End Game, the first of these collections of the eighth Doctor comics I remember being fairly average, but the second, with the change in writer from Alan Barnes to Scott Gray, is very good indeed. I would say that Doctor Who is made for the comic medium, but it's also made for the televisual and audio media, so that's not a very noteworthy distinction-- but suffice it to say, that Doctor Who, with all the strange possibilities that it creates, works very well in comics. This volume is no exception, giving us chases beneath London, kick-butt Cyberman/Sontaran action, introspection in feudal Japan, wacky autonomous robots, and, of course, the masterpiece that is The Glorious Dead itself-- a ten-part epic that would fit right in with any of the new series' grand finales. In a good way. The eighth Doctor is on fine form, Izzy is Rose before there was Rose, and who doesn't love Kroton the Cyberman? The wonderful art by Adrian Salmon, Martin Geraghty, and Roger Landridge doesn't hurt either.

Added October 2022; access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

If you have a consistent writer, does the strip have a natural tendency toward story arcs? The backmatter here explains that after the Threshold arc, editor Gary Gillat promised fewer arcs... but in his very next multi-part story, scripter Scott Gray introduced the elements of a new story arc. Just can't be avoided, I guess? Like the stories in End Game, this arc draws on the strip's long history, but it feels less beholden to it, as instead of lots of returning strip elements, we just have one in the form of Kroton, and also unlike End Game, I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms.

Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools
Just as the McCoy-era strips picked up a character from the Tom Baker–era back-ups and brought him into the main strip in the present, we have that here with Kroton the Cyberman with a Soul, and so the collection helpfully reprints his original appearances. Throwback is basically fine; I think what I struggle with is that even before Kroton breaks away, none of the Cybermen feel particularly Cyberman-y. I mean, I guess there's no reason Cybermen can't chat about things, as long as they do so logically, but they don't feel like the impassive, unstoppable telos of humanity here. But, you know, I would never say no to some Steve Dillon art, and Kroton's interventions on behalf of the human resistance are well done. Ship of Fools is a great spooky sf tale, but Kroton himself could pretty much be any random traveler in it. If someone picked it up because of issue #23's "A NEW CYBERMAN COMIC STRIP!" cover blurb, I imagine they were kind of disappointed.

Happy Deathday
This is DWM's special contribution to the... ah, 35th anniversary? Is that a thing? It's a deliberately goofy multi-Doctor story, and I have to say, deliberately goofiness is probably better than deadly earnestness when it comes to these things, as the Doctors team up against the Beige Guardian, and there are references to Dimenions in Time, and it all turns out to be a videogame that Izzy is playing. There are some good jokes, and the art is fun.

The Fallen
This is DWM's sequel to the TV movie: Grace, since its events, has been using DNA she recovered to try to create a human/Time Lord hybrid, that will fulfill her desire to hold back death. But the DNA didn't come from a Time Lord, because he was in the body of a Skarosian morphant, and so Grace and the MI6 scientist she's been working with have inadvertently created a horrendous monster. Meanwhile, the Master is back... even though no one knows it. What I realized while reading it is that it's really the only sequel to the TVM ever made! BBC Books kind of edged close to it a couple times (and I know authors wanted to use Grace in novels but couldn't), while Big Finish totally ignored it except for using McGann himself (up until they got Eric Roberts, anyway). But this is a full-fledged sequel, following on from its scenes and character beats, even. The Doctor makes big impacts on people's lives, and this has repercussions he's not always thinking about. There's a strong focus on the characters of the Doctor and Grace here, and Martin Geraghty does a great job with big action and character close-ups alike. Overall, a good one, and the beginning of a good direction, I think.

Unnatural Born Killers
If you say, "Adrian Salmon, draw a story about Kroton the Cyberman beating up Sontarans," of course he will draw the hell out of it. And it turns out he can write, too! It took a bit for me to adjust to the more irreverent, human Kroton of the 1990s, but it was the right call for sure.

The Road to Hell
I felt that this was the weakest story of the volume, though it got better as it went. At the beginning, I found it hard to track the different groups and characters, who were introduced thick and fast. But once the relationship between Izzy and Sato Katsura came into the foreground, I found the story worked a lot better. There are some great moments here, such as Izzy making the future of Japan manifest as her knowledge of manga, anime, and Power Rangers, but then the cliffhanger being the reveal of the atomic bombing of Japan. Some neat concepts here, and one thing I appreciate about Gray as a writer is his peppering of the dialogue with small moments of humor, especially between Izzy and the Doctor.

TV Action!
It's DWM's 20th anniversary! Alan Barnes's notes in the commentary give the whole thing an air of desperation, but I thought it was a blast... even though, as an American, most of the cultural references go over my head. They bring back one of DWM's first original villains, Beep the Meep, but have him and the TARDIS cross over into a different universe... ours. The Doctor and Izzy chase Beep through BBC Television Centre on the day DWM debuted, culminating in a scene where the real Tom Baker pretends to be the Doctor to cower Beep. Magnificent! The real Tom Baker quotations used in his dialogue are priceless.

The Company of Thieves
This was good fun: the Doctor and Izzy arrive on a ship being hijacked by pirates, and when a Cyberman is found belowdecks, everyone misunderstands the situations... because it's Kroton, his path intersecting the TARDIS's at long last. Like I said above, the interplay between the Doctor and Izzy really works; I enjoyed her putting on her glasses and spouting Star Trek bafflegab to confuse a bunch of pirates about the status of their engines. This does a great job of escalating a complicated situation, and then exiting it. It's filled with delightful moments, such as a "high" Kroton, Izzy's idea to stop the bad guy, the TARDIS team flying through the void of space, and the two pirates who don't trust each other drifting apart in space on the final page. The Glorious Dead is great, of course, but this might be Scott Gray at his best, and Adrian Salmon's work is as delightful as always... or maybe even moreso.

The Glorious Dead
The biggest DWM story ever! Ten whole months! It could be a grind, but Gray stops it from being so by switching things up every so often. The first three parts play out relatively normally, with the Doctor, Izzy, and Kroton trying to figure out what's up with this alien planet and the strange religion coming to it. But then the part three cliffhanger is marvelous: the Doctor hears the words "WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP" and suddenly finds himself waking up... in bed with a Grace who called him "honey?" It's the kind of cliffhanger I can imagine Steven Moffat doing.

Part four then does something I can't remember any DWM story doing before (corrections welcome): jumping forward away from a cliffhanger, in this case about three weeks. The installment entirely focuses on what Izzy and Kroton on the occupied planet Paradost, told almost entirely via her narration (as a letter to Max). The jump forward again feels very Moffat (e.g., "Day of the Moon"); the choice to focalize the installment via the companion feels very Russell T Davies (e.g., "Doomsday"). And then in part five, we're doing something else entirely yet again! Here we have a masterpiece of surreal comics storytelling, as the Doctor tumbles from universe to universe, and thus from storytelling style to storytelling style. It starts out ordinary-ish, with the Doctor in a world where he did stay with Grace, but soon he's in a western, he's a cartoon tiger, he's in Peanuts getting advice from the Rani. I guess it's all a bit Steve Parkhouse—it reminds me of Once Upon a Time Lord—but it's so well done, and it's striking for coming in the middle of what has seemed like a pretty straight DWM space epic up until this point. Bits of it are drawn by Roger Langridge, which works well.

So with part six, things settle down... a bit. But we still get massive surreal landscapes of the omniverse, and the reveal that the alien planet the enemies come from is actually Earth, and the return of Sato, and Izzy shrunk and put in a test tube, and the reveal that the Master is behind it all! Again, it feels a bit RTD, akin to the reveal in Last of the Time Lords that the Toclafane are actually humans, and that the Master has been manipulating the entire series. It's all a bit mad, but in the best DWM way, and Gray and Geraghty's focus on the Doctor and Izzy and Kroton as people keeps it anchored. I do tune out a bit whenever we get one of those multi-page sequences of someone explaining the History Of All Time or whatever, but on the whole, this really works, and I like how it subverts the seeming prophecy about a Doctor/Master battle. Kroton gets a great end. Izzy's discussion of her parents and her relationship to them works well this time out. I think this does a good job of taking the kind of Parkhouse/Gibbons-y space epic and marrying it to the sensibilities of contemporary, character-focused storytelling—similar to what Big Finish was about to do in its own Paul McGann stories, and foreshadowing the approach the new series would take under Russell.

The Autonomy Bug
I was going to say this was cute, but it's not; like the New Eighth Doctor Adventure The Cannibalists, it uses cuteness to disguise how horrifying it really is. The Doctor and Izzy come to an institution for deranged robots, and realize they are being pretty awfully mistreated. I didn't love it, but it's an effective serious story from Roger Langridge, and has a great moment of cartoon logic, and a nice conclusion. The stuff with the robots painting their faces is pretty good.

Other Notes:

• Roger Langridge will go on to be a McGann-era mainstay of the strip as an artist, so much so that he illustrated the eighth Doctor installment of IDW's 50th anniversary series. But I, weirdly, know him from the fact that he illustrated special installments of the short-lived Shaenon K. Garrity webcomic Smithson (2004-8, I think? previously known as More Fun).
• Unnatural Born Killers is one of only a few Doctor-free main strips... and actually the last one featured the Sontarans, too!
• The Doctor is said to have defeated Beep twice before; the second time was in the story Star Beast II, published back in 1995, but this was collected with some twelfth Doctor strips, so I haven't read it yet. Big Finish would later add another Beep encounter, a direct follow-up to Star Beast II, inconsistent with this story. Which is, you know, as canon as anything. In IDW's era, they'd even do another story about the Doctor crossing over into our universe!
• Barnes was inspired by a Star Trek short story he only vaguely remembers; it would be "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman from the anthology The New Voyages.
• The only thing to dislike about Kroton being in the TARDIS crew is how little his time was! His departure story immediately follows his introduction. I demand missing adventures set between The Company of Thieves and The Glorious Dead. Another one to go on the the-tv-show-gets-cancelled-and-the-strip-becomes-a-nostalgia-fest list, I guess.
• I kept comparing The Glorious Dead to something Russell would do, and it really is, in a number of ways... and then I learned from the commentary that Russell actually wrote DWM after part four!
• Did the readers at the time know The Glorious Dead was going to be ten parts? Or did they just come to the end each month and read "TO BE CONTINUED..." every time instead of "TO BE CONCLUDED..." and wonder if it would ever end?

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