Doctor Who Free Comic Book Day 2018
Writers: Nick Abadzis, John Freeman, George Mann, Jody Houser
Artists: Giorgia Sposito & Arianna Florean, Christopher Jones, Mariano Laclaustra, Rachael Stott
Colorists: Marco Lesko, Carlos Cabrera
Letterers: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt
This Free Comic Book Day offering contains three-and-a-half stories, only one-and-a-half of which have been collected, so I picked it up. It's a weird artifact, in that when it came out, Titan clearly planned to do some stuff it never actually got around to doing; instead, it massively shrank its output when it began its Thirteenth Doctor comic.
It begins with "Catch a Falling Star," a twelfth Doctor story that picks up from the end of The Good Companion, showing Gabby being picked up out of the time vortex by a later incarnation of the Doctor than her own. Mostly it's recap and set-up, one assumes so that people could jump on with the new twelfth-Doctor-and-Gabby comics that the closing caption promised with its "THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES THIS NOVEMBER!" But November 2018 saw no such comics released, nor did any subsequent Novembers, even though Abadzis wrote the scripts. It's cute, though; I always like it when Florean draws Gabby's diary.
It continues with "The Armageddon Gambit," a slim story that serves as an utterly nonessential prologue to Operation Volcano, Titan's seventh Doctor miniseries... but at least that actually came out! Interestingly, it's by John Freeman, editor and occasional writer of the DWM strip during the era the comic seeks to recreate. This is actually collected in the Operation Volcano trade paperback, so you can read it there.
It ends (kind of) with "Midnight Feast," an eleventh Doctor story that offers some faint amusement. This story ends with "THE ELEVENTH DOCTOR WILL RETURN!" He never really did, appearances in The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor and The Many Lives of Doctor Who aside.
It actually ends with "And Introducing...", a one-page three-panel strip where the thirteenth Doctor gets out of the TARDIS, by the Thirteenth Doctor creative team. Not sure if it really needed a writer, but I guess someone had to write "VWOORRRP" down so the letterer knew to put it on the page.
So, overall, a bit of a curio, but if you were invested in Gabby's story from the Tenth Doctor comics, it's definitely worth a few minutes to read what turned out to be the end of her adventures.
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 First Doctor: "In-Between Times"
