Lettering by Shawn Lee and Neil Uyetake

Tony Lee managed to surprise me with the first few pages of this collection, with the prologue to "Space Squid," a cute little montage of adventures with the new TARDIS crew: the eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory, and Kevin the Robotic Tyrannosaurus. But then it becomes a tedious space station runaround, made worse by Lee's decision to name all the station crew after cast members from Castle, guaranteeing you get knocked out of the story every 2-3 pages. I liked Josh Adams's artwork in the prologue, but in the story itself, it's stiff and overly posed, like he's traced too many reference photos that don't quite fit the circumstances of the story.

Next is "Body Snatched" with the ever-reliable Matthew Dow Smith on art. Seriously, this guy is good, and if any artist gets carried over to Titan's Doctor Who comics, it had better be him. The story itself should be fun-- the Doctor and Amy switch bodies-- but of course it's more a television premise, where you'd get to see Matt Smith play Amy and Karen Gillan play the Doctor, and so it feels squandered here, and the plot that surrounds this is unnecessarily convoluted.

The rest of the book is a set of shorts, which are on the whole entertaining. Lee and Paul Grist's "Silent Knight," a textless story where the Doctor teams up with Santa, is fun. Joshua Hale Fialkov and Blair Shedd's "Run, Doctor, Run," where the Doctor lands on an Escher-like world (though not Castrovalva-like) is gorgeous to look at and fun enough for its length. Matthew Dow Smith (on writing and not art) and Mitch Gerads provide "Down to Earth," a decent tale with gorgeous art of the Doctor and an alien hiding on Earth. Finally, Doctor Who Magazine stalwart Dan McDaid crosses the pond for "Tuesday," a zany alien invasion story framed by a letter from Amy to her mum. McDaid gets these characters, in both writing and art; I'd love to see a full Doctor Who comic series by him.

Next Week: The Doctor, Amy, and Rory must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, the fundamental things apply, As Time Goes By!

Review: Doctor Who: Tesseract by Tony Lee, Al Davison, & Blair Shedd

Comic PDF eBook, 134 pages
Published 2010 (contents: 2009-10)
Acquired May 2014
Read July 2014

Doctor Who, Volume 2: Tesseract

Written by Tony Lee

Art by Al Davison & Blair Shedd
Colors by Lovern Kindzierski & Charlie Kirchoff
Lettering by Neil Uyetake & Robbie Robbins

What's with the dreary covers on these collections? Anyway, it was a preview of the first issue collected here that back in the day convinced me I was right about my decision to skip the IDW ongoing. And on reading it in context, it's still awful. Though Al Davison's art in Fugitive was good, his characters are just ugly here, especially his David Tennant and his Matthew (even though he invented Matthew's appearance!). The dialogue is unnatural and awkward, and there are random, forced continuity references.

So, Tesseract completely squanders all the potential I saw being built up in Fugitive. We find out what the deal of the Shadow Advocate is, but it's just not satisfying: when Finch killed her, she was actually flung back into the Time War and she witnessed its final moments over and over again before escaping. Having seen what the Doctor did, she wants to kill him. But the only reason she got flung into the Time War is because after she escaped, she told Finch to send her back! Predestination paradoxes can sometimes drain the drama out of situations, and this is one of those cases: a writer can make a character do anything, no matter how implausible, on the pretext that they had to do it to maintain the loop. And though I kinda like the idea that someone seeing the Doctor use the Moment to wipe out the Time Lords and the Daleks would conclude that he's too dangerous to have around (the Doctor himself reaches that conclusion in "The Parting of the Ways," after all), she just acts like a generic scheming villain, using complicated plots to ensnare the Doctor for no readily apparent reason when she could just kill him multiple times. Also the plot requires a number of people who should know better (like UNIT) to trust the Shadow Advocate against all reason. What is it with the unlikeability of the new-series UNIT commanders? Until Kate Stewart, the show (and its spin-offs) seemed intent on giving us a series of assholes.

The new companions are not great, either. I liked them all right in Fugitive, but Tony Lee can't write them as people to save his life. I get what he's trying to do, but it doesn't work because it lacks all subtlety; Emily is all "I NEED A GUN TO FEEL SAFE" and Matthew is "I DON'T TRUST THE DOCTOR BECAUSE A WOMAN I JUST MET TOLD ME NOT TO." Why does Matthew listen to the Shadow Advocate? Who knows. The Doctor points out that the flaws in her story indicate she's manipulating him, and he basically goes, "She might be a manipulator, but she learned it from you, even though the only person who told me that was her, who we just established as an untrustworthy liar." I can't bring myself to care about either of these characters because there's nothing likeable or interesting about them. Also, Lee seems to keep forgetting they're from the 1920s, as Matthew explains he was too busy to read The Lord of the Rings (and not, perhaps, too from-the-past), and Emily does the "the TARDIS doesn't look like a proper spaceship" bit seemingly obligatory for new-series companions, but I'm not sure really makes sense for someone from the 1920s.

I haven't even talked about the stories here, but I didn't really like either of them. "Tesseract" is flimsy while "Don't Step on the Grass" is just an overcrowded mess of elements that don't work together.