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Comic Book Review


Book Cover

Doctor Who
The Tenth Doctor #2.10

 

Writer: Nick Abadzis
Artist: Elena Casagrande
Colourists: Arianna Florean with Azzurra Florean
Publisher: Titan Comics
RRP: UK £2.65, US $3.99, Cdn $4.99
Age: 12+
32 pages
Publication Date: 25 May 2016


Father, I hear you. I hear your voice as clearly as I hear my own. I have a conscience now… she buzzes in my ear, like a Nile mosquito. I am caught between these two conversations, my own thoughts disappearing like so much dust caught in the spinning, vanishing funnel of a downward spiral. And still I wait. I grow impatient…” The TARDIS is under attack and its internal and external dimensions are about to collapse! Only one suspect has the power required to breach the ship’s defences. Has Anubis slipped back into his father’s old ways…?!

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey! Someone send for the Doctor, because the front cover of this comic appears to be lost in time! It shows the Tenth Doctor, Gabby and Cindy in New Orleans, but, though they are en route to that destination, they won’t actually arrive there until next issue. Similarly, the online synopsis for #2.10 promises a trip to the Jazz Age and an encounter with the maliciously musical Nocturnes… which is actually due to take place “NEXT TIME”, as the preview at the back of this issue makes plain.

It is possible that the Nocturne storyline was originally supposed to start here, but then someone at Titan realised that would spoil the eventual graphic novel compilation – they typically collect issues in groups of five. As it is, the one-shot The Infinite Corridor feels like a filler, with the TARDIS crew encountering technobabble-inducing spatial weirdness which puts Cindy in jeopardy but is quickly sorted out.

We also get a brief cutaway to deep space, where Anubis the Osiran is growing impatient at the Doctor’s lack of progress in aiding his galactic quest – a plot strand which Titan’s temporally displaced online synopses have been promising us since #2.4 and #2.5!

On the plus side, it’s good to see old dog face again, and there are lots of dramatic images from Elena Casagrande showing stellar patterns in space, the swirling time vortex, and the TARDIS getting twisted out of shape.

There’s also a neat nod to Pyramids of Mars from writer Nick Abadzis, as the Doctor and his companions wonder who or what could be affecting the ship: “Nothing can get inside. Except…” “Except…?” “Except for a psychic projection. Mental force of that power is… unimaginable.” The Doctor and Cindy’s words echo a much earlier conversation between the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith in 1975: “Nothing can enter the TARDIS. Unless…” “Unless what?” “Mental projection of that force is beyond imagination.”

What is hopefully not beyond imagination is an eventual landing in New Orleans – next time…!

6

Richard McGinlay

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