Barrie Mitchell

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

The Age of Chaos
Already reviewed on its own here.

Under Pressure
The seventh Doctor tells Ace a story of the time the fourth Doctor (on a submarine) secretly helped the third and Jo (on a surface vessel) avert a crisis with the Sea Devils. It's pretty charming: Abnett captures the voices of both past Doctors pretty well, and the ways the fourth Doctor helps the third are fun. There are some good moments, such as the fourth ingratiating himself with the submarine's captain. My main issue is the Sea Devils never feel like much of a threat, as we barely see them. I did really like the panel of them all swimming around the sub, the kind of thing you could never afford to do onscreen, but it comes after they've been neutralized. But it's enjoyable enough.

Metamorphosis
The seventh Doctor and Ace battle (spoiler) Daleks on a space freighter. As Cornell says in his notes, this is pretty generic action-adventure stuff, but it's good anyway, lifted by some cool ideas (there's a reason Steven Moffat stole the "eggs" bit, and the Doctor becoming a Dalek is good, too), some horrific ones (human embryos mutated into Daleks!), and some excellent artwork from Lee Sullivan. Sullivan draws great Daleks, but also a strong Doctor and Ace, capturing their facial expressions well, and clear action sequences. Generic... but solid. The last line is a groaner, in the most delightful way.

The Last Word
And here, the comic strip adventures of the seventh Doctor, Ace, and Benny come to an end. For reasons I didn't understand, this is framed as the Doctor writing up an account (in the third person) of a recent adventure the TARDIS crew had. The adventure itself is somewhere between a parody and a pastiche of the Virgin New Adventures: Gareth Roberts lists all the tropes in the notes at the end, but I picked out most of them myself. Journeys into 1970s pop culture, overcomplicated plots, a voyage into "puterspace," and the Doctor being mentally tormented by all the people and planets he's let die. I had fun, and it mostly comes across as good-spirited. It's funny, though, that despite being a DWMification of the VNAs, it doesn't feel anything like the actual DWM strips that tied into the VNAs! I feel like it makes a better finale to this era than Cuckoo/Uninvited Guest, so I'm glad I read it here. With a wink and tounge-in-cheek, it's time to switch to something completely different!

Stray Observations:

• Since all these are outside of the usual DWM context, there's no clear chronological placement; what I can see online (from the "Interweaving with the New Adventures" article and various fan sites) disregard the clues in the stories themselves. Under Pressure's Ace seems to be pre-Spacefleet, while Metamorphosis's is afterwards (though Benny is not around). The Last Word could go pretty much anywhere during Ace and Benny's travels, as long as enough time has passed for Ace and Benny to become aware of the clichés of their own lives.
• I found Vincent Danks and Cam Smith's art on Under Pressure kind of flat, but looking at the uncolored pages in the back, it seems that this is down to the coloring eliminating some of the finer linework.
• Gareth Roberts in the notes: "imagine a world where you could not even know what a minority of random noisy strangers were saying on the internet, and where nobody cared about them, took them seriously, or reacted to them." Gee, why would you hope for such a thing, Gareth?

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (més)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

It works pretty well here. When we last saw the Doctor, Peri, and Frobisher, they were travelling together having fought the Cybermen on Planet 14; evidently in the interim, The Trial of a Time Lord happened (without Frobisher, maybe he went fishing), and now Frobisher and the Doctor periodically check in on Peri on Krontep, the planet where she settled down with King Yrcanos after Trial. Assume the Doctor regenerates off-panel (as he always does in DWM-land), and this leads right into A Cold Day in Hell!

So how's the story-- written by none other than Colin Baker (the first Doctor to write licensed fiction; Tom Baker became the second twenty-five years later with Scratchman)? Well, it's fun. None too deep, but fun. Krontep is in a time of crisis when a solo Doctor visits; Peri's granddaughter Actis asks the Doctor to get Frobisher and help. The Doctor, Frobisher, and Carf (a Krontep warrior) go on a quest to figure out what ails the land, then they go on another to find Actis when she goes missing. There's a bit too much gubbins at times-- what is up with the alien the Doctor meets?-- but if your idea of a good time is a quest story where the participants are the Doctor, a talking penguin, and a giant bearded warrior who shouts "VROOMNIK" a lot, then you will have one. Mine is, and I particularly enjoyed their forays into the underground cult. The Doctor's ultimate foe being a hallucination that he is on This Is Your Life is delightfully bonkers.

The first quarter is drawn by John M. Burns; the remaining parts by Barrie Mitchell. Both are good artists, working well with the story's epic nature. I did have the impression, though, that Barrie Mitchell wasn't drawing Colin Baker so much as the steel-jawed hero of a men's 1950s adventure comic wearing a Colin Baker wig. And of course the sixth Doctor was made for color!

It's not all good. Somehow though the Doctor and Frobisher have visited Krontep and Peri's family a lot over the years, Actis knows them but her older brothers don't! The resolution of the political subplot is rushed and sudden, too. But on the whole, I enjoyed this, a weird slice of Doctor Who history that plugs a hole in the tv show but does something uniquely DWM at the same time.

Stray Observations:

• I like the idea that the Doctor periodically drops in on Peri and her family and gives them odd presents. I didn't like that part 14 of Trial undid Peri's death, but if she was to live, I don't like the idea that the Doctor never looked in on her, and I find this take on her future preferable to that offered by Nev Fountain over in the audio dramas.
• Speaking of which, this would be a good one for Big Finish's stillborn range of audio adaptations of DWM comics. Colin Baker and Robert Jezek would crush this!
  
• It's rather nice and unexpected that upon getting to write a Doctor Who story, Colin Baker picks as his Doctor's companion a character he never actually appeared opposite on screen! I guess he likes Steven Parkhouse and John Ridgway as much as the rest of us. It is a bit odd that a black-and-white companion was chosen for DWM's first (I think) full-length color endeavor, however!
• I didn't need to read the Tardis wiki to know that this was originally written and drawn as a four-issue miniseries; it was obvious when on the 22nd page, there was suddenly a splash panel on a dramatic moment, and then the 23rd page was the same moment again, and this repeated two more times.
• On the other hand, the Tardis wiki claims this volume "nearly doubled the number of comic panels that had been devoted to [Baker's] incarnation of the Doctor." There are 88 story pages here; the two DWM graphic novels of sixth Doctor strips total about 350 pages. For Age of Chaos to nearly double the number of panels those 350 pages contained, this would have to have over three times as many panels per page! It doesn't seem likely.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (més)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/932339.html

Yes, it's a real rarity - the only full-length Doctor Who book written by one of the Doctor Who actors. Colin Baker had written three Sixth Doctor stories featuring his own character and Bonnie Langford's Mel, but here's a full 96-page graphic novel published by Marvel in 1994, taking the story of Peri further. I have not seen the series in which she gets married off to Brian Blessed (or killed, depending on the interpretation), but Colin Baker obviously feels as strongly about it as most fans do.

Anyway, it's a fun quest story, rather in the Conan the Barbarian genre of medieval romps, though with inevitable science fictional overtones; the Doctor, his penguin-shaped companion Frobisher, and a locally recruited warrior set off to save Peri's grandchildren and their kingdom, Peri herself having disappeared some time back. My only problem with it is that the artist who drew three quarters of the book, Barrie Mitchell, referred to so positively by Baker in the introduction, doesn't actually draw the Doctor to look very much like Baker at all! (Mitchell is apparently best known for having drawn "The Four Marys" in the girls' comic Bunty, though I doubt that he did it for the whole run from 1958 to 2001 as WikiPedia implies.) The artist of the first quarter of the book, veteran John M Burns, seemed to me to catch him rather better.

This book is something of a curio, admittedly, but quite fun.… (més)