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: Caustic Comedies by Robert Shearman

Hardcover, 310 pages
Published 2010 (contents: 1992-2001)
Acquired October 2011
Read December 2013

Caustic Comedies: Plays For The Stage
by Robert Shearman

This collects seven stageplays by Robert Shearman, a dramatist of some repute, or so I've heard, though I primarily know him for the very highbrow reason that he's written a lot for Doctor Who. It's all pretty good, as good as reading a stageplay can be, I suppose. Some of these I like the concept more the execution ("Knights of Plastic Armour," about a group of obsessed historical re-enactors), but it's my supposition that good actors would be doing enough with this material to make it come alive. If I have a favorite, it's "Fool to Yourself," about a married couple who go to the hotel where they first met in an attempt to rekindle their relationship, only their older selves meet and start falling in love with the past version of their spouses... whoops. I also really liked "Inappropriate Behaviour," about a minister and a woman who bump into each other at key life moments, and "Shaw Cornered," about George Bernard Shaw after his death.

Fans of Rob Shearman's Doctor Who work will notice some themes from his Doctor Who work (particularly, Punchline, The Chimes of Midnight, Jubilee): repetition, emotionally disconnected spouses, women purposefully acting a bit dim for their men, Martin Jarvis. Also "Shaw Cornered" reminds one somewhat of the Mozart story Shearman wrote for 100 (as far as its general concerns go, not in its plot).

The title is a bit weird. "Caustic" is less wide-ranging than the book actually is, and "comedies"... well, I guess so, but there's so much more going on than jokes.

Review: Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman

Trade paperbook, 230 pages
Published 2009

Acquired October 2011

Read September 2012

Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical
by Robert Shearman

I should have known that a book of love stories by Rob Shearman would be depressing. These are very depressing.

But that's okay. It's the kind of pain that lets you know you're still alive, and you feel joy for feeling it, and maybe you even laugh inappropriately. The stories are bizarre and macabre and imaginative and quite frequently gross, but they always work. Even when a story about a woman having the world's most awkward affair is for some reason also about running over a strange and hideous creature in the middle of the night. Or especially.

I think my favorite was the one about the people who literally gave other people their hearts when they fell in love. Or maybe the one where it turns out they can measure exactly how much you love someone. Or the one where a woman is haunted by her ghost cat her entire life.

The one where Satan tries to make it as a novelist wasn't my favorite, but it was still good.

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.

It's Hard to Topple Governments When the Doctor's Not Around

Hardcover, 202 pages
Published 2003
Acquired December 2011
Read February 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield III: Life During Wartime

edited by Paul Cornell

At the end of the previous Bernice Summerfield story, the audio drama The Poison Seas, Bernice received a message from Irving Braxiatel, telling her to come home to the Braxiatel Collection. Life During Wartime picks up almost immediately thereafter, with Bernice coming home to find the Collection occupied by the Fifth Axis, the Space Racists she'd thought defeated in The Glass Prison. Life During Wartime features little archaeology and little space adventure, instead telling the story of the months of the Fifth Axis occupation.

The first thing in Life During Wartime, as in most Bernice Summerfield books, is a little descriptive piece called "The Braxiatel Collection," explaining the series setup. This little piece explains succinctly everything that is wrong with the setup. There are potted backstories for Benny, Irving, Jason, and Adrian, which is fine, but it reads like it comes out of the series bible, and hence explains all of the jokes: we are told that Joseph the Porter is over-literal (but on purpose), what Collection administrator Ms Jones means when she puts on her glasses, how gardener Mister Crofton reacts to forgetting the "Mister," and that the public relations officer never actually turns up in stories (oh, the hilarity). Why do we need all these characters? Bernice Summerfield wants to be Indiana Jones in Space, but Indiana Jones just has Marcus Brody to report back to, not Brody and a lover and a rival and a department secretary and a janitor and a press officer. Why do you need such a large, uninteresting supporting cast? Even the one story largely set on the collection, The Squire's Crystal, didn't make a lot of use of them as I recall.

Life During Wartime doesn't mean that the unwieldy setup has been worthwhile all along, but it is used to maximum effect here. We just don't see what Bernice has to deal with (she feels compelled to play along with the Fifth Axis because she doesn't know where her son is), but how Irving Braxiatel deals with being surprised for the first time ever, how Jason Kane immediately gives in and defects to the Axis, how Adrian suffers as a worker, that Bev Tarrant can be something other than a thief, why Ms Jones fell in love with an Axis policeman, and what happened to Mister Crofton during the Dalek War. The range of characters has a range of reactions to the occupation, some trying to stop it at any cost, while the Axis itself tries to convince them that nothing has changed.

Suffice it to say that I liked this book a lot. It's technically an anthology, but it reads like a novel. Especially the early stories lead one right into the next. Paul Cornell keeps the book nearly seamless; with 22 stories in 200 pages, each story is around ten pages long, and thus no one voice is in play too long. The many-voice thing works, though; it feels like one author adopting a range of styles and approaches to convey one idea: the difficulty of maintaining your courage in a life during wartime. Some are just moments, with Bernice talking to Irving, or Mister Crofton remembering his past. Quite amazingly, not a single one is bad. Not a single one. The worst I could describe one as is "average," and even that is pushing it. If I just talked about the good ones, I'd be here far too long, but here are some favorites:

"The Birthday Party" by Simon Guerrier, where Bernice must help celebrate the life of a member of the resistance without offending Marshal Anson, otherwise many lives will be lost.

"Five Dimensional Thinking" by Nick Wallace, where Irving Braxiatel convinces himself that only a Time Lord could have beaten him, and that that Time Lord must be himself.

"Meanwhile, in a Small Room, a Small Boy..." by Robert Shearman, where Peter must try to occupy himself while his mother Bernice is gone... and he does so through self-destructive blame.

"Drinking with the Enemy" by Jonathan Blum, where Bernice, having sold out and resumed her relationship with Jason, now an Axis officer, has dinner with Ms Jones and her new boyfriend, an Axis stalwart. Curfew comes, no one can go home, they drink too much, and they all learn entirely too much about one another. The best story in the book, showing how someone can be a fundamentally good person and a fundamentally awful person at the same time.

"The Peter Principle" by Kate Orman, where Bernice finally figures out where she stands.

There's something intrinsically Bernice-ish about occupation stories; when I think of classic Benny stories, the usual suspects are Beyond the Sun and Just War, and there's also The Dying Days and "Kill the Mouse!" I think it's because for the most part, Bernice is a pretty Doctor-like character, swanning into sci-fi situations and solving problems through action/adventure and some good dialogue. But occupations play out differently for Bernice than the Doctor. I can't imagine the Doctor living for weeks or months under a dictatorship, unable to do anything but keep himself alive, but what else can Bernice do? It's an intrinsically (and exclusively) human problem, and hence what makes Bernice her own character, her own person, and very real. She's never cruel or cowardly, but when you can't swan into the occupation headquarters and destroy the government with five words, that's something it's very hard to keep up, making her a whole lot braver.