The Cruel Sea (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 30)

The Cruel Sea: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Robert Shearman, Mike Collins, Gareth Roberts, Steven Moffat, et al.

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 2005-06
Acquired: December 2014
Read: September 2022

I've always been a bit salty that this book exists. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I am salty that the DWM Special Edition The Ninth Doctor Collected Comics exists. I dutifully bought that, expecting that no such graphic novel would ever come out—there just weren't enough strip adventures to justify such a collection! Eight years later, and the size of these collections had been halved, and so I bought those stories all over again, with just one addition—a prose story that I already had! Well, that and the as usual excellent extras.

So this was a reread again for me, but the added context of the extras was new. I appreciated in particular that were get to hear a lot from Mike Collins, who illustrated every DWM strip of the ninth Doctor; this is one of those eras where we have a consistent artist but not a consistent writer. I've opined before that you need one of those two, otherwise the strip doesn't feel cohesive because you don't have an actor's performance to unify the various voices as the tv programme does. And Mike Collins does good work; he's been with DWM since 1987 as a writer, and since 1991 as an artist, but I knew him first from his work on Star Trek comics for Marvel and Wildstorm and Babylon 5 comics for DC. He's good at likenesses, great at storytelling—exactly the artist you want, I reckon, when you're suddenly producing a tv tie-in strip to an actual tv programme for the first time in over fifteen years!

It's funny, in the extras to both this and the next volume, The Betrothal of Sontar, editor Clay Hickman talks about how they felt they had to a go a bit more kid-friendly now that the tv show was back... but I would hesitate to call any of the DWM strips here notably kid friendly, especially Rob Shearman's! But overall, I remembered this era as a bit of a shambles, and rereading it I didn't find that true at all. It's not perfect, but this is a solid slice of Doctor Who comics. Certainly it's much better than what DWM was putting out last time the tv programme was still on!

from Doctor Who Magazine #356

The Love Invasion, from Doctor Who Magazine #355-57 (Apr.-June 2005)
script by Gareth Roberts, story by Roberts/Hickman, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by Dylan Teague and James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The ninth Doctor and Rose debut with a very solid piece of Russell T Davies pastiche. There's a lot of running back and forth in 1960s London as the Doctor and Rose must piece together what links some overly helpful young women, the death of several prominent scientists, and a woman who keeps killing aliens. There's solid humor, a decent alien motivation, and a strong sense of the voices of both Eccleston and Piper. The main thing I didn't like was that there's sort of a fake-out double ending, which felt tacked on.

Art Attack, from Doctor Who Magazine #358 (July 2005)
story & pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by Kris Justice, colours by Dylan Teague, lettering by Roger Langridge

This is a decent story with a good ending, about the Doctor and Rose coming to a futuristic art gallery, and getting caught up in an evil piece of performance art. That said, I felt like there's a better version of this story somewhere in the multiverse: a comics story about art written by an artist seems like it could have done more fun stuff than the story does, and there's surprisingly little made of the fact that both the Doctor and the alien are the last of their kinds—that would have been the emotional center of the story on tv, I think.

from Doctor Who Magazine #359

The Cruel Sea, from Doctor Who Magazine #359-62 (Aug.-Nov. 2005)
story by Robert Shearman, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I was pretty surprised when Mike Collins noted this as one of the best comic strips he's ever illustrated—because to me it was the weakest story in this volume. It has striking visuals—a cruise ship on the red oceans of Mars, Billie Piper in a skintight spacesuit, a woman whose face looks like a fractured mirror—and some neat uses of the medium—the conversation between the two Doctors—but even though I'm a big fan of Robert Shearman's audio work for Big Finish and his original prose fiction, I found something deeply unpleasant about reading this story. Some of the visuals struck me as inappropriate for the Doctor Who of 2005, and some I just didn't like. Well rendered, but genuinely unpleasant to think about. It's the kind of thing Shearman makes work in prose or audio, I guess (there's some gross stuff in Scherzo), but when you have to actually see it, it's very different. The characters generally are unpleasant, too—this story is very much the epitome of something that's well-crafted but just did not work for me.

When I posted the above on GallifreyBase, Rob himself popped up to opine, "I absolutely agree with you! I'm so grateful to Mike Collins for his amazing art and lovely support, but I don't think I got this story right at all. I've never been a big comics fan, and so misunderstood the particular demands of the medium - and yeah, I think I got the tone wrong completely." Phew!

from Doctor Who Annual 2006

Mr Nobody / What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow, from Doctor Who Annual 2006
stories by Scott Gray and Steven Moffat, art by John Ross and Martin Geraghty, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

These two stories, one comics, one prose, are both from Panini's only Doctor Who Annual, and are both more child-focused than the average DWM strip. But they're still both solid. You can of course count on Scott Gray for a well put-together done-in-one, and Steven Moffat's story is a fun time travel loop. We should meet this Sally Sparrow again!

from Doctor Who Magazine #364

A Groatsworth of Wit, from Doctor Who Magazine #363-64 (Dec. 2005–Jan. 2006)
story by Gareth Roberts, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

The ninth Doctor's DWM tenure comes to a quick end with this, a decently fun story with some good jokes and a nice last scene. Obviously this ended up a dry run for a David Tennant episode, like some many stories in this volume, but it's different enough to be worthwhile.

Other Notes:

• The Love Invasion, despite being three issues long, spans the entirety of Christopher Eccleston's on-screen tenure.
• The behind-the-scenes stuff about Mike Collins trying to get Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper's likenesses down was great. On the one hand, Eccleston kept shooting down images that were too heroic and good-looking and muscular, too American comics! On the other hand, Piper just said, "Ooh, he's given me hips and tits, I like it!"
• After all the talk of likenesses, it thus becomes very noticeable when Rose has a dream in The Cruel Sea about marrying Mickey, but we never actually see his face, presumably so the story could avoid an extra set of approvals just for a one-page sequence.
• Elements of The Love Invasion, The Cruel Sea, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays, and A Groatsworth of Wit arguably all ended up on screen. The latter two are obvious, but Clay Hickman makes the case that The Cruel Sea influenced "The Waters of Mars." Is this an offshoot of the Flood? A GallifreyBase commenter pointed out to me that the scene in Love Invasion where the Doctor counteracts being poisoned by eating random foods was lifted for "The Unicorn and the Wasp."
  
• Rose is the first companion to spontaneously appear in the strip since Benny, and only the second to ever do so. Every other previous companion was introduced, even if (as in Peri and Ace) it was a reintroduction. Between this and the Doctor's regeneration, the illusion of the DWM strip as a standalone continuous narrative is shattered. We're in for a lot of that over the next couple years...
• Rob Shearman is, I think, the first tv writer to work on the strip since Marc Platt. (Though one other strip writer here would go on to be a tv writer, as is the case with a couple past writers.)
• It's pretty mind-boggling to learn about the ninth Doctor strips we didn't get from the extras: Russell T Davies and Bryan Hitch writing the ninth Doctor's debut! Russell T Davies and Dave Gibbons writing his final episode!! It's a shame we've still never gotten an RTD Doctor Who comic. I don't know if comics would play to his strength like tv, but I'd certainly be interested to see it.

This post is the thirtieth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Betrothal of Sontar. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
24. Ground Zero
25. End Game
26. The Glorious Dead
27. Oblivion
28. Transformers: Time Wars and Other Stories
29. The Flood
    

Review: Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 162 pages
Published 2011
Acquired September 2012
Read September 2013

Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012
edited by Clayton Hickman

Okay, the cover's not as nice, but in most other ways this is an improvement upon its already-quite-good predecessor. I remember not liking the 2011 series very much as it aired, but this book got me appreciating it-- even if the plots don't hang together, surely it's one of Doctor Who's most stylish and gorgeous-looking seasons? The episode guides are still good, but there's even better features than ever before:

• notes from Amy and Rory to the Doctor during their honeymoon(s)
• cut sequences from episodes (including a Fiddler on the Roof song in "The Impossible Astronaut," and all the drafts of "The Curse of the Black Spot"... including the ship-less one!)
• an explanation of the three-month gap between "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" (complete with map)
• "The Changing Hats of Doctor Who"(!)
• a scrapbook of Madame Vastra's history (including Henry Gordon Jago reference)
• report cards for Rory, Mels, and Amy
• a Teselecta user's guide ("The Teselecta comes with a range of pre-programed dance moves for scenarios when it is required to dance convincingly.... NEVER attempt manual improvisation - IT CAN COST LIVES!")
• a TwoStreams Kindness Facility PR brochure
• The White Flag, the newspaper of the always-surrending planet of Tivoli
• Charles Dickens's twitter updates

Particularly awesome is a Neil Gaiman/Mark Buckingham comic strip prequel to "The Doctor's Wife" and the Doctor's job application for the department store in "Closing Time."

There's a real emphasis in here on how the show is made, which is both pleasing to someone like me and sure to inspire and thrill a whole new generation of younger fans. It's a shame that there don't seem to be any future Brilliant Books on the horizon-- no doubt a victim of the awful scheduling decisions that have plagued the show of later...

Review: Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2011 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 131 pages
Published 2010
Acquired September 2012
Read August 2013

Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2011
edited by Clayton Hickman

Okay, it's a little weird to be reading a guide to the first series of eleventh Doctor adventures just after the last one has gone out, but whatever. The Brilliant Book 2011 is a charming guide to the 2010 series, but much more besides-- it's filled with interviews, original fiction, and goofy features like a map of Amy Pond's hometown of Leadworth, instructions for dancing like the Doctor, "twitbook" and updates from Rory's stag party. I appreciate that they got Brian W. Aldiss(!) to write fiction for the book, but "Umwelts for Hire" didn't entirely come off, I'm afraid. The book is gorgeous overall; I love Anthony Dry's collage illustrations for each episode, and Paul Lang's visual design is top-notch.

Review: Doctor Who Storybook 2007 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 76 pages
Published 2006
Acquired August 2011
Read June 2012

Doctor Who Storybook 2007

edited by Clayton Hickman

I picked this book up because my wife and I had just listened to Patient Zero and Blue Forgotten Planet, two Big Finish appearances of the Viyrans, and she was curious about them; the story "No One Died" by Nicholas Briggs contains their only appearance in prose. It's an okay story-- there are some good ideas, but the resolution obnoxiously leaves a central mystery dangling!

The rest of the stories are fine: there are no particular standouts, positive or negative. Part of the problem stems, I think, from the fact that most of the writers try to tell a "typical" Doctor Who story in a few pages, not reworking the format to the shorter length as the Short Trips usually do. Still, some are fun, such as Gareth Roberts's "The Cat Came Back," about a strange civilization discovered by the Doctor and Rose. (Martin Geraghty's illustrations are great.) Robert Shearman's "Untitled" has some good ideas-- a picture coming to life-- but the best part of it are the Brian Williamson illustrations it engenders.

I did find Justin Richards's "Gravestone House" sacrificed logic for poorly done "scares," and Jonathan Morris's comic strip "Opera of Doom" is kinda disappointing as well.

On the other hand, Steven Moffat's "Corner of the Eye"-- told in the form of an implausibly detailed instant messenger conversation-- is hella creepy.

Review: Doctor Who Annual 2006 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 62 pages
Published 2005
Acquired August 2009
Read June 2012

Doctor Who Annual 2006

edited by Clayton Hickman

This set of stories are some of the scant few adventures to feature Christopher Eccleston's ninth Doctor: aside from this book, there's just six novels and a slim collection of Doctor Who Magazine comic strips. Despite being written by luminaries such as Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman, they're mostly just okay. Nothing terrible, but Gareth Roberts's "Doctor vs Doctor" just seemed too convoluted, and I never engaged with Cornell's perhaps-too-alien "The Masks of Makassar."  Shearman's was a bit better, with "Pitter-patter" giving us some nice creepy moments, and Daryl Joyce turning in some excellent illustrations.

The best stories are definitely the fun little comic strip ("Mr Nobody") by DWM stalwart Scott Gray and illustrator John Ross and "What I Did On My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow" by Steven Moffat, which went on to become the television story "Blink," but is a fun Moffat adventure in its own right. (I actually bought this book to get this story, so that I could assign my students to write a short paper on that adaptation!)

There's also some puzzles and behind-the-scenes stuff which is utterly disposable, with the exception of the volume's highlight: "Meet the Doctor" and "Meet Rose," both written by Russell T Davies. There's nothing quite like seeing how the characters are viewed by their creator himself.