Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, No. V–VII (Chs. 14-22)

No. V (Chs. 14-16)
This deviates from the structure of the last couple installments. Instead of going Paul→Paul→someone else (probably Walter), here we get Paul→someone else (indeed, Walter)→Paul. In the first chapter, Paul and Florence attend an end-of-term party for the students at Paul's school, but Paul suffers an attack of illness. The whole chapter has a kind of dreamlike quality, and though the installment came out in February, and the party actually precedes summer break, it actually felt very appropriate to read it in December; tonally, it felt very appropriate for Christmas, with its nostalgic, wistful tone.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: December 2024–January 2025

There's also some good jokes about an eternal Dickens bugaboo, the oversystematization of that which should not be systematized. In this case, there's a funny bit about how the teachers at Paul's school rate him at 6¾ on a scale of one to eight for "natural capacity" and "general disposition to study"... though only at a four for "gentlemanly demeanour" (208). Paul, however, is "undecided whether six three-fourths, meant six pounds fifteen, or sixpence three farthings, or six foot three, or three quarters past six, or six somethings that he hadn’t learnt yet, with three unknown something elses over"!

Incidentally, when sick, Paul perceives things around them changing size and position; it seemed to me that this could be (based on my limited understanding) an example of a malady named after a different Victorian novel, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, but in some quick Googling, anyway, I didn't find anyone else making that connection to Dombey and Son. Maybe I don't understand AIWS, or maybe I misread the novel? For example, it's noted that "Mr Toots’s head had the appearance of being at once bigger and farther off than was quite natural" (213). It's very vivid, though, making me wonder if Dickens himself suffered from it at some point.

The Walter bit goes on a bit too long, like all the other ones, but we do see that Walter is beginning to invest himself emotionally in Florence. Florence, incidentally, is probably the Dickens girlest Dickens girl who ever Dickens girled, being a beautiful naïve slip of a girl who the men adore. The statement that she was "something precious, unattainable, unchangeable, and indefinite – indefinite in all but its power of giving him pleasure, and restraining him like an angel’s hand from anything unworthy" (243) could sum up so many of Dickens's female characters.

The big spoiler for this section—which I did not know going in, so avert your eyes if you want that to be true of you as well—is that the "Son" of Dombey and Son is no more following this section. That's right, Paul dies one-quarter of the way into the novel of which he is one-half of the title!

I did not see this turn of events, partially for that reason, and partially because it seemed like we were in for a very typical Dickens formula: the bildungsroman about a boy with an emotionally deprived childhood, e.g., Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Great Expectations (1860-61). I would say it's clever of Dickens to subvert your expectations that way... except that two of those examples postdate this novel, so it wasn't a formula yet! But anyway, it's a very effective piece of writing either way, Dickens at his sentimental best. He would bring himself to tears reading the chapter aloud at public performances, apparently; I would have loved to see and hear such a thing.

No. VI (Chs. 17-19)
'Wal'r,' said the Captain, handing it [the watch] over, and shaking him heartily by the hand, 'a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every morning, and about another quarter towards the afternoon, and it’s a watch that’ll do you credit.' (300)

The first and third chapters here are about Captain Cuttle and Walter respectively, and they're fine for what they are. (Is Captain Cuttle the character my friend said I'd like?) But the clear standout here is the middle chapter, "Father and Daughter," about how Florence is mourning the death of her brother Paul and how her father just doesn't care for her or her feelings in any way, shape, or form.

I occasionally have remarked that I want to have more access to Florence's interiority, but I think I'm just projecting my twenty-first-century expectations onto this novel. Dickens wasn't a realist, like those Victorian writers that came after him, such as George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell, his project wasn't to reveal character by taking you into someone's head. Dickens reveals character through dialogue and action. In the realist novel, you have this artifice, that the narrator somehow knows what Hetty Sorell or Molly Gibson were thinking. Dickens projects no such artifice—well, he projects a different one. His narrators never claim to know what someone is thinking, only what someone is saying and doing. Imagine someone else telling you the story of Florence Dombey because it was real; they wouldn't give you her thoughts via free indirect discourse or something because they don't know them. But what they could tell was what she did, how she looked out at the happy family across the street every day, and that would be enough to let you know how she felt, because that's how humans always figure out how each other feel. You need to imagine a Dickens novel is being related to you by a friend who knows the story in detail.

So of course we don't have access to Florence's interiority, and you should stop hoping for it! Dickens does a great job of communicating what's going on inside her regardless, particularly in that devastating scene where Florence goes to see her father.

I don't think this is an absolute; clearly we do get a bit of Paul's interiority in his last couple chapters, as he's dying. But it's not a move Dickens makes a lot, and he only deploys it to make a particularly strong point. His next novel after Dombey and Son would be David Copperfield, which is (I believe) his first told in the first person, so we finally do get that dose of interiority... but the old-fashioned way. He would use it in just two other novels, both ones I rank among his best, Great Expectations and Bleak House (1852-53).

No. VII (Chs. 20-22)
'You are too great a man, Dombey, to be thoughtful. In your position, Sir, you’re far above that kind of thing.' (314)

This is probably the first installment of Dombey and Son that I found ho-hum. It had its moments, but none of the three chapters was a great one. In the first, Dombey hangs out with a new character, Major Joe Bagstock—he's who I've quoted above, and he is in general quite funny. In the second, Dombey and Bagstock go on a trip and bump into Mrs Richards, who reveals her eldest son (whose education Dombey sponsored) has gone bad. In the third, said son shows up at Dombey and Son looking for a job so he can straighten himself out, and doesn't get one directly, but Dombey's clerk gets him a placement with Walter's uncle, the instument-maker. (Walter himself is missing, his ship unheard of since its departure.)

It's all fine, and definitely there are some great bits, but it felt to me like things were being moved into position for the next phase of the story—whatever that may be.

This is the second in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. viii and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
   

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Genesis of the Daleks (1976) and The Pyramids of Mars (1976)

Back when I read my way through the first Doctor novelisations, I noted how the very idea of a "Doctor Who book" was emerging. Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964) was literally the only Doctor Who book in the universe when it came out; Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965) was the second.

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two
by Terrance Dicks

Collection published: 2022
Novels originally published: 1976
Acquired and read: December 2024

But by the time the first two books collected in The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two were published, things were very different. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars were the fourth and fifth novelisations to feature the fourth Doctor—and the 23rd and 27th Target novelisations overall. By this time, there was no need of the novels to stand alone, to work for people who hadn't seen the television programme, or even the stories being novelised. The function of these books are very different to those earlier ones, part of a project to pump out the books to meet the demands of an enthusiastic child readership. And of course, no one was better at meeting that demand than former script editor Terrance Dicks.

When I read Dicks's Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), I observed that the novel's unfortunate weak spot was the Daleks themselves:

I think probably the Daleks are a bit tricky to capture on the page, but I don't know that Dicks even really tries; [...] I don't think the book really sells you on their alien nature or their monstrousness. It seems to reckon (perhaps accurately) that you'll already know and care what a Dalek is because you've seen one on tv!

I felt the same way here, and I would extend that observation to Davros, the Daleks' creator. Maybe something about the Daleks doesn't capture Terrance Dicks's fancy (I haven't read any of his third Doctor Dalek novelisations yet), maybe he more broadly just can't vibe with a Terry Nation script, I don't know. But I felt like The Genesis of the Daleks had all of the to-ing and fro-ing of its tv counterpart, but little of the atmosphere or intensity. I know the inclusions in The Essential Terrance Dicks were determined by fan vote, but I kind of suspect fans were more voting on the quality of the original stories than that of the books in question per se. Of course, I can see how this book would be invaluable in 1976, when there was little chance you were going to see Genesis of the Daleks again, but while this book was of course an effortless glide to read, I found it had little to recommend the 2024 reader.

Pyramids of Mars, on the other hand, seemed to have lit up Terrance's imagination. This might be an unambitious novelisation of a story I've seen several times, but I found there were a lot of nice little touches here. While The Genesis of the Daleks seemed to go from dialogue sequence to dialogue sequence, faithfully recapitulating the script, The Pyramids of Mars has an original prologue about the Osirans, an original epilogue about Sarah Jane after her travels with the Doctor, and a number of long bits of dialogue-less prose that set the scene atmospherically or provide backstory. I suspect, based on all the original Dicks novels I've read, that the historical setting did more for him than the science fictional one of Genesis. This is pretty straightforward stuff (though Dicks carefully removes all references to "1980"), but it works on its own to a degree that Genesis did not. My current litmus test is to imagine my six-year-old reading these (I haven't actually tried to foist one on them yet, though), and I felt like I could imagine them getting a complete novelistic experience out of Pyramids that I don't think they would Genesis. 

I think it also helps that this is the first of the books I've read in this sequence where Tom Baker comes through. Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (1976) was too early for Dicks to have a sense of how Baker plays it, and Nation always writes a pretty generic Doctor, but here Dicks captures the moody, capricious nature of Tom Baker on the page pretty effectively. I look forward to seeing how this is handled in future novelisations.

The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two, by the way, has a foreword by Robert Webb of Mitchell and Webb fame, and it's a good one. "If I told you that Terrance Dicks taught me to read, I would be exaggerating. But not much."

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Ark in Space

Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel Reading Order (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 57)

From the inside, the reading order for the Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels seems pretty clear... but there are quite a lot of the things, and the release order of the collected editions is nothing like the release order of the original strips, so I imagine it can seem pretty intimidating to an outside reader. So to cap off my ongoing series of posts about the DWM comic strip (for now, anyway), I've written up a reading order for the collections.

Basically, the short answer is to do the volumes in the release order of the original strips. For example, the back-up tales go best by original publication, because characters from them eventually cross over into the main strip, so it's nice if you already know them. The past Doctor volumes best go by publication order, because they usually reflect what's going on around that time in publication order; most notably, the stories in Ground Zero lead straight into End Game.

In most cases, I would just read the strips in the order they are reproduced in the books, but in a couple cases, I've suggested a different order in my notes.

I've given issue numbers, but in a simplified form; if a single issue is being skipped, or put in a different volume, I'm not being pedantic about its positioning.

1. 
   Fourth Doctor: The Iron Legion^a (#1-38)
   
2. Back-Up Tales: The Return of the Daleks^b (#1-46) 
3. Fourth Doctor: Dragon's Claw^a (#39-60)
4. Back-Up Tales: Black Sun Rising^b (#31-64)
5. Fifth Doctor: The Tides of Time (#61-87)
   
6. Sixth Doctor: Voyager (#88-107)
   
7. Sixth Doctor: The World Shapers (#108-29)
   
8. Seventh Doctor: A Cold Day in Hell! (#130-50)
   
9. Seventh Doctor: Nemesis of the Daleks (#152-62)
   
10. 
    Seventh Doctor: The Good Soldier (#164-79)
    
11. Seventh Doctor: Evening's Empire (#180-92)
    
12. Seventh Doctor: Emperor of the Daleks (#193-211)
    
13. Multi-Doctor: The Age of Chaos^c (#305)
• "Under Pressure"
• "Metamorphosis"
• "The Last Word"
• "The Age of Chaos"
14. 
    Multi-Doctor: Land of the Blind (#212-26)
    
15. Multi-Doctor: Ground Zero (#228-43)
    
16. Eighth Doctor: End Game^d (#244-71) 
17. Eighth Doctor: The Glorious Dead^d (#273-99)
18. Eighth Doctor: Oblivion (#300-28)
    
19. Eighth Doctor: The Flood (#329-53)
    
20. Ninth Doctor: The Cruel Sea (#355-64)
    
21. Tenth Doctor: The Betrothal of Sontar (#365-80)
    
22. Tenth Doctor: The Widow's Curse (#381-99)
    
23. Tenth Doctor: The Crimson Hand (#400-20)
    
24. 
    Eleventh Doctor: The Child of Time (#421-41)
    
25. Eleventh Doctor: The Chains of Olympus (#442-50)
    
26. Eleventh Doctor: Hunters of the Burning Stone (#451-61)
27. Eleventh Doctor: The Blood of Azrael (#462-74)
    
28. Twelfth Doctor: The Eye of Torment (#475-88)
29. Twelfth Doctor: The Highgate Horror (#489-500)
    
30. Twelfth Doctor: Doorway to Hell (#501-11)
    
31. Twelfth Doctor: The Phantom Piper (#512-23)
    
32. Multi-Doctor: The Clockwise War^e (#524-30) 
33. Thirteenth Doctor: Mistress of Chaos (#531-48)
    
34. 
    Thirteenth Doctor: The White Dragon (#549-77)
    
35. Multi-Doctor: Monstrous Beauty^f (#579-83)
36. Fourteenth Doctor: Liberation of the Daleks (#584-97)
    

Notes

1. The contents of these two volumes were later collected in one as The Fourth Doctor Anthology.
   
2. 
   I suggest reading each collection of back-up tales immediately after the main strip volume its contents were (largely) published simultaneously to. In particular, this maintains chronology for the character of Ivan Asimoff, who appears in Dragon's Claw, Black Sun Rising, and Voyager.
3. Reading the volume here and in my suggested order means you start with three Virgin New Adventure–era stories (tying up that phase of the strip) and end with a "past Doctor" one (setting up the next era of the strip).
4. Note that the strips in this collection are arranged out of order, but best read in original publication order; just pay attention to the original publication details.
5. This volume is the finale to the twelfth Doctor strips, but is branded as "multi-Doctor" because it contains some unreprinted past Doctor material to get the volume up to full length. You can read that material here if you want, but if you wanted to experience it closer to original publication sequence, that would be between Land of the Blind and Ground Zero.
6. 
   This volume is the finale to the thirteenth Doctor strips, but is branded as "multi-Doctor" because it contains some unreprinted past Doctor material to get the volume up to full length. You can read that material here if you want, but if you wanted to experience it closer to original publication sequence, that would be between Land of the Blind and Ground Zero, except for Monstrous Beauty, which would best go before The White Dragon.

Jumping-On Points

Obviously you can always start at the beginning with The Iron Legion! But there are other good places to kick off. I think mostly any Doctor's first volume is a safe enough bet. In particular, though, I would suggest:

• End Game. For a modern reader, the eighth Doctor stuff may read better than the fourth and fifth Doctor material, despite its classic status. It has a more of a character focus, and is better, I think, at using continuity with light callbacks that enhance your reading pleasure, as we are used to from, say, Buffy or the 2005-22 series. If you find yourself intrigued, you can jump back and read books like The Tides of Time to discover the stories this era is drawing on.
• 
  The Betrothal of Sontar. If you are a new series person, you may find it easier to jump on board with a new series Doctor. In that case, I would suggest skipping The Cruel Sea (for now), as I don't think the strip really got to grips with the new series style until David Tennant came on as the Doctor. The Betrothal of Sontar, The Widow's Curse, and The Crimson Hand are three strong volumes showing off the diversity of the DWM strip at its best, and you can continue on from there. Eventually, the strip will slowly drop in older continuity that you can eventually loop back to and explore. Similarly, I think The Chains of Olympus, Doorway to Hell, and Mistress of Chaos are all good points to begin for their respective Doctors.

Should I Work in Other Stuff?

If you look at my own sequence below, you'll see I worked in a lot of other stuff from outside the Doctor Who universe. In general, I would say, "No," you don't need any of this stuff to enjoy the DWM strip, especially if it's your first time through it. Make things easy on yourself, and just do the Doctor Who parts. Some specific notes on stuff I added in:

• 
  The Transformers UK. I read this because the character of Death's Head begins in The Transformers and appears in DWM strips collected in A Cold Day in Hell! and The Good Soldier. Those strips will work on their own if you haven't read Transformers, because the Doctor doesn't know who Death's Head is either. It's quite a commitment to read The Transformers UK, partially because the UK TF strip incorporated the American comic, so you would "need" to work that in too!... and you would thus actually be reading more Transformers than Doctor Who, I think.
• Death's Head. Marvel has collected (most) of the original Death's Head series in a volume called Freelance Peacekeeping Agent; there's also a modern series collected as Clone Drive. If Death's Head's appearance in the DWM strip leaves you curious, sure go ahead and read this stuff... but I doubt it will, since DWM is not Death's Head at his best. Technically speaking, the first seven issues of Death's Head volume 1 do take place in the Doctor Who universe. Everything else takes place in the Marvel universe. If you are very much a completist, the one I would recommend tracking down is "Time Bomb!" from Death's Head vol. 1 #8, reprinted in The Incomplete Death's Head #9 (but not in any trades, alas), as it features key roles for the seventh Doctor and Josiah W. Dogbolter, and is written by DWM's Steve Parkhouse.
  
• 
  The Daleks. The 1965-67 Doctor-less comic strips from TV Century 21 are fun enough and collected in a convenient Panini "bookazine"; you can read them pretty much whenever, but in particular, you may benefit from doing them prior to Liberation of the Daleks, which uses some of their iconography to good effect.
• The Sleeze Brothers. Against all my expectations, I did find this kind of charming. These characters debuted in a story collected in A Cold Day in Hell! before getting their own series. Definitely nonessential but fun enough.
• 
  The Ultimate Comic Strip Collections. Panini have collected all their Dalek strips in two volumes and all their Cybermen strips in a single large volume. For the most part, these volumes contain nothing you can't get from the collections I've listed above if you include the back-ups... except that volume 2 of the Dalek collection includes a single eight-page story about the Peter Cushing Doctor from the DWM 1996 spring special, Daleks versus the Martians, collected nowhere else. It seems a shame Panini couldn't have included this alongside their other Cushing story in Monstrous Beauty; it's probably not worth chasing down, though.
  

This post is the fifty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment is currently unknown. Previous installments are listed below:

Reading Roundup Wrapup: December 2024

Pick of the month: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. This was a kind of random pick from my wife's shelf, but I ended up really liking it, a charming YA book that is the clear best of a somewhat shallow month, reading-wise. More later.

All books read:

1. Star Trek: Section 31: Control by David Mack
2. The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar, illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool
3. Cover B: The Titan Comics Covers by Will Brooks
4. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward
5. Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter
6. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
7. Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two (part 1/part 2/part 3) by Terrance Dicks
8. Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

I've actually done some solid reading this month, but it's not reflected in the raw numbers; The Essential Terrance Dicks is an omnibus of five novels, and I've made a lot of progress through two large books I haven't finished yet (see below).

All books acquired:

1. DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy by by Gardner Fox, E. E. Hibbard, Sheldon Moldoff, et al.
2. Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two by Terrance Dicks
3. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward
4. Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
5. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
6. Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
7. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
8. DC Comics Classics: The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Life and Death of Ferro Lad by Jim Shooter, Curt Swan, and George Klein
9. Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio
10. Loki Modern Era Epic Collection, Vol. 1: Journey into Mystery by Kieron Gillen, Robert Rodi, Jamie McKelvie, Doug Braithwaite, Pasqual Ferry, Richard Elson, Whilce Portacio, Mitch Breitweiser, et al.
11. Loki Modern Era Epic Collection, Vol. 2: Everything Burns by Kieron Gillen, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Matt Fraction, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Richard Elson, Alan Davis, Stephanie Hans, Joe Bennett, et al.
12. The Visitors from Oz by L. Frank Baum
13. All Wound Up: The Making of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz by Eric Shanower
14. Sleepless in Cincinnati: A Romance Anthology by Sarah Wilson Gregory, J. M. Clark, and the B2B Writing Group
15. Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke
16. The Pelican History of England: 1. Roman Britain by I. A. Richmond, revised by Malcolm Todd
    

Obvious Christmas always means a lot of books: #4 and 7 were gifts from SantaThing, #9-11 from my wife (and kids), and #12-14 from my sister. But even without that, it would have been a high-yield month, as I bought a lot of books for myself too!

Currently reading:

• Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke
• The Pelican History of England: 1. Roman Britain by I. A. Richmond, revised by Malcolm Todd

Up next in my rotations:

1. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton
2. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan 
3. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
4. Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 670 (up 8)

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. I–IV (Chs. 1-13)

Every winter break, I read the most popular Charles Dickens novel that I haven't previously read. This year, that brings me to Dombey and Son, originally serialized in nineteen monthly parts from October 1846 to April 1848 under the title of Dealings with with the Firm Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation. Last year, I experimented with reading Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) serially. Not across nineteen months(!), but rather alternating installments of the novel with parts of other books (or, in some cases, whole other books), and then writing up those installments as I went. I would say it was a successful experiment, in that instead of being forced to endure nothing but Martin Chuzzlewit for weeks, I got to alternate it with book that were actually good, so I decided to go for it again this year.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: December 2024

I should say, that going in, I literally knew nothing at all about this book, beyond what I gleaned from the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition. I feel like I've never heard anyone ever mention it, even in passing. A totally forgotten (or forgettable) Dickens novel? It doesn't bode well, to be honest, beginning a book that's nine hundred pages long and not even worth complaining about, but I tried to be open-minded.

No. I (Chs. 1-4)
Some Dickens novels begin ominously, a mode that Dickens excels in. Think of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) or Great Expectations (1860-61). But it seems to me that earlier in his career, perhaps because his big success was still the hijinks of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Dickens was much more likely to begin comically, even when his topic was tragic. He takes a similar mode here to that of David Copperfield (1849-50), beginning with the birth of a child, largely under sad circumstances, but mostly focusing on making jokes about it all. The first line is so funny I stopped immediately to read it aloud to my wife: "Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new" (11). And then the second line is also a joke: "Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet" (11).

What this all belies is that the opening of the book is quite sad! Dombey is the owner of the titular firm; he use to be the "Son" and now he is the "Dombey," but though he has been married ten years, he has only just got a "Son." He does have a daughter, aged six... who he doesn't care about at all, because a girl "was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested – a bad Boy – nothing more" (13). Dombey's lack of affection extends to his wife, who dies after giving birth to Son, and Dombey is more concerned about the logistical difficulties this will lead to in raising his Son. And though this bit is of course sad, Dickens also has a lot of jokes here, mostly from the dead Mrs. Dombey's sister-in-law, who keeps insisting she just needs to make an effort and she'll be fine: "It’s necessary for you to make an effort, and perhaps a very great and painful effort which you are not disposed to make; but this is a world of effort you know, Fanny, and we must never yield, when so much depends upon us. Come! Try! I must really scold you if you don’t!" (20-1)

I feel like Dickens pulls you in with the jokes in order to subsequently get you with the tragedy, but also the tragedy is perhaps a bit too muted, more abstractly understood than felt, but like I said, maybe the Dickens audience of 1846 didn't want tragedy, only comedy, so he had to understate it a bit. (This is after The Old Curiosity Shop and the death of Little Nell, though, so maybe I am overstating this point.)

After this, there's some comic hijinks as Dombey must engage a wet-nurse, excellent stuff, I really enjoyed it. So many great lines about the wet-nurse and her apple-faced family. But then Dickens is always very good at this sort of thing, and from here we move away from comedy a bit, as the wet-nurse (real name: Mrs Toodle, but called Mrs Richards when at work because it's more "ordinary" and "convenient") meets the daughter of Dombey for the first time, and realizes how isolated and alone and sad the poor girl is. After all this, I was fairly into the book; a much better opening installment than Martin Chuzzlewit, to be sure.

The fourth chapter is some blather about a shopkeeper and his nephew Walter, though, so you can't win them all, though again it had a couple good jokes. But then I got to take a break and go read something else. One installment down... eighteen to go!

No. II (Chs. 5-7)
It's interesting that two of the three chapter titles here center Dombey's son Paul—"Paul's Progress and Christening" and "Paul's Second Deprivation"—because it seems to me that the clear emotional focus of the chapters is Dombey's neglected daughter, Florence. Yes, Paul's christening is the event on which these three chapters hinge, in that it's there that the characters make some key decisions that end up having major repercussions. (Mrs Richards decides to go visit her son at his new school, which results in her and a couple others losing their jobs working for the Dombeys.) But the person who goes through trauma here is Florence; on her way back from the visit, she gets separated from her caretakers, and she is taken advantage of by "Good Mrs Brown," who steals her clothes and cuts her hair off and claims she will murder Florence if Florence rats her out! Poor Florence goes through some awful stuff here.

Still, we feel a bit distanced from it all. The things we're told about are quite awful to read, but I don't feel like we're totally in Florence's interiority the way Dickens sometimes brings us, like he did a few years after this with Little Dorrit in Little Dorrit (1855-57).

I didn't expect the whole thing with Mrs Richards and the Dombeys to fall apart like that so quickly, though, so I am curious to see where this all goes in the next installment.

No. III (Chs. 8-10)
'Girls,' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son.' (153)

Here we get one chapter about Paul and two about a character I haven't discussed much so far, Walter. Back in no. II, Walter helped rescue Florence after her ordeal at the hands of Good Mrs Brown; here, he comes calling to Mr Dombey to seek help paying off the debts of his uncle, a ship's instrument-maker who has no customers.

I am a bit worried that Walter may be the character about which my friend Christiana said, "I can think of one character who I expect you to like," because I find that so far his sections substantially slow the narrative down with a lot of unnecessary detail. I'm loathe to say Dickens could have done something in fewer words... but I really think "nobody is buying anything at my shop" doesn't need as many words as he gives it.

On the other hand, I found chapter 8 very interesting; we've jumped ahead a bit here, and now Paul Dombey is almost five, and we actually get some insight into his psychology. Poor kid! But I like best of all the simultaneously sympathetic and scathing way that Dickens describes Mr Dombey himself: "But he loved his son with all the love he had. If there were a warm place in his frosty heart, his son occupied it; if its very hard surface could receive the impression of any image, the image of that son was there; though not so much as an infant, or as a boy, but as a grown man – the 'Son' of the Firm. Therefore he was impatient to advance into the future, and to hurry over the intervening passages of his history" (109).

No. IV (Chs. 11-13)
She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead – stone dead – and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoule. (163) 

We're settling into a pattern here, I think: two chapters about Paul Dombey, and then one going elsewhere. The Paul ones are about how at first he and Florence go to the seaside and spend time with a terrible governess (she's not called a governess, I don't think, but she's essentially so), and then Dombey decides Son needs an education, so he gets packed off to a nearby terrible school. What Victorian does horrible systems better than Dickens? Great stuff about the terrible, terrible education Paul is beginning to get; lots of good jokes on this and other topics. I am not loving this book yet (still a bit long-winded, we're still a bit distant from Paul and Florence, I think) but certainly I am enjoying it more than Martin Chuzzlewit or The Old Curiosity Shop; I don't know this one isn't better know. I guess Dickens has got 750 pages in which he can screw it up.

The other chapter is about the doings at the firm Dombey and Son, a place we previously haven't gone despite it being the title of the novel! Most of the characters here are thus new, but there's a bit more about Walter, who is being sent to the West Indies. I remain open-minded, I suppose, but I am not sure where this strand of the novel is going. The best part, though, is this zinger between two new characters who are estranged brothers:

'Haven’t you injured me enough already?'
     'I have never injured you, James, wilfully.'
     'You are my brother... That’s injury enough.' (200)

Dickens has a good line in insult comedy. 

This is the first in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. v and beyond.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Fortune of War

late 2386
A cut scene from David Mack's Fortune of War, exclusive to Science's Less Accurate Grandmother:

"You know," said Riker, "my life has been very strange recently."
     "How so?" asked Deanna.
     "This is my fifth adventure in a row that follows up something that happened while we were on the Enterprise-D. First we went into interphase again, then we met the Cytherians again, then we met the Solanae again, then we met Arda's people again, and now we're looking at Husnock artifacts again."
     "That's odd," said Deanna.
     "The reason I wanted to captain the Titan was to explore strange new worlds, but it seems like we spend most of our time chasing down small lingering plotlines from two decades ago."
     "Well," said Deanna, "TNG was a very popular tv show. Even a follow-up to a mediocre episode is going to sell more copies."

Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War
by David Mack

Published: 2017
Acquired: August 2024
Read: November 2024

I jest, of course, and I cheat by including some stories that aren't Titan ones even if they are Riker ones, but even so, this is the third Titan story in a row to sequelize a TNG episode (in this case, "The Survivors" from season 3). The original selling point of Titan was that it took a diverse group of characters into interesting new sfnal situations; Fortune of War, alas, does not really accomplish this. We have, on the one hand, a character focus mostly on Riker, Vale, and Titan's new XO, Sarai, and an action-adventure plot. Many people seem to think David Mack does these kinds of plots well, but Mack in action mode has never really appealed to me, and in any case, this isn't the kind of thing I come to Titan for.

Even within those confines, though, I didn't find much to enjoy here. I've repeatedly stated that while I think the promotion of Riker to admiral could be interesting, the novels that have followed The Fall haven't really capitalized on it. Fortune of War continues this trend; Titan is part of a fleet action here, which you think would be great for Admiral Riker... but weirdly, the character who does the most with this is Vale. I did appreciate the focus on Sarai, a character I enjoyed in Sight Unseen, but Mack's version reads a bit flatter than Swallow. The rest of the Titan crew don't get much focus that's very memorable or interesting. On top of that, a lot of time is spent on the various factions competing with Titan to get the Husnock artifacts, but I found these characters were almost universally one-dimensional and unpleasant.

Some of these TNG sequels have at least fleshed out the concepts in interesting ways (mostly Sight Unseen, I guess), but there's nothing interesting to be learned about the Husnock here. I find depictions of empire in sf fascinating, but the interminable glimpse we get of them makes them into snarling one-dimensional monsters.

This was a quick read, Mack always is, but other than that, I found this had little to recommend it. Competently done, but not what I want from a Titan book... which is a bit disappointing, as it's the final one. This series peaked back with Sword of Damocles, in my opinion; the post-Destiny run was too inconsistent and largely failed to tap into the series's original potential, installments by James Swallow aside.

Continuity Notes:

• Vale claims that "[t]here is no precedent in interstellar law for your claim of annex to a territory not contiguous with your own." But surely this must happen all the time in the three-dimensional, mostly empty environment of space, and indeed, there are a lot of discontiguous nodes of the Federation itself according to Star Charts.

Other Notes:

• I complain a lot about how all the captains in the Destiny-era fiction are parents; I think what makes it particularly grating is very few of the writers are. You can tell, because no one whose five-year-old had actually done ballet would ever write a sentence like "she had tears of joy in her eyes while she watched their daughter float like a sylph in time with a melody stolen from a dream." My (currently six-year-old) kid is very enthusiastic about ballet, but them and their classmates are lucky if they remember what they are supposed to be doing when they perform in a recital.
• Having Pakleds and Nausicaans, two different alien species who apparently never discovered the article, in the same book ends up being a bit grating.
• Admiral Batanides threatens Sarai with internment in a Starfleet Intelligence "black site." I just really hate this idea, which is part of a generally unpleasant way that Starfleet is depicted in Mack's fiction. Section 31 having "black sites" they deport unwanted people to, sure, I guess. But regular Starfleet? Ugh, no, I don't buy this at all, and I don't want to read Star Trek books where it can happen.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Section 31: Control by David Mack

What Is Christmas? ("Any good thing to make us all merry")

On its face, the question posed in my title is absurd. We all know what Christmas is, the celebration of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

But then... why do I celebrate Christmas, as someone who largely left behind my Christian faith around two decades ago now. Or rather, what is Christmas... to me? Because despite my lack of religious faith, I really do like Christmas. I like Christmas traditions, Christmas music, Christmas cookies, Christmas trees. Why do I like all of this? Do I just like cookies and presents? Or is there more to it than that?

I've said this before in various forms, but what gives Christmas resonance for me is the turn of the seasons—even living, as I do, in Florida where the seasons never turn. Christmas is the point when, as Steven Moffat put it in the Doctor Who story "A Christmas Carol," we are "halfway out of the dark." In the winter, the nights grow longer and the cold grows deeper, but we come together with family and loved ones to celebrate the fact that we are holding out against the cold, that we are making it into the promise of the new year. As Merle Haggard put it, "if we make it through December," that's something worth celebrating.

It's for this reason, I think, that the best Christmas stories and music always have those tinges of sadness to them. Last year, I wrote up five of my favorite Christmas albums, and more than one of them has a melancholy tone to them. I particularly like the work of Sting on his album If on a Winter's Night... and all three Christmas albums released by Over the Rhine. My favorite Christmas movie is It's a Wonderful Life, which is all about loss even if it is also about triumph.

It's a metaphor, of course. Christmas is the time that we celebrate our triumphs in the face of our losses, and the families and communities that let us experience them. I had a really tough year in some ways, but by December, I felt like I was getting through it, with the help of my wife and my kids and my friends who were there for me.

One of the songs on Sting's albums is called "Soul Cake"; it's about the English tradition of "soulling," where children and the poor go door-to-door offering to say prayers for the souls of the dead, in exchange for cookies called "soul cakes." I guess this is more of a Samhain tradition than a Christmas one, but it's still got that winter feeling, of thinking about our losses and pushing back against them together.

I've loved this song since I picked up the album back in 2021, but this year I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while, and make the soul cakes. (This is the recipe I ended up using.) The Saturday morning after finals week, we  decorated the tree we'd picked up the previous weekend. Then, I spent late morning baking while my kids played and my wife got work done and the Christmas music played on my soon-to-be-dead iPod. I don't usually bake, to be honest, but I found it very satisfying. That evening, my older kid and I went to my department's board game night, and we shared the soul cakes I had made. I had a good day—I was the happiest I'd been in a while.

I don't think I am in the clear yet... but I do feel like I am "halfway out of the dark." That's what Christmas is.

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Loch Ness Monster (1976)

As mentioned around here previously, I've been on a mission to read Doctor Who books I've owned along time but never gotten around to. Next up on that list is a Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter. But when such a book on my list is a Target novel, I read through all the Target novels featuring that particular incarnation that fall into either of two categories: 1) I already own it, or 2) it was (re)published in the current century, and I read them in publication order. For the fourth Doctor, then, that sequence will be The Loch Ness Monster (1976), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976), The Pyramids of Mars (1976), The Ark in Space (1977), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Horror of Fang Rock (1978), [The Five Doctors (1983),] The Stones of Blood (2011), The Androids of Tara (2012), and Warriors' Gate and Beyond (2019). Quite a few! As I did with the first Doctor novelisations (see the sequence of posts starting here), I want to chart how the approach to novelising the show changed over time.

Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster by Terrance Dicks

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: August 2024
Read: November 2024

I begin with the novelisation of Terror of the Zygons, which went out under the title Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. This wasn't the first fourth Doctor novel; that would be Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975), but that one hasn't got a modern reprinting. It is, however, the second, and I think that comes through in that the personality, the force of Tom Baker does not come through on the page. In fact, I usually found it easier to imagine Jon Pertwee delivering the lines!

I assume that on screen, Tom put his own spin on it all, but Terror of the Zygons is a story I have only seen once, probably a little less than twenty years ago, so I was very much dependent on the novel itself to conjure imagery and sensation. I don't think Dicks does a bad job of this, especially at the beginning; I like the sequences of Broton observing our protagonists from a distance as they scramble across the moors. But I also don't think he does a great job of it, either. The Zygons are one of Doctor Who's great visual creations, and their spaceship interior an interesting one (I think, but if not, it's the kind of thing that in prose could be), but there's not a lot of atmosphere here in these parts of the story.

What's interesting to me is that while many of those early first Doctor novelisations were clearly novels, this is clearly a novelisation; there's a lot of cross-cutting between different locations in the same scene (usually Dicks puts one location's prose in parentheses), which is much more of a tv move, and the kind of thing you might expect a prose version to move away from. But Dicks very much embraces the fact that this originally went out on screen. I think this probably makes it less interesting to the adult modern reader, but I imagine it probably works well with kids; this is one I can imagine to handing over to my six-year-old reader of chapter books who is (we might say) "Doctor Who curious," which isn't so true of, for example, The Daleks (1964) or The Crusaders (1966)! I might be the target audience of the 2012 BBC Books reprint I own, but I wasn't the target audience of the original.

My reprint, by the way, has an introduction by Michael Moorcock; it's fun enough, but I see little in it that indicates he has much appreciation for or has actually even read the book in question! He clearly likes the tv serial, though.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars

4-Dimensional Vistas: The DWM Comic Strip by the Numbers (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 56)

The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, as I have chronicled extensively on this blog, has a very long history. Thus, we can compile all kinds of interesting numerical facts about it! Note that for all of these, I'm just focused on the "main" strip, not the back-ups.

Longest Runs by a Writer

Here, I'm looking at the longest runs as the writer of sequential strips. These runs have to be unbroken, either by a fill-in writer, or by the strip itself taking an issue (or more) off.

• 1. Scott Gray on #512-52 (41 issues)
• 2. Scott Gray on #442-80 (39 issues)
• 3. Steve Parkhouse on #53-84 (32 issues)
• 4. Scott Gray on #308-29 (22 issues)
• 5. Scott Gray on #333-53 / Dan McDaid on #400-20 / Jonathan Morris on #421-41 (21 issues)
• 8. Scott Gray on #284-303 (20 issues)
• 9. Steve Moore on #35-82 (18 issues)
• 10. Pat Mills & John Wagner on #1-16 and on #19-34 (16 issues)

Unsurprisingly to anyone who has been reading all this time, our man Scott Gray has five of the ten longest runs as the comics main writer! He racked up long runs during the McGann, Smith, Capaldi, and Whittaker eras. And if you read him, you'll know why; I don't think there's anyone else who has ever "got" what makes Doctor Who work as a comic better than him.

Longest Runs by an Artist

• 1. John Ridgway on #88-133 (46 issues)
• 2. Dave Gibbons on #19-57 (39 issues)
• 3. Mike Collins on #355-76 / David A Roach on #359-80 / David A Roach on #467-88 (22 issues)
• 6. Dave Gibbons on #1-16 (16 issues)
• 7. David A Roach on #451-64 (14 issues) / Lee Sullivan on #584-97 (14 issues)
• 9. Martin Geraghty on #244-55 (12 issues)
• 10. Mick Austin on #73-83 and John Ross on #524-34 (11 issues)

Somewhat surprisingly, to be honest, John Ridgway's run as an artist is longer than any of the runs by a writer! He provided the art for every Colin Baker strip and then into the Sylvester McCoy era (and also returned a few times after that). Mike Collins and David A Roach have overlapping runs because Collins was penciller when Roach was inker.

Both of these rankings just cover the strips in the collected editions; I think both Barnes and Sullivan continue on the strip after #597, so they should climb a bit.

Most Strips by a Writer

But who has actually done the most overall, regardless of number of sequential strips?  

1. Scott Gray (184 issues)
   
2. Steve Parkhouse (46 issues)
3. Alan Barnes (27 issues)
   
4. Pat Mills & John Wagner (32 issues)
5. Jonathan Morris (28 issues)
6. Dan McDaid (26 issues)
7. Dan Abnett (24 issues)
8. Jacqueline Rayner (20 issues)
   
9. Steve Moore (18 issues)
10. Gareth Roberts (17 issues)

Impressively, Scott Gray has written four times as many strips as his nearest competitor! It's hard to imagine anyone overtaking his record in the near or even distant future. 

Most Strips by an Artist

1. David A Roach (162 issues)
2. Martin Geraghty (143 issues)
3. Mike Collins (75 issues)
4. Dave Gibbons (66 issues)
5. John Ridgway (61 issues)
6. Robin Smith (55 issues)
7. Lee Sullivan (44 issues)
   
8. John Ross (31 issues)
   
9. Adrian Salmon (18 issues)
10. Colin Andrew (14 issues)

Regular inker David A Roach dominates here; he's inked many Martin Geraghty strips and many Mike Collins ones, allowing him to surpass both pencillers. John Ridgway still does well here, landing in the top five. Robin Smith, a bit of a forgotten inker to be honest, is in sixth.

Longest Gaps between Contributions

I think it was when John Tomlinson popped up as the writer of a David Tennant strip, having previously written one back during the Sylvester McCoy era, that I first got interested in this statistic. I am going to count people who came back for #500 but are otherwise not regular contributors outside of my ranking.

• X. Dave Gibbons (431 issues between Stars Fell on Stockbridge and The Stockbridge Showdown)
• X. John Ridgway (289 issues between Uninvited Guest and The Stockbridge Showdown)
• 1. Lee Sullivan (267 issues between Children of the Revolution and Liberation of the Daleks)
• 2. John Tomlinson (210 issues between Nemesis of the Daleks and The Betrothal of Sontar)
  
• 3. Alan Barnes (204 issues between The Warkeeper's Crown and Liberation of the Daleks)
  
• 4. Sean Longcroft (156 issues between A Life of Matter & Death and Mortal Beloved)
• 5. Mike Collins (152 issues between The Good Soldier and The Nightmare Game)
• 6. Adolfo Bullya (126 issues between Junk-Yard Demon and The Grief)
• 7. John Ross (104 issues between Bus Stop! and Spirits of the Jungle)
• 8. Alan Barnes (95 issues between TV Action! and The Warkeeper's Crown)
• 9. Scott Gray (89 issues between The Flood and The Chains of Olympus)
• 10. Lee Sullivan (78 issues between ...Up Above the Gods... and The Last Word) 

Tomlinson held onto that record for a long time, but the second David Tennant era finally saw him dethroned by the return of Lee Sullivan after a twenty-year absence. It's pretty amazing that the strip has been running so long some of the people who have contributed the most can also be on the list for longest gaps between contributions!

Longest Runs as Main Companion

This one I'm counting a bit differently. Instead of looking at individual strip appearances, I'm looking at how long each companion was the "main" one for the strip. So, for example, Izzy gets a point for Unnatural Born Killers in #277 despite not appearing in it because she was the main companion during that era (appearing in the strips immediately before and after it). Along those lines, I did not count one-off reappearances (e.g., Ace in Ground Zero, Rose in Monstrous Beauty) or reappearances where a former companion serves a different narrative role (e.g., Fey in The Clockwise War).

1. Izzy in #244-328 (85 issues)
2. Frobisher in #88-133 (46 issues)
3. Yaz in #531-52, 559-62, 570-83 (40 issues)
4. Clara in #462-99 (38 issues)
5. Ace in #164-92, 203-10 (37 issues)
6. Amy in #421-55 (35 issues)
7. Sharon in #19-48 (30 issues)
8. Peri in #104-29; Fey in #257-71, 318-28; and Ryan & Graham in #531-52, 559-62 (26 issues)

It was honestly surprising for me to realize how long of a run Yaz had, the longest of any tv companion.

This post is the fifty-sixth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers a reading order for the collected editions. Previous installments are listed below:

Black Panther: Doomwar by Jonathan Maberry, Scot Eaton, Robert Campanella, Andy Lanning, et al.

Doomwar is a six-part miniseries (with a double-length first issue) published in 2010; even though it was not branded as belonging to a particular Marvel series, it is clearly a Black Panther story. Despite having guest characters from across the Marvel universe (e.g., the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, War Machine, even Deadpool), the story picks right up from the end of Black Panther volume 5 by the same writer, and the protagonists are definitely T'Challa and Shuri as they struggle to defend Wakanda from an invasion by Doctor Doom.

from Doomwar #5

As a result, I didn't expect to enjoy it very much, having not really enjoyed Jonathan Maberry's "Prelude to Doomwar"... but by the time I was partway through issue #2, I realized I was pretty into this! I had been afraid this would be a big generic Marvel event, but as I said, it's very much a Black Panther story about the characters of T'Challa and Shuri, and about the politics of Wakanda. It would fit right into, for example, Christopher Priest's run without a lot of tweaking. Though I still feel like Shuri isn't a very strong character, mostly just being an angry young woman, I felt Maberry had a good handle on T'Challa here, showing how dedicated he was to his country even in trying circumstances. And while I felt like the populist uprising in vol. 5 was kind of contrived, Maberry does a good job with its consequences here. 

On top of all this, I kind of groaned when Deadpool showed up (especially when they put him on the cover of issue #4, but he didn't appear until the very end, presumably so they could also put him on the cover of #5), but Maberry makes good use of him, and he doesn't derail the book like I was afraid he might.

from Doomwar #4

The story was aided by two other things. One is definitely the artwork; Scot Eaton (mostly inked here by Andy Lanning & Robert Campanella) is the best penciler assigned to Black Panther since Jefte Palo's Secret Invasion story in volume 4, with clear storytelling and good character work. (I think he was doing Ioan Gruffud for Mister Fantastic and Denzel Washington for T'Challa. Of course I approve of the former.) And John-Francois Beaulieu, who I really liked on the Marvel Oz comics, does a great job as the colorist. Bad coloring can muddy the storytelling, but I felt that even with dark colors, everything popped and was visually clear—even though he obviously uses a very different palette here than he did in Oz!

The other is Doom himself. I haven't read many Fantastic Four comics, so I don't have much of a handle on the character, but I really liked Maberry's take on him here, especially when we find out how Doom was able to overcome T'Challa's locks on the Wakandan vibranium vault. It plays out exactly how I expected... but was nevertheless perfectly done. A great depiction of a great villain.

from Doomwar #4

I found the ending both interesting and frustrating. The characters can kill Doom, but don't, so that they're "better" than him. While I believe that, say, Reed Richards would have this philosophy, it doesn't make any sense for T'Challa and Shuri, and surely it only happens this way because Doomwar is part of a wider Marvel universe, and can't be the story that kills off a key character. On top of this, T'Challa makes a very interesting choice: he destroys all Wakandan vibranium rather than let Doom make off with some of it, preserving Wakandan values but perhaps at the cost of Wakandan security. But this happens at the very end of the story, so we get no implications of his choice. This isn't so much an issue for Doomwar itself (though I think the way that the country's rebuilding gets a single panel is) but one that I am afraid future Black Panther stories will not really engage with. I guess we'll see!

Doomwar originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry; penciled by Scot Eaton; inked by Andy Lanning (#1-5), Robert Campanella (#1-6), Jaime Mendoza (#6), and David Meikis (#6); colored by John-Francois Beaulieu; lettered by Cory Petit (#1-5) and Joe Caramagna (#6); and edited by Axel Alonso. (Note that issue #2 is called "Part 1" and #6 "Part 5" on their title pages.)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE