Review: Doctor Who: The Forgotten by Tony Lee and Pia Guerra

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2009 (contents: 2008-09)
Acquired May 2014
Read June 2014

Doctor Who: The Forgotten

Writer: Tony Lee

Artists: Pia Guerra with Kelley Yates, Stefano Martino, and Nick Roche

This is the second of the digital comics I got from IDW's Humble Bundle; I'd avoided it previously because of the seeming fanwank, with the Doctor losing his memory and reacquiring it by recalling nine previous adventures, one for each incarnation. I'll admit it's not as bad as I thought, mostly because the individual adventures are fun, and Lee does a decent job capturing the voices of old eras. Some are too slight to work (those featuring the first and fourth Doctors) but others really work as quick little adventures (the second and fifth Doctors). The only really bad one is the eighth Doctor one, which primarily seems to exist to insist that plot elements from The Invasion of Time played a key role in the Time War. The main plot is not great (some alien is... up to something? and there's the Matrix? I don't know), but it's not really the point of the book, so that's okay. And I'll admit that the continuity references work in the context of a continuity-driven story (unlike in Lee's dreadful "The Time Machination").

The first few issues here are drawn by Pia Guerra of Y: The Last Man fame, and they are gorgeous. Guerra is great at drawing people as people (a surprisingly rare skill in the superhero-dominated comics industry), and her use of light and shadow is fantastic. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the other artists here are, well, not good. I don't know who draws which issue, but the big two-page spread of all the Doctors in chapter 6 is totally compromised by how bad the artist is at likenesses; the second and fifth Doctors look Asian!

Review: Doctor Who: Agent Provacateur by Gary Russell et al.

Comic PDF eBook, 136 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2008)
Acquired May 2014
Read June 2014

Doctor Who: Agent Provavateur

Written by Gary Russell

Art by Nick Roche, Jose Maria Berdy, Stefano Martino, and Micro Pierfederici
Art Assist by Joe Phillips
Inking Assist by German Torres
Colors by Charlie Kirkoff and Tom Smith
Letters by Chris Mowry, Amauri Osorio, and Neil Uyetake

IDW has put out a large number of Doctor Who comics since it acquired the American license in 2008, but I've avoided most of them-- this one because it was written by Gary Russell, whose Doctor Who novels I almost never enjoy. But in May IDW released digital downloads of everything they ever published as a Humble Bundle, and sixteen trade paperbacks for $15 is nothing to sneeze at.

Having finally read this, IDW's very first Doctor Who story, I feel justified in avoiding it. These are six largely self-contained single-issue stories, with a narrative threading through the whole thing. But if you can explain what that narrative actually is, you're a smarter person than me. They don't really work at standalones, either; Russell typically wastes the first 3-4 pages of each story on irrelevant banter between the Doctor and Martha, and then leaving him less than twenty pages to introduce a problem, complicate it, and solve it. Usually it's the solution that suffers; many of these endings are cursory at best. It must be admitted that he really captures the voices of the Doctor and Martha very well, but that is not anywhere near enough to make all 136 pages worth reading.