JODY HOUSER

Review: Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #7

By Jeffrey Bracey 6 years ago

STORY

As a long time Dr Who fan I was very eager to read my first ever Dr Who comic. I know that Dr Who has been had runs in comics for many decades but I just never saw any growing up and of course with the tv shows they weren’t as much of a priority to me. But now we live in an age where many properties are licensed by comic companies and its easy to find pretty much all of your genre favorites in floppy format. My enthusiastic expectation however, was dulled by boring story and uninspired artwork.

Im a big fan of giving new readers the needed info to jump into a comic whether by way of some sort of introductory paragraph or within the context of the story being told. In this series we get said paragraph plus a nice little bio on each of the min cast and even the Dr’s vehicle the TARDIS. From there the story ambles along with the Dr and friends pursuing yet another alien threat through time and space and not a whole lot else happens really. The comic is trying very hard to be an episode of Dr Who but things that work in a tv show sometimes do not translate well into a comic. The Dr is often a source of a great deal of expositional information in the series but those info dumps are easy to swallow because of the charismatic actors chosen to play the Dr over the years. In a comic book format there is a need for things to happen to maintain the energy and excitement that a tv show can achieve with camerawork, performance and lighting. Without these things in play the script just becomes a lot of talking heads on mostly static panels. It takes a really gifted author to pull this sort of thing off in comics and unfortunately Houser doen’t have the sort of chops that writers like say Neil Gaimen bring to the table. I just couldn’t make myself care about what was going on as I read this book.

Even worse the story was completely predictable. It really reads like an episode of the show that I’ve already seen but executed less well. The Dr’s dialogue is quirkily superior as she goes about explaining events or deceiving former allies but it doesn’t express the charm of the character while doing so. It just felt like a pale imitation of the punchy speeches the Dr is known for. Every beat of the plot is foreseeable and even when the Dr gets a little preachy trying to protect a species feeding on humans by saying they are carnivores it falls flat. The Dr and crew justify this be commenting out how they’ve each had meat for lunch without acknowledging the fact that they aren’t eating sapient beings or why these aliens can simply feed on common animals. The story logic just fails utterly.

ART

The art is flat, boring and even lazy. Characters are often drawn with expressions like they just caught wiff of a dirty diaper and consistency is random. I spotted several times where the artist reuses the same drawing with either slight or no modifications to save some time on the book. Don’t ask me why though because there are no real backgrounds to speak of. Particularly in the outdoor scenes where looks like everything was done with a stock pack of woodland Photoshop brushes. There is no depth in the entire comic. The colors are murky and most of the characters are so stiff that I can only think that the artist is working from photos.

LETTERING

Why are there three letters on this book? Yeah it’s dialogue heavy but not beyond the scope of a single letterer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Forget this book and go watch the tv show or dig up some of the older Marvel Dr Who comics. 1 out of 5!

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

REVIEW: DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTENTH DOCTOR 7
Writer: Jody Houser
Art: Roberta Ingranata
Colors: Enrica Eren Angiolini
Color Assistant: Vivian Spinelli
Lettering: Richard Starkings, Sarah Jacobs, John Roshell

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