The travelling Time Lord has regenerated — and he's back in this third collection of classic comic-strips!
Join the heroic Time Lord in his complete DWM strip collection — six incredible, out-of-this-world adventures from the pen of Steve Parkhouse: The Tides of Time, Stars Fell on Stockbridge, The Stockbridge Horror, Lunar Lagoon, 4-Dimensional Vistas and The Moderator!
In these mind-bending adventures through time, space and alternate realities, the Doctor finds himself up against old enemies — the Ice Warriors and the Meddling Monk — plus an incredible array of new foes — including the demonic Melanicus, the money-grabbing Josiah W Dogbolter, trigger-happy Time Lord Tubal Cain and a ghostly presence aboard his own TARDIS!
Joined by the mysterious Matrix agent Shayde, UFO-spotter Max Edison and time-warped GI Gus Goodman, the Doctor has to contend with threats to the universe, to his own freedom and even to the lives of his companions...
Featuring stunning artwork from the award winning Dave Gibbons, plus Mick Austin and Steve Dillon and scripts from Steve Parkhouse — plus a bonus strip by Paul Neary — these classic comics have been digitally restored for the twenty-first century and are reprinted for the very first time in their original format!
Steve Parkhouse is a writer, artist and letterer who has worked for many British comics, especially 2000 AD and Doctor Who Magazine. (source: Wikipedia)
The Doctor Who comic never even pretended to explain where it fit into the shows continuity, but it had some great Dave Gibbons art, good stories, very cool new companions like Sir Justin and Shayde and was just alot of fun as it told stories the TV show could never afford to do.
This book, instead of a collection of short stories tells a big cosmic adventure, using a few bits of continuity from past Who comics.
This series of comics has something of a legendary status amongst fans who read Doctor Who Monthly at the time they were being printed - it's the start of the run that Gary Gillatt describes as a 'golden age' in his notes for Ground Zero, and clearly this era of the comic strip was a huge inspiration for the impressive run of eighth Doctor strips that I grew up with. So it's a little disappointing to discover how flawed they are. The Tides of Time certainly has a magnificent sense of scale and grandeur, a bold visual style and a determination to do something with Doctor Who that wouldn't work in any other medium, but it's hardly a focused narrative, and whilst I expect that its admirers would argue that the meandering style is the whole point, at times it feels like style over substance (for all that the style is undeniably, well, stylish).
I suppose at least the story begins and ends in the same place; it's in The Stockbridge Horror that the strip really loses its way. After a promising, atmospheric prelude (Stars Fell on Stockbridge), the 'main' story is all over the place, veering wildly from one style to another, throwing in random new characters and locations as if desperately trying to keep readers distracted from the absence of a plot. It is certainly not helped by the sudden, jarring change of artist, Mick Austin delivering some of the most unattractive artwork ever seen in any Doctor Who comic strip - his weirdly giant headed caricatures do nothing to help a story that's trying to blend realism with the surreal, but I can't help feeling the sudden preoccupation with two-dimensional gun-wielding heavies is equally unhelpful. As the narrative ought to be wrapping up we're introduced (well, in the most cursory way) to SAG3, a special team of human soldiers with strange skills, as if the whole point of the thing was actually to launch a spin-off series, and frankly I couldn't care less.
Lunar Lagoon is a comic strip that actually strays into the distasteful, the racial insensitivity of the text exacerbated by the artist's tendency towards caricature - and what feels like a botched attempt at a character study is all the more misjudged for having that character brutally murdered by a man we are supposed to accept as the Doctor's companion for the remaining stories. And although Austin's work improves in 4 Dimensional Vistas, it's a pretty bland crashy shooty runaround with several moments I found utterly incomprehensible both in terms of what the hell was going on and also significance. Is that the Meddling Monk? Or the second Doctor? Or neither? (Perhaps the writing could have helped a bit here.) Are we supposed to recognise the SAG3 team when they turn up and if so why put them in clothing that entirely hides their faces??? (Perhaps the writing could have helped a bit here.) In any case, I still couldn't care less.
These are clearly problems of both text and art, so it's strange that the strip regains its mojo with such force the moment Steve Dillon takes over the artistic duties. Because as well as instantly looking fabulous (gorgeous pictures, inventive layouts, and above all clarity) it feels like the work of a different writer altogether - quirky, imaginative, witty and satirical. For my money, The Moderator is the strongest story of the lot, and if the strip is going to continue in this way I'm well up for more. I just haven't been persuaded that this team is all that good at consistency.
I can see why the ambitious world building of the Parkhouse era would be remembered as a kind of golden era, but seen dispassionately by this reader who wasn't there at the time, I can't help feeling that it paved the way for something far superior.
When I discovered this era of comics in Doctor Who Magazine as an 11-year-old, it was a version of the 5th Doctor (my favourite) that lived in a darker, more fantastical, more disturbing version of the Whoniverse. I can't say it's my favourite interpretation, but it had an enormous impact on me...and I now re-read it with great fondness and nostalgia.
This was a lot of fun, the usual bonkers brilliance from the collected stories of "Doctor Who Monthly". In this generous volume we get the complete run of the Fifth Doctor tales (ie. Peter Davison). The artwork dips in the middle but this is to be expected when bookended by the fantastic Dave Gibbons & Steve Dillon. I found the stories more ambitious & sprawling than the previous Fourth Doctor's, spilling into each other in a 'kind of connected' arc.
Anything goes here in a Terry Gilliam stylee - the Tardis landing in a giant bath alongside a huge rubber duck? No probs. An evil tycoon named Josiah W. Dogbolter? Why not, let's make him a frog too. Strangely this mostly works but some of the stories fizzle out. I liked Shayde, the Doctor's sidekick agent/construct from Gallifrey and SAG3, the UNIT type black ops team specialising in the weird arts. The Doctor himself is a bit of a passenger, absent for some of the narrative and seems as confused as the reader at times: a superhero he ain't, but he makes up for it in charm.
We get an early (half assed) attempt at the 'omniverse' parallel realities theory- I suppose being ahead of your time is easier if you're a Timelord. There are villains new (Melanicus the demon) and old - Ice Warriors & the Time Meddler. I wasn't familiar with the later, given the TV character was from 1965, but guessed he was from the original series as I recognised the actor's likeness. Worth noting this is a lovely big glossy book but almost wholly black & white. I never found this a problem but having read some more modern graphic novels this does now jar a bit.
I'll miss Dave Gibbons' pics but will still be back onboard for future (past?) adventures. Added poignance this week with the final story having the tag line "Stan Lee presents".
Setting an unusual tone, the Steve Parkhouse-penned comic stories offer an idiosyncratic version of the Fifth Doctor era which doesn't wholly work, but it's fascinating in how it almost does. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
This is the collected Fifth Doctor comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly #61-87, all written by Steve Parkhouse and with the best art done by Dave Gibbons (Mick Austin and Steve Dillon also contributing). It's a very impressive effort - Big Finish fans will have heard Peter Davison a year or so ago admit that he had had no idea these existed, and then more recently saying how much he had enjoyed them once he finally got hold of them. What DWM and Parkhouse managed to do here was to establish a completely different Fifth Doctor continuity, where he has two spiritual bases - the quaint late twentieth-century English village of Stockbridge, and a high-tech, sinister, somewhat mystical Gallifrey - and has adventures being dragged between the two, and to other places. I remember now thinking at the time that one of the disappointments of Arc of Infinity was that the TV Gallifrey was so much less awe-inspiring than the Gallifrey that Parkhouse and Gibbons had summoned into being in the pages of the magazine. The whole sequence of stories has more unity of style and spirit than the TV series was managing at this point, and is all the better for it; and I may now go back and listen again to the recent Big Finish stories set in Stockbridge with the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa (which were all rather good - the "Autumn" segment of Circular Time, and the Castle of Fear / The Eternal Summer / Plague of the Daleks sequence).
In a later story here we also have the Meddling Monk returning, in alliance with the Ice Warriors, not so different from his alliance with the Daleks in the recent Big Finish audios (though obviously played by Peter Butterworth rather than Graeme Garden). Otherwise the Fifth Doctor has various male hangers-on - two warriors of different time periods (Sir Justin and Angus Goodman), übergeek Maxwell Edison, and the sinister Time Lord construct Shayde, with brief appearances from the mysterious psycho-military group SAG 3; almost no female characters at all here. (Someone who looks a bit like Zoe makes an appearance but doesn't speak.)
NB also a short sequence at the end featuring the Fourth Doctor regressing to the First Doctor, originally published in 1980 in Doctor Who Weekly #17-18, presumably having escaped from the earlier collected volumes, and also rather good.
Not being a fan of the 5th Doctor admittedly did give me some bias against the graphic novel going in, but it was definitely a pretty solid set of stories. Each story tied into each-other without any gratuitous obviousness and there were some great characters introduced. The bit that I really feel is worth mentioning is the insanity that the 5th Doctor guns a man down in the penultimate story. Not a simulation or he is possessed, nope, he just shoots a man. I think that is one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen in expanded media and although hardly a point for literary criticism; still worth mentioning he shot a man to death. Apart from that (not ignoring it though) the characterisation of the 5th Doctor feels a lot more like what they clearly were going for on TV and never had the opportunity to explore. Just a shame I’m not really a fan of this version and much prefer the Big Finish characterisation of him. It is worth complimenting however that the writers of these comic strips managed to keep me engaged even with an incarnation of the character I don’t really like.
One thing that I wasn’t a fan of was that all the villains are really disappointing, I mean a big evil alien space tiger who plays time piano? I know the ridiculousness of comics makes them loveable but given these villains felt they were created by a random word generator; I just didn’t feel any need to care about what they could and can’t do. Shayde is a pretty great character and admittedly the stuff on Gallifrey is quite interesting. It is just a shame that it takes an essay the size of the bible to work out what is and what isn’t canon there with all the contradicting depictions of Gallifrey in expanded media; taking it on face value is easiest and allows for a good 1/3 of the graphic novel to be more interesting.
While I love Doctor Who, I can't say that I really enjoyed this volume. I think it would have helped if I was familiar with the fifth doctor, however I've only watched 9 - 10 so far. Since I don't know this version of the Doctor, I didn't quite understand his personality or quirks and so it was hard to get into. While reading this there were different parts that struck me as funny or interesting, however a lot of it went over my head. I feel like I didn't get everything that I was supposed to in the story, and in fact I often felt like I was missing something as though I missed a section of background or the terminology just didn't make sense. Again, this could have something to do with the fact that I haven't watched the 5th Doctor's episodes and so didn't know certain aspects of his story line. I think people who know this Doctor would enjoy it a lot more than I did and would get more out of it. There is a small section at the end that features the Fourth Doctor that felt very episodic and I actually enjoyed it, although it wasn't very long and was instead a small aside at the end of the book. It felt like a normal episode of Doctor Who and that was something I really appreciated.
Enjoyable, but inconsistent, this is another of Panini's excellent collections of Doctor Who Magazine strips. 'The Tides of Time' focuses on Peter Davison's Fifth incarnation of the Time Lord and contains six stories, two of which act like preludes to a larger succeeding story.
The best stories in this collection are the first ('The Tides of Time') and the last ('The Moderator'). They are well illustrated and well written. A criticism of mine for at least two of the stories in this six-story volume ('The Stockbridge Horror' and '4-Dimensional Vistas') is that they are meandering, dull, and simultaneously slow and extremely quick to race towards a resolution. They just don't flow.
I read this volume back in 2006 or 2007 when I first bought it and remembered it with great fondness. However reading it straight after the two Fourth Doctor volumes, it seems that this represents a difficult period in the evolution of the comic, one where there are certainly big ideas, but the tight plotting isn't there to back them up.
I think some of this suffered from my not being a fan of Mick Austin's art, though anyone would probably find Dave Gibbons - whose work consistently enhances the wonderful sense of scope that opening story has - a tough act to follow as the strip's primary artist. My favourite stories were the first ("The Tides of Time") and the last ("The Moderator") but I found stuff to like in most of them, the only real dud for me being "4-Dimensional Vistas", which felt like it underutilised both the alternate worlds premise and its villains.
It seems strange to think that, in many ways, these were the best 'Doctor Who' stories that Peter Davison ever appeared in.
Steve Parkhouse's writing really begins to shine here and after the delicate hiccup following Dave Gibbons' swan song, it's Steve Dillon magic to the end. And then there's a random reprint of a fabulous tale from the early days - when everything was weekly - to round it off.
This is without a doubt one of the best realizations of the fifth incarnation of the doctor, some of the plotting is awkward in places and some of the panel jumps are confusing but this does not detract from its charm. The artwork is not coloured save a few pages in my edition but the pencilling and inking is wonderful in its attention to detail and depth. To any fan of this incarnation of the doctor I would recommend this lovely and charming collection of short tales.
I figured while I was waiting for "The Time of the Doctor" finale to download, I'd read some good Doctor Who comics, and this trade of the Fifth Doctor (and one adventure of the Fourth) is a fun read. It's nice to actually see the Doctor playing cricket, since he wears most of the outfit all the time. Good art, especially the stories by Dave Gibbons and by Austin, and well-written stories.
Note; this is an altered version of a review of these batch of strips posted at the end of my Letterboxd reviews of Arc of Infinity and The Caves of Androzani.
There’s a dearth of DWM Fifth Doctor comics much like the Ninth and Thirteenth Doctors and it’s a shame it’s as inconsistent quality-wise as his run on television.
It can’t be stressed enough how much I love The Tides of Time; it’s a massive sprawling epic packed to the gills with surrealist imagery and epic mind-bending concepts, it’s the first time that the DWM comic strip achieved a ‘season finale’ of sorts (one of many to come) and even after the 40 years of its first publishing, it might just be one of my favourite Fifth Doctor stories period. Stars Fell on Stockbridge is also a lovely short story of the Doctor giving hope to a UFO believer, but sadly things fall apart with The Stockbridge Horror which starts off quite strong but loses itself the longer it goes on and the inconsistent artwork reflects it (the latter half is drawn by Mick Austen who doesn’t seem to get body proportions right so everyone is shaped like lanky goblins).
Lunar Lagoon to its credit is an interesting character study between the Doctor and a Japanese soldier who's holding him captive in the midst of a war, but 4-Dimensional Vistas fails at being a Tides of Time level epic and might just rank as my least favourite out of the six strips (given how it's about a multiversal conflict, this is really saying something). Austen's work is better but still very sketchy, so it’s a small relief that Steve Dillon’s work on the only non-backup strip he did feels reminiscent of Dave Gibbons with The Moderator, an intriguing mix of Saward-level grittiness and the more off-kilter humour that would spring up in the comics of the following Doctor…