A Silly Little Adventure

As a fan of the Eighth Doctor and their sole movie adventure, I’ve frequently thought about the “what if” of their adventures. He got one movie which, while a tad cheesy at times, did a decent enough job of introducing Number Eight, giving him life and personality and a reason for existing. He was a neat character who, in the right circumstances, could have had a whole world of adventures. Unfortunately his Doctor Who film didn’t perform particularly well in the ratings, especially not in the United States, and the whole project (a proposed series to follow the movie) never happened.

But he remained in Doctor WhoThe longest running sci-fi franchise (at least in terms of sheer seasons), Doctor Who has seen cancelations, relaunches, and reboots, but the core of the series remains the same: a madman in a box traveling through time and space. continuity and, over the years, various productions took up the task of fleshing out his adventures that could have been. It’s like if George Lazenby has stayed on, what could his adventures as James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. have been? That’s the task these creatives had for the Eighth Doctor: find a way to flesh out the character, and the world he lived in, for any fans that were sad he never got a full crack at his own series of stories. Audio adventures, novels, and comic tie-ins abounded, and the end result was a full world for the Doctor, despite his one major appearance (and a final short appearance before the introduction of the War Doctor after).

Titan Comics was one of the many creative houses that tackled the project. They’d actually gotten the license to make a whole fleet of new adventures for all the Doctors, and they’d made many, many books for the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth. Heck, there was even a crossover, The Four Doctors, that bridged all those adventures together. And then they added in more adventures from other Doctors, presumably with the plan to have even more ongoing stories. The Eighth Doctor got their first series of five comics, published as a single volume under the heading of “A Matter of Life and Death”... and then nothing. Another cancellation for this underrepresented Doctor.

So what was it that made fans flock to the other Doctors for their adventures, but kept them away from the Eighth Doctor. Was there not enough love for Number Eight? Was it an oversaturation of the market, with too many ongoing serial comics for all the other Docs as well? Could be a bit of both, especially when you consider that adventures were started for the Third, Fourth, and Seventh Doctors as well. But digging into this single volume, I think there’s a much easier answer to the question: this book kind of sucks. I hate to be dismissive like that, but this was not a very fun read, and the stories provided do a bad job of getting you interested in the Eighth Doctor and his (potential) ongoing adventures.

We find Eight (looking very much like his live-action counterpart, Paul McGann) arriving at a cabin he owns in Wales, only to find a squatter living there. Her name is Josie Day, and she’s an artist. She’d moved in, quite by chance, as the cabin was abandoned and she needed a place to work. An artist by trade, she took up painting, creating very interesting works of aliens and beasts in gorgeous landscapes. But the arrival of the Doctor seemingly brings those painted creatures to life, and he has to work with Josie to find a way to stop them from killing everyone in the village.

And then, since she’s proven useful and interesting, the Doctor whisks Josie away on an adventure through space and time. They come across alien worlds being invaded by crystalline creatures, and find magicians trying to conquer olden day Earth. Each stop along their quest is seemingly guided by a note one version of the Doctor left for Number Eight, a series of clues that could lead to a grander story… but who cares about all that when there’s daring-do to accomplish. It’s all in a day’s work for the Doctor and his companion.

I think a big problem with this book (and the five comic issues within) is a matter of scope. The book, across those five stories, wants to tell a complete adventure with a big reveal (which I won’t spoil, just in case you feel like reading this later). But each comic only has 20-ish pages to tell its story, and it’s hard to fit setup, plot twist, and climax all into a single, 20-page tale. For comparison, the Absolute Universe books from DC that I’ve been reading for the last couple of months also tell long, continuous stories, but a single full tale will get spread across five-to-seven issues, not crammed into a single comic. 20 pages just isn’t enough.

These tales move very fast, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on their own, but they are incredibly shallow because of it. The Doctor and Josie show up where, immediately get into some kind of trouble, talk to a couple of people about what’s going on, and then solve the problem within a matter of minutes. It’s a formula the book uses over and over again, and there is simply no time in that quick series of beats to really develop anything. Not the story, nor the side characters, or the world the Doctor has landed onto. In, out, faster than it takes to make a spot of tea.

And it also means that we don’t really get a lot of time to truly get a feel for the main characters. Josie feels like a cypher, a representation of a companion, but she hardly is developed enough to feel like a real person on her own. She’s about as generic as a companion could be, outside of her bright, blue hair, feeling like an amalgamation of Amy Pond and Clara Oswald, just within the fire or sass either of those characters brought to the table. We need some spark of life from her, and the writer, George Mann, never feels like he really knows how to give us that.

But then the same can be said for the Eighth Doctor as well. For many who might not have seen the movie, this could be their first full introduction to this Doctor, and the book never really brings him into focus. He’s a little manic, and he hates war, but outside those tics we don’t learn his personality. He’s as much an amalgamation of two other Doctors on the page (Ten and Eleven) as Josie was an amalgamation of other companions. Mann seems to know how to get the characters moving but not how to get the living, and it holds them back.

Perhaps this all could have been worked out if the characters had gone on longer than a single volume, but that didn’t happen. Five issues, with the promise of potentially more, and then the book ends. If we consider this a pilot, this was the volume to establish the world for Eight and Josie and not that it is established, maybe we could have gotten more interesting, and better developed, adventures to come. That didn’t happen, though, so this book has to stand on its own, and it’s very bad at that.

I love the Eighth Doctor. They’re my Doctor, the first I really watched, and I would love to see more, grand adventures for him. There’s a promise in a Doctor Who comic like this that we could get that kind of new, awesome story, but this specific book doesn’t provide it. “A Matter of Life and Death” is very rushed, and very uneven, and whatever grand ideas Mann might have had for it, the actual final product fails to deliver.