Evening's Empire: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Andrew Cartmel, Richard Piers Rayner, Dan Abnett, Marc Platt, John Ridgway, et al.
This set of stories take us into, ahem, "Virgin territory." I suspect
I'll have more to say about this when I read the next volume, but here
we get the first references to the
New Adventures. In
The Grief, Ace includes the Timewyrm among the most dangerous foes she's encountered; the internet tells me that
Ravens take's place during
Cat's Cradle: Warhead; and then in
Cat Litter, we start getting footnotes that clarify placement (it opens with one saying recent adventures were seen "
both last issue and in Nightshade" and ends with "
Next: After Love and War, a new companion and... Sontarans!"). For the
DWM
strip—which for a long time barely even seemed to acknowledge that
there was a tv programme—this is a huge change, and a weird one that I
wish was explained more. John Freeman's notes, though, mostly focus on
the issues surrounding
Evening's Empire, and don't give any sense of why he might want to hitch
DWM's narrative to a series of novels that were only just getting off the ground. On
Down the Tubes,
he off-handedly mentions that
Ravens "was the first story where we tried to work with
Doctor Who novel publisher Virgin, after meeting with the editor
Peter Darvill-Evans and trying to cross promote what were then the only new
Doctor Who adventures," but that's it. My impression is that this was a decision ultimately regretted by his successors at
DWM, and part of the reason this entire era of
DWM
ultimately ended up kind of orphaned, but... why did they do it?
Anyway, more on that when I get to Benny Summerfield's debut in
Emperor of the Daleks.
Overall, this is a dark set of stories. I don't know if I would want all my
Doctor Who to be like this, but it works more than it doesn't, and I found it more to my taste than many other
DWM runs (i.e., #44-57, #100-47).
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from Doctor Who Magazine #162
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Living in the Past, from
Doctor Who Magazine #162 (July 1990)
story by Andy Lane, illustrations by Cam Smith
This text story clearly should have been in the previous volume, telling
as it does the story of how Ace joined the Doctor between Train-Flight and Teenage Kicks!
As a story, it's okay; I found it a bit dull but the climax is amazing
(Ace leading a dinosaur army), and well drawn by Cam Smith. It kind of
ties into the then-ongoing Mandragora storyline; the Doctor says "I'm
being distracted by trivia there's something more important going on
elsewhere," but it doesn't quite fit in that the Doctor thinks,
"Considering the state of the TARDIS, he was lucky to have ended up on
the same planet," when in Distractions he says he can't leave Earth if he wants to!
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from Doctor Who Classic Comics Autumn Holiday Special
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Evening's Empire, from
Doctor Who Magazine #180 (Nov. 1991) and
Doctor Who Classic Comics Autumn Holiday Special (Sept. 1993)
written by Andrew Cartmel, art by Richard Piers Rayner
More than any story of its era, this feels to me like Doctor Who
does Vertigo. The DC Comics imprint wasn't actually launched until Mar.
1993, but of course it drew on preexisting DC comics lines, most notably
The Sandman. This has the feeling on many of those stories:
journeys into people's psyches, abuse both sexual and parental, mental
trauma, criticism of religion, difficult page layouts and transitions.
Delete the Doctor and Ace, and this could come straight out of Hellblazer or Animal Man or Black Orchid, anything trying to be Gaiman, Morrison, or Moore, but not actually written by them.
It's okay. For me, it's let down by two things. One is Richard Piers
Rayners's artwork. His drawings seem reliant on photo reference in a way
that often works to the detriment of the imagery. I can see the
argument for why someone's mouth should be open when they are talking,
but it never looks good to trace a photo of someone's open mouth. His
Muriel Frost is unrecognizable as the same woman from The Mark of Mandragora,
and looks like a series of an actress's glamour headshots rather than a
moving, living, breathing human being. Individual images look good, but
overall this doesn't flow. Though, to be honest, it is a lot like
reading a mediocre Vertigo title.
I came to like it less after reading Cartmel's discussion of it in the
notes, where he says he wanted to write a narrative countering adventure
stories where the women are fantasies for the men. Given that, the way
Frost is drawn rankles; and given that, it seems bizarre that Evening's
victims are barely discernible as people, and that Ace even feels pretty
peripheral; the character of Ives pretty clearly exists only to suffer a
horrible fate later on. I am not sure you can write a story criticizing
putting women at the margins if you yourself put women at the margins!
That said, there's stuff to like here. Cartmel, for obvious reasons,
excels at portentous Sylvester McCoy dialogue; the twist about the scale
of the crashed UFO is a good one; seeing Frost's home life is
interesting even if it doesn't entirely come off.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #183
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Conflict of Interests, from
Doctor Who Magazine #183 (Feb. 1992)
script by Dan Abnett, pencils by Richard Whitaker, inks by Cam Smith, letters by Caroline Steeden
Darkness, Falling was the first Doctor-less "main" strip in DWM's
history, but that was a prelude to a Doctor-focused story; Conflict of Interests is a totally standalone Doctor-free tale. It follows a Foreign Hazard Duty team trying to secure some
ruins for archeological study on an alien planet; they run into
Sontarans. This was fine; the ending is nice, but I feel like even at
seven pages it's a tad longer than it needs to be.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #185
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The Grief, from
Doctor Who Magazine #185-87 (Apr.-June 1992)
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Vincent Danks, inks by Adolfo Bullya and Robin Riggs, letters by Caroline Steeden
The Doctor and Ace find a group of Dan Abnett space marines—not the FHD,
though—investigating a planet upon which was trapped an ancient evil. I
hate it when new monsters are cheaply claimed to be in the big leagues,
and I found the soldier characters hard to distinguish at first, but
otherwise this is a solid piece. I particularly like how well Abnett
captures the voices of both the Doctor and Ace.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #189
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Ravens, from
Doctor Who Magazine #188-90 (July-Sept. 1992)
story by Andrew Cartmel; pencils by Brian Williamson; inks by Cam Smith and Steve Pini; letters by Caroline Steeden, Glib, and Janey
Again, there's a bit of a Doctor-Who-does-Vertigo vibe to this. But I don't have a problem with that—isn't that what Doctor Who
always does, take pop culture and chews it up and spits it out in its
own imitable fashion? If the show had been on screen still, you could
imagine it going in this direction, and though I think that would run
against its populist appeal, this was an era where there was no tv show,
and the strip thus didn't have to appeal to a broad audience. I thought
this was much better executed than Cartmel's similar attempt in Evening's Empire.
Great dark inks by Smith and Pini really support his pretentious
seventh-Doctor-as-God stuff. If there's a criticism I have, it's that if
you told the whole thing in order, it'd be a bit thin for three parts;
it's basically just one scene told incredibly complicatedly! But what a
scene. It does very well the
ordinary-people-plunged-into-horrifying-world vibe.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #191
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Memorial / Cat Litter, from
Doctor Who Magazine #191-92 (Sept.-Oct. 1992)
scripts by Warwick Gray and Marc Platt, art by John Ridgway, letters by Kid Robson and Caroline Steeden
John Ridgway is back! I'm sure these are both solid stories on the basis
of their writing, but getting Ridgway back for the first time in a
while adds an inestimable something—and both of these are stories that
play to his strengths. (He does a good Ace likeness, for one.) Memorial
is a somber but uplifting tale; slight in terms of plot, but what it
does, it does well, communicating the Doctor's horror at war. Ridgway is
equally at home in horrifying space vistas and the English countryside
in mourning. Cat Litter I didn't really get from a writing
perspective, but if you say, "John Ridgway, Ace is trapped in the TARDIS
and it's a gameboard," obviously it will look great. I didn't know I
needed to see Ace running from a pair of giant D20s, but now I can't
imagine why I didn't.
Stray Observations:
- Normally I don't say much about the cover art
of these things, because it ranges from perfectly fine to excellent,
but David Roach did not do a good job with Colonel Frost here.
- Also, I am again grumpy that the new format collections omit creator credits. You wouldn't know Vincent Danks inked some of Evening's Empire without the notes at the end; several stories thus give no credit to letterers.
- Again, the idea of a coherent DWM universe continues to build. Other than the cameos in Party Animals,
I think Muriel Frost is the first time a non-companion character
created (for the main strip) by one writer is brought back by another.
- Due to a number of problem, part one of Evening's Empire ran in DWM #180, but there never was a part two. The complete story eventually appeared two years later in a Doctor Who Classic Comics
special. Cartmel took advantage of the story being complete in one
volume to shuffle the narrative around; the original part one actually
begins on page five of the complete version (spanning pp. 9-15 of this
collection), if I am correct. This did confuse me a bit; by the time I
got to where the opening was set, I forgot all about it, and thus
wondered why Cartmel had skipped over the UNIT assault on Evening's
empire.
- Because the original art was lost for a few
pages, Rayner chose to redraw them for this collection, working in his
2016 style rather than his early 1990s one. The replacement art pages
are a bit off (see above), but the story is surreal enough it gets away
with it. If any DWM strip would randomly switch styles, it would be this one! I appreciate the inclusion of scans of the originals in the back.
- Pretty unsurprisingly, Richard Piers Rayner did no further DWM work. It turns out I have read some other stuff drawn by him: he illustrated the 1989 Swamp Thing Annual by Neil Gaiman (about Brother Power the Geek), a single 1991 issue of L.E.G.I.O.N. (written by former DWM contributor Alan Grant), and some of Tony Lee's mediocre IDW Doctor Who comics in 2011. He basically left comics after this, though, and became the official artist-in-residence for the Middlesbrough Football Club!
- Conflict of Interests was the last
appearance of Foreign Hazard Duty. Apparently an FHD comic book was once
proposed but it never came to pass; it's hard to imagine it, because
the FHD never had much to offer beyond "like them out of Aliens."
I think it works fine as a consistent space organization for us to see,
but it's hard to envision it fronting its own book. Maybe it would have
worked better with recurring characters, but each of the four FHD teams
we've seen are different. Would UNIT have taken off if it was different
guys each time? Also, why aren't the ones in The Grief just FHD?
- This was Robin Riggs's only DWM work. I know him best as a prolific inker at DC in the 2000s, working on titles such as Green Lantern / Green Arrow, Birds of Prey, Manhunter, and Legion of Super-Heroes. This is the fourth DWM seventh Doctor collection with art by Cam Smith; it's also the last. He would go on to do a lot of superhero work for DC Comics, including Birds of Prey in the late 1990s and most notably (to me) Action Comics in the early 2000s, being the primary inker during the time Joe Kelly was writing it. Even before I knew them as DWM contributors, both Riggs and Smith are the kind of inker where I was glad to see their name on an issue, because it meant that I was in good hands.
- Adolfo Buylla's only other DWM contribution was way back in 1981. Unusually, he had an American comics career before working on DWM, illustrating The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery back in the 1970s. This is Brian Williamson's only DWM work (though he did do the 2007 Doctor Who Storybook), but he's illustrated a number of Titan's Doctor Who titles, including The Fourth Doctor: Gaze of the Medusa.
- Warwick Gray is the man we now know as Scott Gray, who continues to work on the DWM strip up to the present. I think he's contributed at least one story to every subsequent Doctor's run, and been the primary writer on many, including the eighth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth. Imagine handing in your first ever Doctor Who comic and being told it was going to be illustrated by John Ridgway!
- As I alluded to above, here we begin weaving in and out of the continuity of the NAs. Eventually the official stance would be that everything since Fellow Travellers has followed on from Timewyrm; I disagree, as it contradicts the actual textual evidence. That article was published Nov. 1993, though, and doesn't seem to reflect intentions at time of publication; for example, the console room that debuted in The Good Soldier collection was used in the DWM preview for the first Timewyrm novel. Based on the references we get, it seems to be something like:
- Evening's Empire
- Timewyrm
- The Grief
- Cat's Cradle
- Memorial
- Nightshade
- Cat Litter
- Love and War
- Yes, Ravens supposedly happens during Cartmel's Cat's Cradle novel, Warhead. I haven't read Warhead, though, so I don't know how that is supposed to work.
This post is the eighteenth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Daleks. Previous installments are listed below:
