This column has been taking
a look at obscure comics for twelve months. For every every sixth
month, instead of taking a look at a comic that nobody talks
about, this special edition will take a look at a comic I feel not
enough people talk about.
Doctor Who: The Eighth
Doctor Comic Strips by Scott Gray and various artists – Doctor Who
Magazine 1996 to 2005
Contains Spoilers
It was a strange time to be
a Doctor Who fan in the mid nineties. The series had been off the air
long enough that people had basically assumed it was never coming
back. Few official stories had been released within the decade by the
BBC, but the desire from both fans and writers for a return was only
getting stronger.
Then everything changed, and
at the same time, nothing changed. The 1995 Paul McGann movie proved
there was fertile ground for the character to move on to, but it was
an abject failure at courting new audiences.
As a young kid who didn't
really understand the peaks and troughs of film and TV politics, I
was waiting, with bated breath, for the TV series to return. It
was bound to happen right? Only a matter of time?
In a post Doctor Who The
Movie world there was a great feeling of betrayal. We had something
so close and had been denied. And so we sought solace in the only
place we could, The Doctor Who Magazine's monthly strip. It was the
closest thing we'd get to seeing Paul McGann back on the screen.
It'd be easy to look back on
DWM's Eighth Doctor strips with nostalgic fondness when that's
practically the only Doctor Who you were getting at the time. And
that's true, I lapped up what I could as a kid. With no TV series in
sight, to me the DWM strip was Doctor Who.
I slipped in and out of
reading it over the years, and I mostly read the colour strips when
my brother was buying it regularly. But my interest fluctuated, and I
had an egregious, homophobic reaction to the later stories which
we'll get in to later.
I was in university by the
time Doctor Who was back on the screen. I'd started buying the
comic's reprints but I never went back and reappraised the Eighth
Doctor stories until 2013, when I decided to finally complete the
collection and read them as a single body of work.
It wasn't nostalgia. I
enjoyed The Eight Doctor Strips so much more the second time round.
They are some of the best Doctor Who stories ever written, maybe even
some of the best comics I've ever read.
The whole four volume arc is
itself relatively self contained, so I'd be interested to see what a
reader with no foreknowledge of the TV show would think of the
stories (I think they'd come across quite well.)
But what is it about these
strips, written predominantly by Scott Gray, that makes them all time
greats? Well, there’s a sense that Gray is really trying to break
new ground with these stories. Long before we saw Doctor Who return
to TV under Russell T Davis, Grey brought us a breezy, hip, forward
thinking Doctor Who that could drop pop culture references at any
moment, but still keep one foot rooted in classic Sci-fi, maybe even
more so than the TV series, before or since.
In the beginning we're
introduced to the Doctor's newest companion, Izzy Sinclare, a
tomboyish science-fiction fan who is practically thrilled at the
prospect of space-faring adventures. She's a great match for McGann's
Doctor, who is at once level headed and serious, but also so full of
hope and curiosity. Izzy can irritate him at times, but he just can't
help but admire her enthusiasm.
The early stories are rather
throwaway in tone, but they build an important foundation for what
was to come later. Endgame sees the return of the Celestial
Toymaker, and does what comics do best by creating fantastical and
wonderful scenes that a TV budget would never get you.
The Daleks return, in Fire
and Brimstone, a story that really does it's best to try and make
them ultimately terrifying again, albeit in a very 90's Rob Liefield
kind of way. The story has cracking action, and the art is a perfect
fit for high concept sci-fi. Even so, it's the character driven stuff
that really draws the appeal here.
Alongside Izzy we're also
introduced to androgynous super-spy Fey Truscott-Sade, who, though
easy to miss at first, Izzy seems to be rather smitten with. It's the
story The Final Chapter though, where the strip starts gaining
steam. Not the story itself though, which is a fairly by-the-numbers
look back at Time Lord mythology, but it's the ending that worth
talking about. An ending which would go on to be one of the greatest
pieces of trolling in comic book history.
A little context. With no
sign of Doctor Who returning to the airwaves many fans had taken it
upon themselves to produce their own future Who stories. One such
example were the Audio Visual fan dramas, where Nicolas Briggs (who
would go on to voice the Daleks in the TV series proper) was becoming
quite popular playing a future incarnation. He'd actually appeared a
few times as “the Nth Doctor” in some of the earlier comics.
At the end of The Final
Chapter, Paul McGanns's Doctor seemingly sacrifices his life,
triggering a regeneration and announcing Briggs as the new, official
Ninth Doctor.
Readers fell for it hook,
line, and sinker. Angry letters were sent in condemning DWM for
writing off McGann's Doctor so early, while others said they had no
right outside the TV series to make that call.
It was all a ruse of course.
The Doctor was revealed to have faked his regeneration in the
cracking space western, Wormwood. Teaming up with Time Lord
bioweapon Shayde, the gang battle an 19th Century
industrialist and even more deadly bioweapon, The Pariah. The gang
succeed, but not without Shayde being mortally wounded, forcing him
to merge with Fay and essentially turning her into the Doctor Who
equivalent of the Silver Surfer.
Wormwood creates the
template that Gray would improve on over the subsequent years. It
combined character drama with converging plot-lines and high concept
stories with great action and visuals. It was all polished to a
mirror shine, and the climax is great.
The next story arc, is, in
my opinion, the best of the bunch. The Glorious Dead saw the
return of Kroton, a Cyberman with a soul reinvented as a sort of Luke
Cage character (who he even drops a reference to), he's also joined
by Katsura, a samurai robbed of a noble death by The Doctor, and The
Master, back as a schemer more vicious than he ever had been before
(or since).
The Glorious Dead really
embraces it's wide spectrum of comic book influences. Katsura's
origin story sees references to classic and contemporary manga, and
the main plot involves the two Time Lords battling it out for the
throne of the multiverse. There's literal homages to Peanuts, Doctor
Strange, X-Force and Dick Tracy. It's a comic aficionado's dream.
Right here, DWM was really
leaving it's TV roots behind and embracing it's legacy as a comic
first and foremost. With no TV series in sight, Doctor Who was dead,
long live Doctor Who.
Soon later the comic would
hit full colour for the very first time, and the quality and
intensity of the stories would only increase from there. Ophidious
would see Izzy swap brains with the amoral fish alien Destrii, only
for Destrii to end up getting vaporised, leaving Izzy struggling to
cope living in an unfamiliar body.
The Way of All Flesh
would see The Doctor and Izzy, no joke, team up with Frida Kahlo and
Diego Rivera to fight an alien art diva during Dia de los Muertos and
it's a real doozey of a story. Then there's Children of the
Revolution, voted one of the greatest DWM comics ever, that
follows the legacy of a group of moralistic Daleks as they struggle
to find a place in a universe that hates and fears them.
Things finally come to ahead
in Oblivion as threads going all the way back to Endgame
converge. Izzy, mistaken for Destrii, is summoned to her homeworld to
take on the mantle of Primatrix. Meanwhile, The Doctor discovers that
Destrii, in Izzy's body, isn't dead after all, and seeks to set right
what once went wrong.
The story has action,
adventure and political rivalries, but it is primarily concerned with
Izzy coming to terms with who she is, as an outsider, an orphan and a
lesbian.
In Scott Grey's commentary,
at the back of Volume 3, he notes “I think we only got one angry
letter (from an American reader) about Izzy and Fey's kiss. He
cancelled his subscription in protest. I would have been deeply
disappointed if we hadn't outraged somebody, so thank you, Mr
Republican, wherever you are!” I think about that reader a lot, and
the person I might have grown up to be.
For the young homophobic man
that I was, the finale made me angry and confused. Going back in
2013, the story nearly moved me to tears. I didn't know it at the
time, but Oblivion had played an important role in making me the
person I am today.
The story ends with a big
damn kiss with Fey, and a return to the day that Izzy first left in
the Tardis. It's a neat and tidy ending, and would be the perfect
place to finish, but Doctor Who wouldn't return to television for
another three years, and there were still more stories to be told. It
would have been easy, after Oblivion, for the strip to slip into a
funk. It didn't, instead what they gave us was more of a victory lap.
The next run of stories are
self contained but are some of the best homages in the entire run.
The Nightmare Game is a cheeky, Roy of the Rovers inspired
football adventure, The Curious Tail of Spring-heeled Jack is
pretty self explanatory, and The Land of Happy Endings is
told in the style of the old TV Comic Doctor Who stories from back in
the 60's and re-contextualises them as The Doctor fantasising about a
simpler, more childish world.
We return to the long form
epic arcs eventually with Bad Blood. Sitting Bull vs General
Custer, the return of Destrii and Space Windigo. Jeeze oh man, is
this story ever fucking awesome. Doctor Who, even now, has never had
the budget to tackle western revisionism. But with comics? No
problem. The TV stories have dealt with metaphorical stories of
colonialism before, but here, it's front and centre.
As the kind of story Doctor
Who was created to tell, it's probably be my favourite story of the
whole bunch, even compared to The Glorious Dead.
Destrii joins the crew of
the Tardis, finally, and so we reach the strip's grand finale, The
Flood. The Flood isn't a particular complicated concept, reinvent
a Cyberman story more suited for the modern age. It's interesting to
compare The Flood with the TV's modern reinvention of the Cybermen,
because they're like night and day in approach.
When the TV series brought
them back, the Cybermen were envisioned as hulking, boot stomping war
machines. In The Flood the Cybermen look more fluid, more fragile.
They don't stride towards their victims with menace, instead they
glide and float. These Cybermen are eerie, truly alien.
The Flood finishes on
another homage, one to Doctor Who itself. The last televised story
before it's proper revival, Survival, ended with The Doctor and his
companion Ace walking off into the distance, reminiscing of
adventures gone by, and speculating on the ones to come.
The Flood's ending hits all
those same beats. With Doctor Who returning to television this really
was the Eighth Doctor's swan song and it decides to end in the same
humble way the show did, reminiscing on the past, and looking
forwards to the future.
I've never really felt the
same way about a Doctor Who comic since the end of the Eighth
Doctor's era. While there has been some exceptionally good work done
by IDW and Titan and DWM itself, it's not quite got the same feeling
now that the show is back on TV. The comics can't be quite as daring,
or as experimental, as DWM was during it's wilderness years.
The Eighth Doctor Comics
strips are some of my favourite comics. They're probably my favourite
Doctor Who related stories period, and this is coming from a guy
who's been a fan of the show since I was seven years old. They're
ambitious and progressive, grand in scope yet warm and human. Paul
McGann, despite only ever really having one proper TV appearance, is
my Doctor, and that's in no small part due to what these comics mean
to me.
Any Doctor Who fan, old and
new, owes it to themselves to read the entire run, and even if you
don't give a shit about Doctor Who the craft on display here is so
finely tuned that there's a lot to love for a fan of comics in
general. The Eighth Doctor strips show what Doctor Who as a concept
is capable of when it's unburdened by budget and franchise limitations.
I grew up watching Doctor
Who, but I never really loved Doctor Who until 1995. I'm still a fan,
but I've never really loved it the way I did when Scott Gray was
writing for DWM. You can probably figure out why.
Jack Harvey 2016. Doctor Who (c) BBC,
published by Panini Comics for Doctor Who Magazine. Images used under
free use.
