Review: Doctor Who: Hyperion by Robbie Morrison, George Mann, Daniel Indro, Mariano Laclaustra, and Ronilson Freire

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2015
Acquired: September 2018
Read: October 2020

Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor, Vol 3: Hyperion

Writers: Robbie Morrison, George Mann
Artists: Daniel Indro, Mariano Laclaustra, Ronilson Freire
Colorists: Slamet Mujiono, Luis Geurrero
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

I'm of two minds about Titan's Twelfth Doctor ongoing. I find the plots very uninteresting. Evil fire monsters who are ancient enemies of the Time Lords invade the Earth, blah blah blah. It's Doctor Who at its most generic, which is a shame, because on screen, the Peter Capaldi era was Doctor Who at some of its most inventive and clever. In his three seasons, we only got three alien invasion stories by my count, and all of them (the 2014 Missy/Cyberman two-parter, the 2015 Zygon two-parter, and the 2017 Monks trilogy) did really interesting and clever stuff with the concept, and mostly used alien invasions as a way of exploring other issues: mortality, xenophobia, compliance and resistance. The Hyperion storyline does nothing like that; these are just stompy alien fire monsters who want to burn down the Earth and drain the sun, and the human guest characters are about as complex as a bad drawing. Plus there's this really clunky bit where the Doctor leaves in the middle of a crisis to get the stuff he needs to defeat the aliens from other times and places, which I think creates more problems than it solves.

But writer Robbie Morrison really gets the voices of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and Jenna Coleman as Clara. I can imagine Capaldi saying these lines, and can hear how he would balance warmth and coldness in that way only he can do. So even if the experience of reading the overall story was meh, the experience of reading any individual page was usually pretty enjoyable, so long as the Doctor was on it. (On the other hand, George Mann, who pens a single-issue story about Victorian vampires, writes a pretty generic Doctor.) So far the best this series has been is the Las Vegas story in vol 2, which was fun and inventive just like the twelfth Doctor's era on screen. If Morrison can do more stuff like that and less stuff like this, he can do something really interesting, I reckon. I hope so.

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: Four Doctors

Review: Doctor Who: The Weeping Angels of Mons by Robbie Morrison, Daniel Indro, and Eleonora Carlini

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2014-15)
Acquired September 2018
Read December 2019

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 2: The Weeping Angels of Mons

Writer: Robbie Morrison

Artists: Daniel Indro & Eleonora Carlini
Colorist: Slamet Mujiono
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

The Weeping Angels seem to me to be a uniquely televisual monster. Their whole gimmick is that they don't move if you can see them-- so you need a medium that clearly delineates movement. It's particularly clever, because Weeping Angels aren't just frozen when characters see them, but when you the audience are looking. Big Finish have done okay by them, but it's definitely been diminishing returns, and the way Big Finish must indicate movement by stings of music is often inadvertently hilarious, and people have to say things like, "Gosh, that statue wasn't there a second ago!" aloud.

Comics, I think, start out from even more of a disadvantage, in that in a comic nothing is moving when the viewer is looking at it. Possibly a clever writer could make use of this somehow, but judging from The Weeping Angels of Mons (not to mention Terrorformer), Robbie Morrison is not one. This is a generic Doctor Who pseudo-historical. Plus, if you think about it, a Weeping Angel actually isn't that scary in terms of what it does: yes, it plucks you out of time... so that you can live a long and fulfilling life! Most of the tv and audio episodes featuring them manage to get around that, but this one's setting flags up the problem. If you're a soldier in the trenches of World War I, this is actually a step up! Again, a clever writer could probably make something of that, but this story does not.

from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor #7 (art by Daniel Indro)

One of the real high points of Titan's first Tenth Doctor volume was the Doctor's new companion, Gabby Gonzalez, who felt like a real person with a distinctive voice. Unfortunately, there's none of that present here, where Gabby could be literally any young female companion. This isn't just a writing problem, but an art one, as she suddenly looks like a generic non-Hispanic white woman.