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