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Hamster Book Club - The Glorious Dead · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:05
  Welcome back to the Hamster Book Club.
• 0:07
  My name is Joe Ford and I have extracted a guest today who is
• 0:14
  normally in a foursome on the book club, but I wanted some
• 0:18
  time alone with him. I've got Mr. James Lark here
• 0:20
  with me to say hello James. Hello and thank you for
• 0:23
  extracting me from my foursome. Well, I mean, we're heading back
• 0:27
  to it soon, aren't we too? Yeah, I'm very much looking
• 0:30
  forward to it, but it's just nice to get a get a breath of
• 0:32
  fresh air. Our book of I'm considering you
• 0:35
  to blame for the fact that we will be covering transit in the
• 0:38
  future. Yeah, I consider myself to blame
• 0:42
  as well. I haven't started yet, but you
• 0:45
  will get, you know, rude messages when I am reading.
• 0:47
  No, I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm sure.
• 0:49
  That's going to be my festive Christmas read I'm looking
• 0:51
  forward to. It so today we are not here.
• 0:55
  We kind of are here to talk about Doctor Who in print, but
• 0:59
  with lots of astonishing pictures as well.
• 1:02
  You've chosen a graphic novel for us to talk about.
• 1:05
  And can I ask you sort of what, what your relationship with the
• 1:10
  strip is when you started reading it and where is it in
• 1:14
  your sort of journey of Doctor Who?
• 1:16
  Well, this particular strip is key to my journey with the the
• 1:21
  Doctor Who strip because I started buying Doctor Who
• 1:25
  Magazine regularly just about in the middle of one of these
• 1:31
  stories. I think it was the road to hell.
• 1:34
  It was around then that I found myself with a little disposable
• 1:39
  income, which I'm in a student loan, and some time to read
• 1:45
  Doctor Who magazine, by which I mean time when I should have
• 1:47
  probably been studying. And I started buying Doctor Who
• 1:52
  Magazine regularly from that point on.
• 1:55
  And I think I've heard various people actually on your podcast
• 1:59
  saying that they didn't read the strip at all.
• 2:03
  That's me. That's me.
• 2:05
  Yeah, And you've said that as well.
• 2:07
  And I think when I went into Doctor Who Magazine, I was
• 2:10
  buying it for the the serious articles because there were many
• 2:13
  very serious articles at the time and I didn't consider the
• 2:17
  strip a particularly important part of it.
• 2:21
  That seemed to me kind of harking back to when it was
• 2:24
  Doctor Who Weekly and and and more of a kids you know more of
• 2:27
  a kids magazine. So it really took me by surprise
• 2:31
  and it took me by surprise not immediately.
• 2:34
  The road to hell is is as we will discuss.
• 2:36
  It's a it's a great strip but coming in halfway through maybe
• 2:39
  that wasn't so evident. There was just a point a few
• 2:42
  months down the line that I suddenly thought, this is
• 2:45
  incredible and and instead of being the thing that I read last
• 2:48
  it started to be the thing that I turned to 1st.
• 2:50
  Almost as I was kind of leaving the shop, I would turn to see
• 2:54
  what was going on because it was just delivering a series of
• 2:58
  absolutely brilliant cliffhangers and plot twists to
• 3:02
  die for and characters and moments that to this day just
• 3:07
  remain, I think, some of the best Doctor Who I've ever
• 3:11
  experienced in any medium. I mean, you'll know, given the
• 3:15
  series of excited messages I've sent you over the last couple of
• 3:19
  weeks as I've been reading The Glorious Dead, that I'm fully on
• 3:22
  board with this form of Doctor Who.
• 3:24
  Now I feel sad for me because I never read the strip and when I
• 3:29
  eventually did, like I got to the point where I had saturated
• 3:32
  all the books, all the TVI had nothing left, all the big
• 3:36
  finishes up to that point and I was like, I need more tops of
• 3:39
  who like the hunger for it is, you know?
• 3:41
  It just goes on and on, doesn't it?
• 3:43
  And so I bought the first McGann one.
• 3:46
  Is it end game? Yeah.
• 3:49
  And very, very quickly was hooked.
• 3:54
  But I I think like buying the magazine and having those
• 3:58
  segments, those chapters every month, that must have been a
• 4:01
  hell of an experience. And the the month wait for the
• 4:04
  next one. My goodness, it was quite a
• 4:07
  ride. And one thing that we will
• 4:08
  discuss is that they not only delivered great cliffhangers,
• 4:11
  but they knew how to follow a cliffhanger so that it didn't
• 4:14
  just deliver you a kind of an easy solution, but kept you
• 4:17
  waiting sometimes for another month before you got to see how
• 4:20
  the thing that had been set up was in any way resolved.
• 4:24
  You chose well with End Game though.
• 4:25
  I mean I'm not sure if you've chosen some some of the graphic
• 4:27
  novel collections you might have been less pulled in.
• 4:30
  I think End Game is also a really fine collection of
• 4:34
  stories and it sort of hits the ground running with the Paul
• 4:37
  McGann strips, the 8th Doctor strips and and it maintains that
• 4:41
  momentum right to the end of his run.
• 4:44
  I think, I think of the three runs that the 8th Doctor had.
• 4:49
  The strips, The books, the audios.
• 4:53
  This is by far the most consistently strong series of
• 4:57
  stories the 8th Doctor had. It's certainly the most
• 4:59
  consistent. And I think one of the reasons
• 5:04
  why I held back from getting I just couldn't understand how
• 5:10
  we've got 8 pages and still pictures.
• 5:15
  I could be absorbed into a story or how I could get any kind of
• 5:18
  characterization from it. Or I mean, boy did I eat my
• 5:21
  words. I bet you got around.
• 5:22
  Here, yeah. I mean, I can totally empathize
• 5:25
  with that because I I'm not really a a graphic novels
• 5:28
  person. I, you know, growing up I was a
• 5:31
  comics person in the way that everyone was, you know, the
• 5:34
  occasional copy of The Beano. But I don't think I ever grew up
• 5:38
  kind of taking seriously the potential of the format.
• 5:42
  And like I say, I think I associate it with something
• 5:45
  written for for children and maybe kind of those classic
• 5:47
  comics reprints that Doctor Who magazine brought out in the 90s.
• 5:50
  You know, they were reprinting a lot of the the trousers strips
• 5:53
  and the Hartwell ones, which I now have a huge amount of
• 5:56
  affection for. But they don't, you know,
• 5:58
  they're not graphic novels, they're comic strips and and
• 6:01
  they're not treating the format in the serious way that it gets
• 6:05
  treated here. Did you go back then and consume
• 6:07
  the lot? No, I I, I, I haven't consumed
• 6:12
  the lot. I've I've very kind of
• 6:14
  cautiously started kind of dipping my toes in because again
• 6:19
  this comes from the background of I was a book person, not a
• 6:23
  comic person. So not really knowing the art
• 6:26
  form if I can potentially call it an art form but I I guess it
• 6:30
  it is And I I, you know there are some people take it very
• 6:32
  very seriously indeed. It's only you know fairly
• 6:35
  recently that I've started to appreciate just how lucky we are
• 6:39
  as Doctor Who fans to have had some huge names in the world of
• 6:44
  graphic novels briefly deliver one or two stories for Doctor
• 6:50
  Who. You know the the the start of
• 6:53
  the Doctor Who comic strip in Doctor Who magazine where you've
• 6:55
  got, you know, the Pat Mills's and and you've got the Steve
• 6:59
  Steve de Nancy. You've got the Alan Moore.
• 7:02
  You know, big names. But but unless you know about
• 7:05
  that world, you you don't maybe appreciate how, as with so many
• 7:11
  other parts of Doctor Who, we we're really lucky.
• 7:15
  It's like Douglas Adams writing a script for the TV show, isn't
• 7:18
  it? It's like, how did that ever
• 7:19
  happen? How is he ever that desperate?
• 7:21
  You know, I I went back and I got most of them.
• 7:27
  Like, I've explored the sort of first doctor, John and Jillian
• 7:29
  ones, and they were cute as hell.
• 7:32
  But they were for kids. Absolutely, for kids.
• 7:36
  I bought the Iron Legion because I wanted to, because that was
• 7:40
  considered a high point and I thought they were visually very
• 7:43
  inventive. When I was reading The Autonomy
• 7:46
  bug in The Glorious Dead, I was like, this has given me massive
• 7:49
  iron lesion vibes here. Yeah, but I mean the Iron
• 7:53
  Lesion's a funny one because it it it starts off and it doesn't
• 7:56
  really feel very much like Doctor Who, I don't think.
• 7:58
  I don't think they quite know what to do with the character.
• 8:00
  They've got what is, to all intents and purposes, a Marvel
• 8:03
  comic with this eccentric kind of wandering in out of the odd
• 8:07
  frame. But where it really lands for me
• 8:09
  is the the Star Beast. And suddenly you've got
• 8:13
  something that is authentically Doctor Who in that it's it's a
• 8:16
  story that only kind of could be told in the Doctor Who universe.
• 8:20
  And it sort of touches the the humdrum, the ordinary in in a
• 8:25
  way that obviously kind of made great television a few weeks
• 8:28
  ago. So I I I think that it took a
• 8:31
  while before the Doctor Who strip worked out what to do with
• 8:34
  Doctor Who. That's not to say that you know
• 8:36
  the Iron Lesion isn't gorgeous to look at.
• 8:39
  Well then I I sort of skipped forward into some of the
• 8:41
  Stockbridge stuff with the 5th Doctor, which I thought was very
• 8:44
  interesting. And then I look it's.
• 8:47
  Interesting. It's not consistent, though.
• 8:48
  If we're talking about consistency, you know the tides
• 8:50
  of no that. Soldier that he was going about.
• 8:52
  What was that? Absolutely.
• 8:53
  Bonkers. And you've you've you've got
• 8:55
  that weird lunar Lagoon episode, which I would say is also kind
• 9:01
  of problematic and the art takes a real dive at that point.
• 9:05
  I I'm aware that that was written in a great hurry, but
• 9:09
  it's not a high point of the of the doctoring strip.
• 9:12
  And I think the art takes a massive hike up for the 6th
• 9:16
  Doctor. Absolutely.
• 9:17
  And that's that's a high point. Isn't it?
• 9:19
  It's bafflingly, unsettlingly, magically brilliant.
• 9:23
  It's just brilliant that that strip.
• 9:26
  But I think, do you think would you say that the 8th Doctor
• 9:29
  strips, that's considered the highest point of the?
• 9:35
  I'm not. I think it depends who you ask.
• 9:38
  And to some extent, and this is true of, of course, all of
• 9:42
  Doctor Who. It depends how people
• 9:44
  experienced it. For some people that those 5th
• 9:46
  Doctor strips are, you know, certainly the tide of time is
• 9:49
  considered the zenith, but I do wonder if you had to be there at
• 9:54
  the time. I I find that one kind of again,
• 9:57
  it's ground breaking and it's visually it's it's spooky and
• 10:01
  strange and surreal and I like it, but I don't love it in the
• 10:06
  way that I love these ones. On the other hand, I guess you
• 10:11
  could say that those strips, and I'm very much the 6th Doctor
• 10:15
  ones, paved the way for what what came with the 8th Doctor
• 10:18
  strips. And this was like the first
• 10:20
  opportunity really, wasn't it, to take a Doctor that was given
• 10:24
  one story on television. So it was effectively new Doctor
• 10:27
  Who. You can go anywhere, you can do
• 10:29
  anything. You can have Paul McGann
• 10:31
  regenerate into Nicholas Briggs, because why not for a couple of
• 10:35
  issues. Well and people thought they
• 10:38
  had. People absolutely thought that
• 10:39
  they'd gotten they thought they'd had enough of the eight
• 10:43
  block. They they they could do that.
• 10:46
  They have the absolute nerved got us to to suggest to readers
• 10:50
  of Doctor Who Magazine that the 8th Doctor wasn't coming back.
• 10:53
  No one wanted to to to make any more television, so why not make
• 10:56
  their own comic strip Doctor up Pete, I had a friend who was an
• 10:59
  avid reader at the time and he loved the 9th Doctor.
• 11:03
  He was a big fan. He's like, you know, this is,
• 11:04
  this is going to run and run this 9th Doctor.
• 11:07
  Oh, no. He must have had a terrible
• 11:09
  it's. Been a great disappointment.
• 11:11
  Yeah, yeah. Well, OK, let's.
• 11:14
  So we can text that a little bit.
• 11:15
  Let's talk about your favorite writer or artist or writer and
• 11:23
  artist, because it's definitely, you know, two jobs at Dovetail
• 11:29
  in the strip, isn't it? Yeah, so I was.
• 11:32
  I wanted to give a more interesting answer than the one
• 11:34
  I'm going to give, but. Go on, I'll try and trump you.
• 11:38
  Know my I think my favorite writer is Scott Gray.
• 11:40
  God. Damn it, that was my choice.
• 11:43
  Who we're going to be discussing a great deal originally started
• 11:47
  writing as Warwick Gray in 1995, was I think his first comic.
• 11:50
  So he he, he delivered quite a a few things to Doctor Who before
• 11:54
  kind of hitting his stride as as the main writer and then
• 11:57
  remained the main writer of the strip foot until the end of the
• 12:02
  8th Doctor's run but also beyond.
• 12:03
  He did, I think the main body of the 9th Doctor strips and has
• 12:08
  continued to write Doctor Who comics.
• 12:10
  Not all for Doctor Who Magazine, but he's been very much
• 12:13
  involved. He's sort of become a bit of an
• 12:15
  elder statesman curator of Doctor Who in comic form and
• 12:19
  rightly so. I think his his work is
• 12:22
  astonishing. I I sort of know him
• 12:25
  peripherally and he's a very humble and charming man as well,
• 12:29
  you know, considering what you know the writing that he
• 12:32
  produces, was he involved with the, I think he did a the bulk
• 12:37
  of the sort of destry like storyline, didn't he?
• 12:40
  Absolutely. And then later on the magenta
• 12:43
  price in the Thames Doctor Rum. Yes.
• 12:46
  Because I'd say that's the other rum that a lot of people look on
• 12:50
  very fondly because, again, it's taking, you know, a period of
• 12:53
  time. OK, so that's a run that I'm
• 12:55
  less familiar with because by then I didn't have a student
• 12:58
  loan. I had a very, very tiny income
• 13:01
  and so I couldn't afford to keep up with them.
• 13:03
  Have you read those since? I haven't, no.
• 13:05
  Oh good grief. I might have to make a gift of
• 13:07
  them for you because they are. I'd say no.
• 13:10
  Maybe not as strong, but almost on par with with what happens
• 13:13
  here. Yeah, I was going to say say oh
• 13:16
  Grey as well, and it's only because like the diverse amount
• 13:20
  of stories that he tells. So this run, it starts off with
• 13:25
  Alan Barnes writing, but the end game strips are mostly by Alan
• 13:29
  Barnes. Scott Gray comes in towards the
• 13:32
  end of that collection, but having already written Ground
• 13:36
  Zero and it just feels as though suddenly you've got someone with
• 13:40
  the vision. I don't know whether he just
• 13:42
  kind of went in and thought, well, I'm going to keep this job
• 13:44
  for as long as I can, so I need to start thinking in on a on a
• 13:48
  scale that is, that is really long term.
• 13:52
  Because although he's really good at individual stories, one
• 13:54
  of the reasons why The Glorious Dead is such a good collection
• 13:56
  is that it absolutely does feel like a single utterance, a
• 14:00
  single idea, a single vision for the comic in all its manifold
• 14:06
  ways. I'm sure you read the the behind
• 14:10
  the scenes bit at the back of the graphic novel in the
• 14:12
  Glorious Dead. It's it's very telling.
• 14:15
  And he's, he's told that we want you to take over, right.
• 14:17
  The scripts. Alan's had enough now, you know,
• 14:20
  how long do you think you could do it for?
• 14:23
  And he's like, you're literally going to have to prise it out of
• 14:25
  my fingers. I'm not sure they have yet, you
• 14:28
  know. No, no, they haven't really.
• 14:29
  No, he's he's still got his his grip on it.
• 14:32
  And the other thing, well, the other thing they insisted on as
• 14:34
  well, was that we want standalone stories.
• 14:36
  Standalone stories and and I and I love that it's and you can
• 14:40
  sort of see in in context they just done end game.
• 14:44
  Those stories kind of round off I looked up some dates so it the
• 14:51
  the collection of stories that now make up the Ground Zero
• 14:54
  collection which ends with Ground Zero.
• 14:56
  This kind of apocalyptic end to the 7th Doctor's strip begins
• 15:01
  with Curse of the Scarab in Doctor Who Magazine, 228 July
• 15:07
  1995. So if you see the kind of the
• 15:12
  final chapter Wormwood as the end of that cycle, that's
• 15:15
  October 1998. That's like 3 1/2 years of of
• 15:20
  continuous ideas. Not not applied necessarily in
• 15:26
  as continuous away as the glorious dead does, but
• 15:30
  certainly a cycle that that's that runs for 3 1/2 years and
• 15:34
  you can sort of see how you know a monthly magazine for ATV
• 15:38
  program no longer exists. That may not have the most
• 15:41
  consistent readership. Maybe, I don't know.
• 15:43
  But the thinking is actually people are going to get really
• 15:45
  annoyed if they have to keep buying this magazine every time.
• 15:47
  You know, for 3 1/2 years to get the payoff for for every comic
• 15:51
  strip. Well, I think there was a
• 15:53
  struggle and we'll certainly get there later on in this episode
• 15:55
  that when it was mooted, you know, we're going to do 10, 10
• 16:00
  chapters. You know, we're going to do this
• 16:01
  over 10 issues. And one person went, no way.
• 16:05
  Another person went, yeah, we're going to do it.
• 16:06
  Let's go. I mean that that's a, that's
• 16:10
  nearly a year, isn't it? In the same story.
• 16:13
  And then, but there's not even 10 chapters.
• 16:14
  It's basically turning the entire run into one massive
• 16:19
  chapter, isn't it? It's, yeah, phenomenal.
• 16:22
  OK, So what about what about artists then?
• 16:26
  Oh, I'm going to pip you to the post and have Adrian Salmon.
• 16:28
  Oh God. Damn it.
• 16:32
  Go on. Why Adrian Salmon?
• 16:35
  I just think his stuff is so incredibly beautiful to look at
• 16:40
  and so unique. You can tell an Adrian Salmon
• 16:45
  drawing from a mile off. And he also goes back a long
• 16:48
  way. I remember the the Cyberman.
• 16:51
  What do you remember? The one page Once they were in
• 16:53
  Doctor Magazine in the. I want.
• 16:56
  To say early to mid 90s, it was, it was a long time ago.
• 17:00
  I didn't understand the comics at all.
• 17:04
  There was a single page. It was in colour at the back.
• 17:06
  At the back, yeah, it was like it starts off in black and white
• 17:10
  and then it went into colour and it was called the Cybermen, but
• 17:13
  it had solariums in it as well. It was.
• 17:16
  And it was weird and it was a foot.
• 17:18
  It had kind of this strange religious aspect, and some of it
• 17:23
  was just completely baffling. But even when it wasn't
• 17:26
  baffling, it was it felt a bit inconsequential.
• 17:29
  And I I must go back and kind of read the whole lot and see
• 17:31
  whether it actually as a whole it's greater than the sum of its
• 17:34
  parts. But I remember as a teenager
• 17:37
  looking at these pictures and there was a picture of a low
• 17:41
  angle picture of the Cyberman which I I remember tracing out
• 17:45
  onto a piece of a full paper in in in and trying to imitate
• 17:48
  these these these shapes, these blocks made of.
• 17:52
  Basically it's like he carves pictures out of shadow.
• 17:55
  It's almost like he started with a black page and and and put in
• 17:58
  the the the white bits and it's and it's so uniquely stylized
• 18:08
  but as a as a storytelling device as well.
• 18:11
  Every frame is so full of energy and movement, he's able to
• 18:17
  communicate vast amount just through the image.
• 18:21
  He uses, I think he uses silhouettes beautifully because
• 18:25
  he is using a lot of black. And what what a film director
• 18:29
  would see is different, different then types and camera
• 18:33
  angles and you know wide shots. You know he'll he'll cut from a
• 18:36
  a extreme close up. He's really good at these facial
• 18:40
  you know eyes. He'll zone in on part of a
• 18:43
  character's face and then he'll give you kind of the the, the,
• 18:47
  the long distance version, and in those two different versions
• 18:50
  of the same scene fill in a whole lot of story at the same
• 18:54
  time. It's like I kind of call his
• 18:56
  artwork sort of knife edge artwork because it's so spiky.
• 19:00
  Everything's, yeah, sort of a line.
• 19:02
  There's not. It feels like there's no round
• 19:04
  edges at all. And it wouldn't think it would
• 19:05
  work. Would you?
• 19:07
  It does. How can you draw Paul Mcgann's
• 19:09
  wig? You know, without using any
• 19:11
  curves. And yet he he makes it look.
• 19:14
  He captures the character I. Almost feel like he's he's
• 19:17
  actually like cut out white card and yeah and that's how he's.
• 19:21
  I know that's not the case, but it's it's insanely good, isn't
• 19:24
  it? I I first came into contact with
• 19:27
  him via the Bernie Summerfield covers that he did.
• 19:31
  Gorgeous covers. Beautiful.
• 19:32
  And then I started seeing his artwork in Doctor Who Magazine
• 19:37
  in the Time Team he was he was doing.
• 19:40
  Yeah, he would do it. He would do a little 11 off
• 19:41
  picture for those, wouldn't he? And then finally, you know the
• 19:44
  Renaissance. I finally reached his strips and
• 19:47
  yeah, and they just put and we'll talk about it later on in
• 19:50
  Company of Thieves. The other one that he he crops
• 19:53
  up in one of the Doctor Who yearbooks.
• 19:55
  I think it might be 95. There's a sequel to Junkyard
• 19:58
  Demon and I guess kind of, but he was doing the Cybermen strip
• 20:02
  then, so Cybermen were the thing that he was doing.
• 20:06
  So he was the obvious choice for again, AA1 off.
• 20:09
  Really stylized, but beautiful to look at.
• 20:11
  My choices are exactly the same as yours, but I am going to
• 20:15
  throw two names in just to the side, and that's Alan Barnes,
• 20:19
  who I think is a terrific comics ideas man.
• 20:23
  He's just got brilliant ideas that translate really well on
• 20:27
  the page, and he brought that to Big Finish when he started
• 20:30
  writing scripts for those as well.
• 20:31
  I've heard a lot of people sort of criticize his
• 20:34
  characterization, his dialogue occasionally, but nobody like
• 20:37
  you can't fault his imagination. No he and he totally understands
• 20:42
  how to make it work. And as I said that the end game
• 20:45
  sequence which is a really strong another really strong
• 20:48
  sequence of of stories understands the format,
• 20:52
  understands they they'd started playing with the full page
• 20:55
  reveal when to use a single. But like is it 7 pages per
• 21:00
  episode. It's not very many pages.
• 21:02
  You've you've not got many pages to work with to tell what was by
• 21:06
  then quite an ambitious amount of story and yet they will
• 21:09
  sometimes use their seventh page as a single image.
• 21:14
  Just, you know, I think Alan Barnes really understood when a
• 21:17
  single image was more powerful than packing in words and
• 21:21
  packing in frames. But there's so many vivid single
• 21:24
  page images you could do, like a top ten list of the best
• 21:27
  cliffhangers in the comic strips.
• 21:29
  Half of them would be from this graphic novel we're going to
• 21:31
  talk about today. Half of them would, but I'd also
• 21:33
  from end game, there's one of the of the Doctor being
• 21:35
  exterminated and they just they they it's a beautiful picture as
• 21:39
  well, like they just go, yeah, we're exterminating the Doctor.
• 21:43
  That's worth a full frame. Indeed it is.
• 21:46
  Or the doctor's going to wake up in bed and naked next to Grace
• 21:48
  Holloway. That's definitely worth a full.
• 21:50
  Page she is worth A and and they do it at the skewed anglers.
• 21:53
  Again like it's it's going to be a single page so let's make sure
• 21:56
  it's a really good image. They don't waste it at all.
• 21:59
  It's. All, I think Paul Mcgahn has
• 22:00
  ever been that buff, James, you know, But it looks astonishing
• 22:03
  in that comedy strip. And the other artists.
• 22:08
  I mean, there's so many great artists like Roger Landridge,
• 22:11
  obviously. Great stuff.
• 22:13
  And, well, we'll talk about him. We will later, but I also wanted
• 22:17
  to throw in. I can never say his name right
• 22:19
  Martin is it Garrity, who wrote a ton of script.
• 22:24
  He drew a ton of comics during this time, and I do.
• 22:29
  I sometimes I feel like he's a little bit overlooked.
• 22:31
  Do. You think I, I mean I I if if he
• 22:33
  is overlooked, let's correct that now Garrity is sort of the
• 22:36
  house artist for this period for for, for all of them again
• 22:40
  period. And I think his stuff is
• 22:44
  endlessly imaginative. Not just the the the the visuals
• 22:47
  which he's called on to to create one world after another.
• 22:52
  These these trips are rarely earthbound and even when they
• 22:55
  are he he's the one who kind of creates the the the Camden image
• 23:00
  from the floods. You know all of that stuff and
• 23:02
  you know beautiful images of. London image of the rain coming
• 23:05
  down and everyone on their knees like sobbing, to be turned into
• 23:09
  Simon. That image never left me.
• 23:12
  There's a strip where he's got a load of prehistoric dinosaurs
• 23:18
  all smooshed together on a bridge somewhere with unit
• 23:20
  helicopters flying over like man.
• 23:23
  His imagery is vivid. But then he's asked to create
• 23:26
  whole new worlds and he's it's like he's been told you can do
• 23:29
  whatever you like and and he keeps coming up with new
• 23:32
  visuals, new ways to draw a spaceship, new ways to draw a
• 23:35
  planet. Weird enough, I'll say
• 23:38
  overlooked in a sort of Dudley Simpson way that he does so much
• 23:42
  that when new people come in, a lot of people talk about those
• 23:45
  people because it's a bit different from the norm.
• 23:48
  I think that's right. And and and in in in the latter
• 23:52
  Paul McGann strips he is complemented by the likes of I
• 23:55
  mean John Ross comes in and does a slightly more angular take on
• 23:58
  the Doctor and I think his stuff is great and they they they
• 24:01
  divvy up the stories really well.
• 24:03
  But when Gerrity comes back you just sort of feel like you're in
• 24:06
  a written it sounds like Danny the fake praise to say a safe
• 24:10
  pair of hands but but I mean that in the most positive sense
• 24:13
  you you feel like ah yeah we're back in these hands.
• 24:16
  We know where we are with this artist and we know that we're in
• 24:18
  for a really thrilling ride. Does Gerrity draw the frame when
• 24:22
  Destry's uncle turns round and slashes her in the face?
• 24:26
  Is that Gerrity unforgettable? Absolutely.
• 24:31
  I've, I said with such confidence.
• 24:33
  That's him. I really hope it is.
• 24:36
  It's John Ross, you know. No, I don't.
• 24:38
  Know people at home flipping, flicking through their copies.
• 24:40
  Then don't worry, we're talking about.
• 24:42
  They'll let us know if they will.
• 24:52
  Well, look, let's skip on to the glorious dead then.
• 24:56
  Why this one over all the others?
• 25:01
  OK, two reasons. First of all, end game back
• 25:05
  collection finishes off what started in Ground Zero, which is
• 25:09
  huge and epic and really exciting and goes in some
• 25:14
  unexpected directions. But I feel like by finishing off
• 25:20
  something that was set up with the 7th Doctor, it gains a new
• 25:24
  kind of freedom. And it's free not just to kind
• 25:27
  of explore this situation. That's that's been set up as a
• 25:31
  long running and you know, story arc.
• 25:33
  It's free to explore the characters a little bit more and
• 25:38
  to be honest you could pick any of the their their four volumes
• 25:42
  of eight Doctor comic strips and I could talk happily about any
• 25:46
  of them. For my money this one is the
• 25:49
  strongest visually because what happens next is it goes into
• 25:53
  colour and it's beautifully coloured and I think it's a very
• 25:59
  savvy move to put the comic strip into color and they've
• 26:02
  never looked back. And that's absolutely right for
• 26:04
  the magazine. It makes it more expensive,
• 26:06
  makes a little more glossy. But the use of black and white
• 26:09
  in this I think is it's a little bit like black and white film.
• 26:12
  There's something you can do with black and white graphic art
• 26:15
  that you cannot do with color. And I feel like the level of
• 26:17
  detail in this, it just sort of peaks in the way that it can use
• 26:22
  line, the way that it can use kind of graphic tricks that you
• 26:24
  don't need to if you've got color.
• 26:26
  So in terms of the ones that I kind of just find myself
• 26:31
  studying for the sake of the art and drawn into these, these
• 26:35
  images that seem full of endless detail, this is the collection
• 26:40
  that does it for me. I'm not one that can talk very
• 26:45
  expressively about artistic appreciation, but I'm going to
• 26:50
  give it a go. When it went into colour, I find
• 26:53
  sort of my eyes relaxed a bit into colour and I sort of said
• 26:57
  but where when it was in black and white, I'm like picking out
• 27:01
  striking details all the time because everything's so bold.
• 27:05
  The images just seem more striking.
• 27:08
  It's it's it's feels like a it's almost a competition between the
• 27:12
  artists to see who can cram in the most detail and and and the
• 27:16
  skill of course is in doing it and not making it look
• 27:18
  overcrowded or busy which they they they succeed in.
• 27:21
  But there are so many pages of this this book where you can
• 27:24
  just spend you can go in with a magnifying glass and you can
• 27:27
  find little Easter eggs. You can find details that that
• 27:30
  lend a new light to the the story, to the character, to the
• 27:34
  frame it it, they're so well thought out and I guess the
• 27:39
  minute you introduce colour you actually have to have bigger
• 27:41
  blocks, you have to have spaces that can be coloured in.
• 27:44
  You can't do that. You can't be that self
• 27:45
  indulgent. That's again that sounds like a
• 27:47
  negative, but I mean maybe self indulgent is the wrong phrase
• 27:50
  but but but I feel like it's all in service of the story, but
• 27:54
  it's in service of the world building as well.
• 27:57
  I think was the Children of the Revolution.
• 27:58
  Was that the first colour strip? The Dalek one?
• 28:01
  I think he was the first one. Or was it a A A Phidias?
• 28:08
  Yeah, possibly yes. I I think I think there's one
• 28:12
  before. I think there's a A Garrity
• 28:15
  drawn 1 before Sullivan comes back to the The children of the
• 28:17
  Revolution. I mean, I selected that.
• 28:19
  I think that was the next little big epic after the Glorious
• 28:23
  Dead. And do you know, apart from a
• 28:25
  couple of images like the dialects underwater, I can't
• 28:27
  remember much about that script that that's strip.
• 28:30
  But this one, the Glorious Dead, as I was going through it, my
• 28:33
  memories were just surfacing. I had all of it locked in my
• 28:36
  head. The the page where you know it's
• 28:39
  all the universe is together. All the Doctor's heads.
• 28:42
  All of that was was still in. Well, look, let's let's start
• 28:46
  with the first story. Sure.
• 28:47
  Otherwise you'll never go to bed tonight.
• 28:50
  The Fallen. It's a sequel to the TV movie.
• 28:55
  This is another reason why I think this collection works so
• 28:58
  well and it's sort it's half unintentional.
• 29:01
  The form is absolutely set up as as the sequel to the TV movie,
• 29:05
  it's resolving unfinished business, and the unfinished
• 29:07
  business it's resolving, perhaps surprisingly, is Grace Holloway
• 29:12
  I. Thought they were rights issues.
• 29:15
  Were there rights? Issues I I believe so.
• 29:18
  I believe DWM was not aware that there were rights issues and
• 29:21
  they just did it anyway. I did not know that.
• 29:25
  Well thank God they did because because what what what he does
• 29:28
  is he picks up on, I mean the TV movie, whatever you make of it,
• 29:35
  it's it's unsatisfying because it feels unfinished.
• 29:38
  It feels like it's setting things up and it it's never
• 29:40
  given the chance to deliver. And in a way I feel like, you
• 29:44
  know, comparing this to the to the audios and to the to the
• 29:47
  books, this approach is the the boldest and perhaps the bravest.
• 29:51
  The books, you know, in various points just wipe his memory and
• 29:55
  decide to kind of, you know, it's a clean slate that the 8th
• 29:59
  Doctor is almost just kind of a an image, a frock coat and a wig
• 30:03
  rather than a character that can be built on.
• 30:05
  And the audio certainly start with a a clean slate.
• 30:08
  You know, that's it. It's Alan Barn setting out.
• 30:12
  AI think probably for the audio medium wisely going, let's just
• 30:14
  kind of start fresh. But I think to go back to the TV
• 30:18
  movie and say, look, there is unfinished business here, it's
• 30:20
  really intelligent And to say that Grace Holloway is one of
• 30:23
  them, that this man came into her life in a single night
• 30:26
  completely changed. It is a really intelligent
• 30:29
  reading of a script that is sort of hinting that all the way
• 30:32
  through. It's the it's a brilliant way to
• 30:34
  pick up on what happens next. And what happens next is what
• 30:38
  does Grace do? She takes the goo that was on
• 30:42
  her hand from the TV movie, starts experimenting on it, and
• 30:46
  attempts to turn humanity. She wants to give them the
• 30:50
  ability to regenerate. I believe that's what she did.
• 30:53
  Yeah, it is what she did. The reason she did it is she
• 30:56
  thinks that the Doctor is dropping hints all the way
• 30:59
  through the TV movie that that's what she ought to do.
• 31:02
  He's constantly talking about holding back death.
• 31:04
  Let's constantly talk about her destiny.
• 31:08
  He says don't worry, Grace, you'll do great things, doesn't
• 31:12
  he? And she she quotes that line in
• 31:13
  this saying that she went over and over the words that he said
• 31:17
  and assumed that that she was suddenly going to be a very
• 31:21
  important historical figure. The damage he did during that
• 31:25
  one night, I think, yes. Yeah, And then the next great
• 31:29
  thing, the next really intelligent thing that this
• 31:31
  strip does, is it. It then turns that back on the
• 31:34
  Doctor and it uses it as a way of developing his character.
• 31:38
  So his he's had this one night fling with this character who
• 31:43
  he's kissed controversially. Not quite sure why it was so
• 31:46
  controversial, but it was at the time.
• 31:49
  And but for him it was just a, you know, it was just a a flash
• 31:53
  in the pan thing. It was his, his his first night
• 31:55
  in in this new regeneration and he's gone off and he's had had
• 31:58
  his life. So he's forced to confront the
• 32:00
  consequences of what happened that night and he doesn't deal
• 32:04
  with it terribly well. And I think that's really
• 32:06
  brilliant because suddenly he's not this infallible Doctor Who.
• 32:09
  We've sort of kind of Paul McGann strides out of the TARDIS
• 32:13
  in end game looking God like and looking at, you know incredible
• 32:17
  and behaves in a way that is is sort of the McCoy Doctor in a
• 32:20
  way he. Got A1 pager, didn't he?
• 32:22
  He did, he did. And it's brilliant and it's
• 32:24
  wonderful and it's great to establish a Doctor with that
• 32:26
  power. Seeing him here responding in a
• 32:29
  very human way to an accusation is really powerful because it's
• 32:34
  actually sets him up as a character who's got stuff to
• 32:36
  lose and a character who can fail.
• 32:39
  And that's something that continues to deliver, really, to
• 32:42
  the end of the the 8th Doctor strips.
• 32:45
  I love the fact that once all the sort of bickering is over
• 32:47
  and done with, all the accusations are done, you know,
• 32:51
  I think they love each other like they kiss again.
• 32:53
  At the end of this they have. Another kiss and later on it's
• 32:55
  Grace who he wakes up in bed next to his, so she obviously
• 32:59
  occupies this. I love.
• 33:00
  I love also the the The third character in this equation, of
• 33:04
  course, is Izzy. The.
• 33:06
  Presence of Grace really kind of throws into sharp relief her
• 33:09
  relationship with the Doctor and how different she is and
• 33:11
  actually how good she is for him.
• 33:14
  I remember in Gloria said later on when the Doctor tells Grace
• 33:20
  that she is a simulation, although she's not real, he
• 33:24
  looks crestfallen. He sort of cups her face as
• 33:27
  she's. I don't know.
• 33:27
  He it's like bidding her a final farewell.
• 33:30
  I. Think there's something there,
• 33:33
  whether people would like it or not.
• 33:35
  Well, I I I like it. I like it better than the kiss
• 33:39
  being a kind of one night the same thing actually, I I prefer
• 33:44
  to think that there was something genuine in that
• 33:46
  relationship and I like that they give him another kiss with
• 33:49
  her at the end of this. It feels a little bit
• 33:52
  provocative. It feels like let's just shove
• 33:53
  this in as well to upset the ones who were upset the first
• 33:56
  time round and you know, have it carved in in graphic.
• 34:00
  Form forever, but wait till they've got Izzy kissing Faye.
• 34:05
  Oh, surely no one's going to be upset by that.
• 34:07
  Come on. Rusty dating business is
• 34:10
  absolutely delighting. Isn't he?
• 34:12
  He absolutely is. Yeah.
• 34:13
  Yeah. I, I, I I just think this makes
• 34:16
  this in, in a really simple way. It makes this relationship feel
• 34:20
  more substantial and it makes everything in the TV movie feel
• 34:24
  more substantial. And then, as Scott Gray writes
• 34:28
  in the notes, he realised that the the final kind of part of
• 34:31
  the puzzle had to be the master. Yeah.
• 34:34
  Who? He snuck into this story without
• 34:37
  even telling anyone, and it's only in the final page that you
• 34:40
  realise that he's been there all along.
• 34:42
  We want stand alone stories, you know, no links.
• 34:46
  Scott Gross. Now we're not going to do that.
• 34:48
  What he said actually he was being sneaky at this point.
• 34:50
  I think by the time we get to the glorious end, they must
• 34:53
  have. There's a point where they must
• 34:54
  have worked it out, yeah. But two other things that really
• 34:57
  struck me about this script I love, love that they do.
• 35:00
  Effectively the BLOB with the artwork, you've got this great
• 35:04
  sort of B movie creature that's sloshing about the place and the
• 35:08
  is. It is this Martin Garris.
• 35:09
  He goes to town with the artwork.
• 35:11
  He does, he does some wonderful scenes.
• 35:13
  But also going back to Izzy, there's a great sequence where
• 35:18
  she thinks she's going to drown and she's seeing the faces of
• 35:23
  everybody. Max, her, her.
• 35:26
  Are they her step parents, like their adoptive?
• 35:28
  Parents. They are her.
• 35:29
  Her adoptive parents, yeah. And I think she has a brilliant
• 35:32
  line where she goes, I should have called you Mum and Dad.
• 35:35
  Like there was me worrying. I couldn't have any kind of
• 35:37
  emotional connection with these people in a comic strip.
• 35:42
  Yeah, that was a great sequence, I thought.
• 35:44
  It really great and it's setting her up as a as a as a character
• 35:48
  with immense depth. It's also the first hint, but
• 35:52
  she might have been in love with her, her best friend that you
• 35:55
  know, I never told you how I felt in a single frame.
• 35:59
  We suddenly just get a a richness to that character
• 36:02
  that's that is going to be paid off months later.
• 36:05
  And there's. A and again.
• 36:06
  There's a great moment as well where the Doctor thinks she's
• 36:09
  dead as well, and he and he's properly angry about.
• 36:12
  In fact, they play that card a couple of times in this gravy
• 36:15
  novel. I'll never forgive them so much.
• 36:17
  So it's so effective in the glorious dead that Rusty Davis
• 36:20
  apparently wrote in a letter saying What the hell have you
• 36:24
  done to Izzy? That's another full page one,
• 36:28
  isn't it's not. It's about you.
• 36:29
  But you see her? Her miniaturized corpse, Yeah.
• 36:32
  He was definitely paying attention to this trip, wasn't
• 36:34
  he? Actually, when I was reading
• 36:35
  this, I was like, she is a precursor to Rose.
• 36:39
  Absolutely. I don't think we've done a
• 36:41
  character with this much depth in the classic series before
• 36:44
  this. Yeah, I dare I say that.
• 36:48
  I think she's better than Rose. She's more likable.
• 36:51
  She's more likable. But also I she's maybe less
• 36:55
  commercial, she's she's less kind of Saturday family show.
• 36:58
  But all the Star Trek references, the fact that she's
• 37:01
  a a sci-fi nerd, the fact that he can go round time and space
• 37:06
  with someone dropping all these sci-fi references that he
• 37:09
  doesn't get. And she has to explain the plots
• 37:11
  of kind of basic sci-fi films to to he hasn't seen 2001.
• 37:16
  You know, I love that. Well, I think, you know, we're
• 37:19
  all genre fans, aren't we? So we're sort of grabbing hold
• 37:22
  of those references. I also love as well as she does
• 37:24
  appear to be this sort of inoffensive kid.
• 37:27
  And yet there are several moments in this where she steps
• 37:31
  up. You know, like I will.
• 37:33
  I'm sort of jumping ahead quite a lot, but there's the bit with
• 37:35
  the memory crystals later on. And I was like, she is powerful
• 37:40
  here. Yeah, we're left in no doubt
• 37:42
  that she she she can look after herself and that she's.
• 37:47
  But she's it's the two things. It's the Sarah Jane thing.
• 37:50
  She's scared, but she's brave. The reason we like her is
• 37:54
  because she stands up for other people and for the situation and
• 37:58
  does what's right, even though she's clearly terrified by it.
• 38:01
  I think, I think that's established in the fallen, but
• 38:04
  then that it's like beginning to crack open a a precious jewel
• 38:09
  that you're going to just see more and more of us as it goes
• 38:11
  on. And what about that last page
• 38:14
  with the shrunken man? I mean, I wasn't reading the the
• 38:19
  comic at this point because I haven't quite got the student
• 38:22
  loan, but that must have been a punch the moment, surely?
• 38:26
  I've noticed where they do the ending of a strip on the second
• 38:31
  page, and where they do the ending of a strip where you turn
• 38:34
  the page and it's usually when you turn the page it's the full
• 38:38
  page, so it's a it's a big moment.
• 38:41
  Is this is this collection? I mean, how deliberate is that?
• 38:44
  I I I do wonder when I read this, how it was printed in
• 38:47
  Doctor Who Magazine and how much control they had over it then.
• 38:50
  I. Layout is is similar.
• 38:52
  Or I'm not sure. I asked Johnny Morris about this
• 38:55
  the other day because I interviewed him for Hamster and
• 38:58
  he was talking about the year and a half he did on the Strip,
• 39:01
  and he basically said that they insisted at several points in
• 39:05
  his stories there will be a turn, the page four page.
• 39:09
  And I noticed in the graphic novel there are several moments
• 39:12
  between strips where there's a blank page single.
• 39:15
  Single pages, don't they? That's that's right.
• 39:17
  To to almost make sure that in the right places you're turning
• 39:21
  pages onto a onto a cliffhanger. OK, well how about Unnatural
• 39:26
  born? Killers So a complete change of
• 39:30
  style in terms of content and delivery.
• 39:33
  It's it's our first Adrian salmon.
• 39:39
  Is it our only Adrian salmon in this?
• 39:40
  No, you've got the three parts of.
• 39:43
  Course you have. Yeah, of course you have.
• 39:46
  So this is a sequel to one of those kind of odd little four
• 39:51
  page strips that used to be at the back of Doctor Who Weekly
• 39:56
  and it revisits A Cyberman with emotions called Croton.
• 40:01
  Little bit confusing for fans of Croton and then actually the the
• 40:06
  collection has. Has that strip at the back.
• 40:09
  It's called throwback and it's well worth a read as well.
• 40:12
  Beautiful artwork. And it ends on this poignant
• 40:16
  image of Croton, the side man just sort of sitting in the
• 40:19
  darkness of space waiting to be just you know drained of energy
• 40:23
  waiting for someone to discover him And it just the the lighting
• 40:27
  in the picture picks out the teardrop at the bottom of his
• 40:31
  eye. It's it's a beautiful poignant
• 40:34
  and he's and he's portrayed as this innocent just questioning
• 40:39
  what our emotions. It's a maybe a bit of a cliche
• 40:42
  but it's done so well. It's it's a Cyberman who dares
• 40:46
  to kind of say I don't understand emotions what what is
• 40:49
  it that these humans have got? And through that you start to
• 40:51
  glimpse the man he might have been before he became a
• 40:53
  Cyberman. This picks him up and slightly
• 40:57
  reinterprets the character as a bit of a wisecracking, tough
• 41:01
  talking fighter character. He's given a, you know, a stick
• 41:06
  and in this he takes on an entire team of Sontarans and
• 41:10
  it's it's just basically an excuse for Adrian Salmon to draw
• 41:14
  some really, really good pictures.
• 41:18
  Oh, he wrote the story here as well.
• 41:19
  He. Also wrote the story well, so he
• 41:21
  says in the notes that he had lost confidence in his own
• 41:24
  ability, which I find astonishing, But this was his.
• 41:27
  His way of getting his mojo back was to draw a side man fighting
• 41:31
  Sontarans. And boy, oh boy, does he get his
• 41:35
  mojo back. I loved it.
• 41:36
  There, there. All of the the dialogue, I'll
• 41:39
  call it. It's short and snappy, isn't it?
• 41:41
  It's a couple of lines in the corner of the thing and it's
• 41:45
  basically the pictures that are telling the story.
• 41:47
  Yeah, he mentions it kind of being influenced by by tough a
• 41:51
  tough talking Marvel character about whom I know nothing but
• 41:54
  you can sort of see that there in terms of genre it's the it's
• 41:58
  the tough talking cop, you know with the with the internal
• 42:01
  monologue. I I thought this flew by the
• 42:04
  sort of, I always figured the one chapter story, you know,
• 42:09
  where it's just one, it's 8 pages or whatever it is.
• 42:12
  How on earth do you tell a story that quickly?
• 42:15
  I think you need an artist like Adrian Salmond to get you from
• 42:18
  beat to beat to beat very fast. I noticed every single frame of
• 42:22
  that strip was an action. You're always moving throughout.
• 42:26
  And you're right, there are so few words in it.
• 42:29
  Really it's it's such a visual piece of storytelling and I
• 42:33
  reckon you could maybe remove the text and it would still tell
• 42:36
  that story pretty well. Oh.
• 42:39
  That sounds like an experiment worth doing, you know.
• 42:42
  But that's that That can be skipped over very, very quickly.
• 42:46
  The next strip is the road to hell.
• 42:50
  Yeah, so this is where I came in, and it's set in 17th century
• 42:52
  Japan, which it really, again, the depth you're talking about,
• 42:56
  kind of how much depth can you get into a comic?
• 42:59
  Well, this seems really thoroughly researched and it
• 43:02
  comes out of a desire to explore, you know, 17th century
• 43:05
  Japan where they basically shut out all foreigners.
• 43:07
  And that's the landscape that the Doctor arrives into at the
• 43:10
  point where there are these alien beings observing humankind
• 43:17
  and and through that observation, enduring one person
• 43:22
  with the power of life and death and and and the power of
• 43:25
  regeneration. It reminded me of the aliens
• 43:29
  from Demons of the Punjab. Yeah, the the Jarians.
• 43:32
  Is that what they're called? Do you know, I can't remember.
• 43:35
  But actually that's a that's a pretty good comparison because
• 43:39
  again, it's got an authentic historical setting.
• 43:41
  A historical setting which arguably would have been just as
• 43:43
  interesting without the alien. For sure.
• 43:47
  But the story and explore very thoroughly and with really
• 43:50
  interesting characters that just happens to be the supernatural
• 43:53
  thing going on. It's all but which is almost
• 43:55
  kind of a device with I think we're less interested in in in
• 43:58
  these beings to be honest. I was sending you pictures of
• 44:02
  beautiful temples and, you know, glorious living spaces like the
• 44:08
  artist went to town on this one. Yeah, yeah.
• 44:13
  What I really liked about this one as well was the the modern
• 44:18
  day Japanese influences that Izzy brought to here, which
• 44:22
  makes it a really fun suddenly sort of anime characters are
• 44:25
  jumping into this. And Power Rangers.
• 44:29
  A Neo Osaka Robotrox war master. And you've got a Godzilla.
• 44:34
  I mean, and Godzilla. It's that's great fun, but also
• 44:38
  it gives, it gives you this chilling moment where one of the
• 44:43
  characters sees a vision of Hiroshima and realises that's
• 44:48
  the future of Japan, that's what it's leading towards.
• 44:51
  And that just fuels her hate for for the Westerners who have
• 44:54
  invaded her world. Really.
• 44:56
  Does go to show what skipping away from England can do for the
• 45:01
  show, doesn't it? What interesting stories you can
• 45:04
  tell? Well, what about Sato then?
• 45:07
  Sato. Sato.
• 45:08
  I'm not sure how you say it. Would probably say Sato.
• 45:13
  He's a character established at the start of this with a
• 45:20
  vendetta, and that's portrayed in a way that I think is just
• 45:26
  honourably real. There's no kind of shying away
• 45:29
  from the fact that he basically wants to murder his enemies and
• 45:32
  then kill himself. That's a really grown up idea.
• 45:35
  I mean, that's a that's a hell of a thing to be exploring in a
• 45:37
  in a comic strip, isn't it? I think in a graphic way as
• 45:40
  well. I do think we see a beheading in
• 45:42
  this script. Well, it's very cleverly drawn,
• 45:44
  isn't it? Because you can see the
• 45:46
  beheading or you can see someone's helmet's fallen off.
• 45:49
  It's. Not I read the back of that book
• 45:52
  all right. It was a beheading.
• 45:56
  It's the the violence throughout these.
• 45:59
  I mean, again, it's it's it's scarity, isn't it?
• 46:02
  He has a way of drawing some some really nasty stuff, but I
• 46:05
  think it's clever enough that if if you didn't know that it was
• 46:08
  nasty, you wouldn't see the nasty.
• 46:10
  But yeah, there's a beheading in it and and so he's a a
• 46:14
  complicated character because he's a violent character.
• 46:16
  He's an angry character and A and a sort of.
• 46:19
  He's a character who's been destroyed from the very
• 46:21
  beginning because his master's been killed, and yet he rescues
• 46:25
  Izzy heroically. So he's a heroic character, and
• 46:28
  she and she's fighting for him all the way through.
• 46:31
  She she saves his. Well, the Doctor saves his life
• 46:33
  because Izzy insists that he has to.
• 46:36
  They have this. Wonderful relationship with the
• 46:38
  pair, that. In fact, the moment where he
• 46:40
  takes the piss out of her name. I was like, oh love.
• 46:43
  It reminded me of your Carlos and Perry, actually, That sort
• 46:46
  of that sort of already married relationship where they're
• 46:50
  bickering with each other all the time.
• 46:52
  And the fact that everyone thinks she's a boy, I think.
• 46:55
  Is, you know, that's that's. Always going to be a funny joke.
• 46:58
  You've got a fabulous female antagonist in this as well.
• 47:02
  There's a couple in this graphic novel.
• 47:04
  You know, I I always see you, you know, who would have been in
• 47:08
  the mid 90s? Who would have played this
• 47:10
  character? Oh.
• 47:14
  In the mid 90s. Yeah, just some mad character
• 47:18
  actor. Eccentric.
• 47:20
  Yeah, I was going to say, well, in the mid 90s it would have
• 47:22
  been a white actress, wouldn't it?
• 47:23
  Who'd probably who'd probably moved on a bit now and would
• 47:25
  want to cast ethically appropriately.
• 47:29
  But but I wonder if we will ever see Sato ever again because he
• 47:35
  sort of departs his story with a very tragic ending that he is
• 47:37
  now immortal. I love that because again, it's
• 47:41
  it throws everything back to Paul Mcgann's doctor.
• 47:45
  We've seen him confront the consequence of his actions in
• 47:48
  The Fallen and now yet again, you know, even by doing
• 47:51
  something he thinks is the right thing to do, he's saving
• 47:53
  someone's life has consequences. He saves someone's life who
• 47:57
  wants the honour of being able to kill himself and he has to
• 48:00
  live with that. Anyone would think, you know,
• 48:03
  that somebody was guiding the Doctor to these destinations and
• 48:06
  putting him in these situations, wouldn't they?
• 48:09
  Would you think that or just coincidence?
• 48:12
  Well, I don't know. That's what the master says in
• 48:13
  The Glorious Dead, isn't it? He's literally responsible for
• 48:17
  every destination we go to in. This, yeah.
• 48:19
  And I wonder at what point, I mean at this point, at the point
• 48:22
  that this was written, Scott Great had no idea that had
• 48:26
  guided them there. So it's such a clever piece of
• 48:29
  of working out to make this part of a pattern.
• 48:33
  That must be so much fun as I write, right?
• 48:34
  I've done this, this, and this. How can I tie this all together
• 48:38
  so it looks like a deliberate plan?
• 48:41
  But it feels like a deliberate plan, partly because
• 48:43
  thematically, it's so consistent.
• 48:47
  He's into exploring the 8th Doctor's fallibility, and so
• 48:51
  this is another thing that that plays into that which is
• 48:54
  ultimately going to be the thing that the glorious day is all
• 48:56
  about. Look at the three stories we've
• 48:59
  had so far. We've had a contemporary story,
• 49:03
  what I said, like the movie star story, but a character tale.
• 49:07
  We've had that one shot with Croton against the Sontaras, and
• 49:10
  now we've got a historical witch.
• 49:15
  Has some very fun sort of genre leanings as well.
• 49:18
  Like it, but it doesn't feel all over the place.
• 49:21
  No, it feels of even even though we've had two artists so far, it
• 49:25
  feels all of the same series as it were.
• 49:29
  And if it was a series you'd be, I mean you'd think ripped.
• 49:32
  This is really on on for the strongest run of Doctor Whoever.
• 49:37
  But the sad, some of the sad things about the graphic novels
• 49:39
  is I do wish, I really wish this was on the screen.
• 49:43
  You know, this was this was the Doctor Who I wanted in the 90s.
• 49:48
  Could they have done this on the screen?
• 49:49
  How would this have looked on the?
• 49:51
  Screen Imagine them trying to realise the glorious that the
• 49:54
  floods come on. Yeah, yeah.
• 49:57
  I think they just make it such a virtue of of the visual medium.
• 50:00
  And I yeah, I get that television is a visual medium,
• 50:03
  but not in quite the same way. And this has got a limitless
• 50:07
  budget. Really it's limited only by the
• 50:08
  imagination of the artists and the writers and and it just
• 50:12
  seems to be that they've, they've got that imagination to
• 50:16
  to to paint these vast worlds. But they've also got the
• 50:21
  discipline to do it in a way that is, which you have to, if
• 50:23
  you're going to tell it in so few frames, in seven pages an
• 50:27
  episode, you have to be disciplined about it.
• 50:29
  You have to be really thematically focused, and all of
• 50:33
  these stories do that. I think I'm going to have to
• 50:37
  have try and get an artist to do an interview because how would
• 50:42
  they knock these out in a couple of months?
• 50:45
  That's the that's. The other astonishing thing is
• 50:47
  the speed this was turned around with.
• 50:50
  It has no right to be as good as it has.
• 50:53
  No, right at all. And actually thinking back to
• 50:56
  kind of the, you know, like like I said in the Tides of Time that
• 50:58
  the artwork takes a takes a dive, it's that's totally
• 51:01
  understandable. You know, I think that all of
• 51:03
  the all of the comic strip collections ought to look like
• 51:05
  that. They ought to have kind of great
• 51:07
  pages and then pages where you go.
• 51:08
  Oh yeah, well, they were in a rush for them.
• 51:12
  Well, talking of virtuous visual artistry, let's skip into the
• 51:16
  company of thieves. So Adrian Salmon's back.
• 51:19
  Worship at the feet of Adrian. It's.
• 51:22
  So great a strip. Just every page, all these
• 51:26
  meteors. The, the asteroid field, the.
• 51:29
  Asteroids, right? How did he did he just sit up
• 51:32
  all night for for. The Asteroids.
• 51:37
  I don't know if there was many podcasts around back then.
• 51:39
  He must have just had a lot of good music playing and.
• 51:42
  The Doctor arrives on a darkened ship with a Lantern, and he
• 51:45
  draws this image of the the room they're in lit by, and it's like
• 51:51
  the pictures lit up from that light source.
• 51:54
  There's there's the TARDIS in the shadows in the background.
• 51:56
  It's it's such artistry. The the image that I most
• 52:02
  remembered from this one was the end of the the first episode
• 52:06
  that with the Doctor with the electric wire apparently killing
• 52:10
  Croton, and then Croton sort of dead, leaning out of the frame
• 52:15
  being the last frame. Yeah, it's so traumatic, the
• 52:18
  smoke just floating out of frame, out of his mouth.
• 52:21
  Yeah. Oh, that's astonishing.
• 52:24
  And I I love that. I do like the that we've got an
• 52:27
  established character that we know is a good guy, but the
• 52:33
  Doctor doesn't know that because he's a Cyberman.
• 52:35
  So we're doing that sort of cursor peloton thing of oh, I
• 52:38
  know this this race get back easy.
• 52:40
  I'm going to murder him. It's it's well played out.
• 52:43
  It's very clever, isn't it? And then he starts the next
• 52:46
  episode warning everyone about the sidemen and saying they must
• 52:49
  be more sidemen about because he thinks he's in a sidemen story,
• 52:53
  whereas actually he's in a story about pirates.
• 52:55
  The the image that remains with me is the one on the the the the
• 52:59
  penultimate page of of the the two pirates on the expression
• 53:04
  floating apart from each other. That is such a great visual
• 53:07
  show. You, you help me.
• 53:11
  No, no, no, you help me. Oh, that's so, so funny what
• 53:16
  I've got to say. The bit where Crotons revealed
• 53:19
  coming out of the shadows, he does look like a villain.
• 53:23
  Yes, yeah, well, he's a sideman and he said and and he and he
• 53:26
  comes up behind Izzy with his, his arm outstretched as he would
• 53:32
  draw him if he if he was the villain of the piece.
• 53:34
  But then you get a frame of the Doctor looking as evil as he's
• 53:38
  ever looked as well. Chucky Electric cable at him,
• 53:42
  Yeah. What did you think about this
• 53:44
  story? Do you think it sort of
• 53:46
  sustained its length? Yeah, I do.
• 53:48
  It's it's it's a pretty brief story and it packs a lot Again,
• 53:51
  world building and there's a lot of incident here and and a
• 53:57
  complexity to every page slightly up in the ante by
• 54:04
  giving you a different twist, a different piece of knowledge.
• 54:09
  A realisation that the real villain is actually standing in
• 54:13
  a different place. And the real threat to them is
• 54:16
  that, oh, the TARDIS has gone missing, or the so there's
• 54:18
  someone else on the scene on this, this rock that they've
• 54:21
  landed on. I've got to I don't want to be
• 54:25
  sort of rude to the writer, but I think this is a strip where
• 54:30
  I'm just so beguiled by the art that the story's almost
• 54:35
  irrelevant, are just luxuriating in the imagery.
• 54:39
  Yeah, but the writer, I guess, realises who he's working with
• 54:44
  and and has given us a cast of really interesting characters to
• 54:49
  draw. These faces are so good, and you
• 54:52
  know, they're they're the pirates themselves are, I guess,
• 54:56
  fairly kind of lightweight characters.
• 54:57
  But they're fun and they're funny and I think.
• 54:59
  I love an evil pirate gang. And given what we've got coming
• 55:03
  up, I love the change of tone Again, we've we've gone from
• 55:07
  quite a serious story and at the historical setting to a
• 55:13
  fantastical 1A space opera with pirates.
• 55:16
  And then there is one frame where you know, you realise the
• 55:19
  Doctor, Izzy and Croson are all going to go off together and
• 55:24
  it's when they are flying off in space with him.
• 55:27
  It's just fabulous. Isn't it wonderful?
• 55:29
  And what a team? And suddenly, and I I remember
• 55:32
  the thing that surprises me a bit about this collection is
• 55:35
  actually how Reef Croton's tenure as a companion is.
• 55:40
  Oh, he did do a year. One of those is. 10 years, I
• 55:42
  guess. I guess he was there for a long
• 55:44
  time. Yeah, he's sort of the the Sarah
• 55:46
  Kingdom of the of the comic world isn't.
• 55:47
  He That's more episodes than dodo, you know?
• 55:51
  Yep. Yep.
• 55:53
  But it's no. You're right if that's.
• 55:55
  The bar more episodes than Dodo, then then we're going to talk
• 55:57
  about a lot of a lot of companions.
• 56:00
  We've had a revelation about our work in Dodo today, haven't we?
• 56:03
  In the Doctor Who world, Have we?
• 56:05
  What? The Celestial Toy Maker has been
• 56:07
  animated. Has it?
• 56:09
  Do you know what I've been teaching all day?
• 56:11
  I had this this. Completely.
• 56:12
  They've put out a trailer for it.
• 56:15
  Needless to say, Adrian Salmon and Martin Gerrity and Roger
• 56:18
  Language are not doing the artwork for this.
• 56:20
  You can tell. Who, who's, who's done the
• 56:22
  artwork for? This one.
• 56:22
  It looks like it's a similar technique to the Web of FEAR
• 56:25
  episode 3. OK.
• 56:28
  But done with more money. OK.
• 56:31
  So you're remaining remarkably silent there, James.
• 56:35
  They've animated the whole thing then, I think.
• 56:37
  It looks like it. Yeah.
• 56:38
  Oh yeah. Coming to DVD and Blu-ray soon.
• 56:41
  Sorry. What the hell am I doing
• 56:43
  marketing for the BBC on this? Let's talk about the glorious.
• 56:49
  OK. The centrepiece of this set.
• 56:53
  The centrepiece. Because he is 2/3 of this set.
• 56:56
  The glorious dead. What a story.
• 56:59
  What a story. Where to begin?
• 57:01
  Where do you start? I mean, I wrote, you know, I
• 57:03
  wrote out a bit for each part because I was like, there's so
• 57:07
  much of this. And it does fall into parts in a
• 57:11
  way that is very clever, because I guess if you're doing a story
• 57:15
  this long, you need to find a way of structuring it and
• 57:19
  breaking it up. And bear and I remember so
• 57:22
  vividly reading this by this stage, I was completely hooked.
• 57:25
  And the thing that I admire so much about this, apart from the
• 57:33
  the the epic sense of storytelling combined with the
• 57:37
  the intimacy of knowing that it's about the characters all
• 57:40
  along and making it about Izzy making it about the Doctor, is
• 57:45
  knowing how long you can tease the audience for.
• 57:49
  So it delivers 2 cliffhangers that we've already discussed.
• 57:52
  One is the Doctor waking up in bed next to Grace Holloway and
• 57:56
  she's talking about he's got to wake up and go to work.
• 57:59
  We then don't see the Doctor for the next month or it would have
• 58:02
  been it would have been two months, wouldn't it?
• 58:04
  Because you'd have had to buy the next one and then wait for
• 58:06
  the next one because he's not in the next episode.
• 58:09
  The next episode is a letter that Izzy writes to Max, and
• 58:14
  it's a beautifully written piece.
• 58:16
  It's it's funny. It's efficient, it's touching.
• 58:22
  And it's it's her in this letter describing the situation she
• 58:27
  finds herself in and how she's been dealing with it and what
• 58:31
  she's going to do about it. And at the same time, as she
• 58:33
  narrates what she's going to do about it, you see the plan, her
• 58:36
  plan being carried out. And the last thing you see is
• 58:41
  her miniaturized corpse next to someone's boot.
• 58:44
  And you realize that the masters involved in this.
• 58:47
  And then we cut back to the doctor, so we don't.
• 58:50
  So we're left waiting to see what happens there for another
• 58:53
  month. That's really clever
• 58:55
  storytelling and actually I think it's made me realise how
• 58:58
  many Doctor Who cliffhangers are slightly ruined by the week
• 59:02
  after and how and how kind of tamely resolved they are.
• 59:07
  Well, there's the Steven Moffett approach, isn't there?
• 59:09
  If just we don't resolve it at all, we go somewhere.
• 59:10
  Completely different. Completely different.
• 59:13
  We'll get. Back to that, at some point,
• 59:16
  what I've what impressed me about this was because I thought
• 59:18
  parts 1-2 and three were great, but then from 4 onwards it just
• 59:22
  keeps upping the ante. It does.
• 59:24
  Yeah. So I was like, OK, it ain't
• 59:26
  going to get any better than four.
• 59:28
  That is a that's a short story in its own right there.
• 59:32
  And then five. 5 is. Is unbelievable.
• 59:36
  I mean how to describe what goes on in five and and also the
• 59:40
  confidence to tell this very serious story in such a fun way.
• 59:45
  Yeah. Well, look, OK, I'm going to
• 59:47
  take you right back to the start then.
• 59:49
  I don't want to script the detail.
• 59:51
  So in part one, we are introduced to paradost.
• 59:57
  What do you think about how that's depicted?
• 1:00:02
  I I I don't know how to I don't know how to respond to it
• 1:00:05
  really. And and I I think that's the
• 1:00:07
  intention. Not least because it's all you
• 1:00:09
  see of paradost. For for the next three episodes
• 1:00:13
  you you get a single page of this indescribable form and a a
• 1:00:18
  voice and a creature, and none of what they're talking about
• 1:00:22
  makes any sense. But it seems important.
• 1:00:25
  I'm telling you now, James, but you can't see this because this
• 1:00:28
  is a podcast. But I'm showing James on the
• 1:00:30
  screen that is one of the best alien the cities I've ever seen
• 1:00:34
  in Doctor Who. Oh, sorry, we're talking about
• 1:00:38
  paradost, I thought. I thought you were talking about
• 1:00:41
  the first page. Oh, I'm so sorry.
• 1:00:44
  Oh no, I'm not going to go page by page.
• 1:00:45
  Good grief, you'll never go to bed somewhere.
• 1:00:48
  But no, no the the the Is it seriously a planet I.
• 1:00:53
  Can't. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a
• 1:00:54
  planet. Oh yeah.
• 1:00:55
  And and and we're meant to, we're meant to be wowed by this.
• 1:00:59
  In fact, the word on the page is wow.
• 1:01:04
  It's like bio domes, isn't it? It stretches back.
• 1:01:07
  You've got a star scape in there.
• 1:01:09
  You've got weird flying. I'm not even sure what they are.
• 1:01:13
  Manta rays. Yeah, but they're they're like
• 1:01:17
  manta rays, Stingrays with dinosaur heads, aren't they?
• 1:01:19
  And, and and A and a world is created that quite convincingly
• 1:01:25
  suggests there's a whole civilization here which is
• 1:01:28
  taught. You know, it's briefly discussed
• 1:01:29
  as well, but we don't get a lot of detail, really.
• 1:01:32
  You just get this impression of this incredible, immense science
• 1:01:37
  fiction culture. But the idea that you can
• 1:01:40
  experience, what was it again, life experiences of over
• 1:01:44
  1,000,000 sentient species, so you can sort of learn from other
• 1:01:49
  cultures. I mean, it's a sorry, well with
• 1:01:52
  a Doctor Who goes to lots of type leisure hives a bit like
• 1:01:55
  that, isn't it? As well as learning from past
• 1:01:57
  things like that. It just feels like, you know,
• 1:01:59
  it's the most incredible place to visit before the glory and
• 1:02:03
  the ash rays turn up, and then it all just goes to shift.
• 1:02:06
  So it needs to be established as as something ancient and modern,
• 1:02:13
  something with with centuries of history, and it does that very
• 1:02:16
  effectively so that it can be completely destroyed basically.
• 1:02:20
  It's essentially like a huge out of space library, isn't it?
• 1:02:23
  Yeah, yeah. It's one of those conceptual
• 1:02:26
  things. You know, the we've, as you say,
• 1:02:29
  the leisure hive. I think Big Finish does it a lot
• 1:02:32
  because they don't have to kind of build the sets where they
• 1:02:34
  establish, you know, the idea of a giant library and this is a
• 1:02:39
  library of thoughts. That's an interesting idea as
• 1:02:41
  well, that memories are contained in crystals here.
• 1:02:43
  But what's great about our first chapter is this introducing an
• 1:02:46
  idea that becomes very, very important in the climax.
• 1:02:50
  Yes, yeah. And that's clever as well.
• 1:02:52
  You know, though, it's it's subtle, subtle world building
• 1:02:55
  that turns out to be really, really important in the end.
• 1:02:58
  What do you think There? So then Morningstar turns up,
• 1:03:02
  the the sun rising and and his army of religious zealots.
• 1:03:09
  What on earth are they trying to say about organized religion in
• 1:03:13
  this strip? I don't know that it's about
• 1:03:15
  organized religion, actually. I think it's about blind faith.
• 1:03:18
  I think it's the the reason these characters are sinister is
• 1:03:24
  because of their absolute conviction and unquestioning
• 1:03:29
  faith. And it's an interesting one
• 1:03:33
  because the the word jihad is is used later on.
• 1:03:39
  It's invoking things that maybe wouldn't have been invoked had
• 1:03:43
  their significance been realized at the time.
• 1:03:46
  But obviously this was, this was before many events happened,
• 1:03:53
  actually kind of fairly shortly after after this was written.
• 1:03:56
  So you know we're sort of in when is this.
• 1:03:59
  Yeah, to kind of October 2000 this this strip ended.
• 1:04:02
  So my God, it's prescient, isn't it?
• 1:04:05
  There's an incredibly adult sequence where one of the
• 1:04:10
  disciples is encouraged to commit suicide, so one of the
• 1:04:15
  ash rays can come to be. That's very adult for Doctor
• 1:04:20
  Who. And it's portrayed in in a way
• 1:04:24
  that is genuinely chilling. Yeah, terrifying.
• 1:04:31
  So we get we get a series of sort of destructive set pieces
• 1:04:35
  then, don't we? Where you know the planet is
• 1:04:37
  falling. To these indestructible flaming
• 1:04:42
  beings. And it's it.
• 1:04:43
  It's full of religious imagery. I guess that's kind of the the
• 1:04:47
  scariest thing is of of all is you.
• 1:04:50
  They're established as as cranks and and the doctor treats them
• 1:04:52
  as cranks. And there's a point where he
• 1:04:54
  asks morning staff for his autograph and it's all played as
• 1:04:57
  a bit of a joke. But you know, A-frame later,
• 1:05:01
  he's hovering over the place, you know, declaring jihad and
• 1:05:05
  and everything's on fire. And just at the point where the
• 1:05:09
  Doctor is most needed, where everything's gone to hell, he
• 1:05:13
  suddenly pops out of existence. Well, he doesn't though.
• 1:05:16
  Everything else pops out of existence that I love.
• 1:05:19
  The way this is painted, he's in the middle of a sentence.
• 1:05:21
  He's found, it would appear, a solution, and the the scene
• 1:05:26
  behind him starts to fade, and then the words that people are
• 1:05:29
  saying to him start to fade as well.
• 1:05:30
  It's. Oh, I know.
• 1:05:31
  I want to say that again. Hang on.
• 1:05:34
  Find the. Page Izzy is saying something to
• 1:05:36
  him and it's like, so it's it's like the ink hasn't quite
• 1:05:39
  printed properly on the frame and the doctor's just left in
• 1:05:42
  the in the front of it. And these words wake up getting
• 1:05:46
  bigger and bigger at the bottom of the of the page.
• 1:05:48
  Wake up, wake up, wake up. And then we get that full frame
• 1:05:52
  of a a very buff, shirtless Dr. Waking up in bed next to a a a
• 1:05:59
  skimpily clad Grace Holloway. Since this is a absolute lump
• 1:06:03
  pen knife, it is probably worth me knowing at this point that is
• 1:06:06
  possibly the sexiest image we will ever see in Doctor Who.
• 1:06:10
  It's disturbingly sexy, I think. Didn't I think knowingly?
• 1:06:16
  So I think it's it's pulling you out of this world in the in the
• 1:06:19
  most kind of ostentatious way it can.
• 1:06:23
  Because it's it's showing the Doctor Who roads we haven't gone
• 1:06:26
  to, but could be they can do anything, can't they?
• 1:06:30
  Yeah, yeah. But also at this point, the
• 1:06:32
  Doctor was never naked. Except, yeah, it's a different
• 1:06:35
  space, but we forget about that. But you know, it's it's a it's a
• 1:06:38
  jarring image because we are so used to the Doctor being a
• 1:06:42
  costume. I tell you, what's a jarring
• 1:06:44
  image is the fact that he gets out of bed and he's got question
• 1:06:47
  mark boxer shorts. All right.
• 1:06:48
  Course he. Does we now have to picture
• 1:06:52
  every regeneration of the Doctor wearing question mark boxer?
• 1:06:56
  Shorts, I don't want to think of William Hart all that way.
• 1:06:58
  Thank you very much. So we sort of, we have talked
• 1:07:01
  about the part where Izzy writes, so that's a home.
• 1:07:06
  Was there anything else you wanted to cover in that that
• 1:07:09
  chapter? No I think we've covered that
• 1:07:11
  and and as you say it's but it's it's poetical, it's it's it's a
• 1:07:14
  short story and the the the cleverness of having the text
• 1:07:19
  telling one story and and the visuals telling another story.
• 1:07:21
  Again, it's efficient and it's just it's complete control of
• 1:07:25
  this form of stories I think. I'd just very quickly like to
• 1:07:28
  mention the the beautiful artwork where the snow comes in.
• 1:07:35
  Yes, and you've got the ash raves all sort of being
• 1:07:37
  disintegrated by the snow. Again, just such vivid images.
• 1:07:44
  And the fact that she kind of wins, or at least as far as we
• 1:07:47
  can tell at this point of the story, she's beaten the wraiths
• 1:07:52
  and that's kind of her final parting shot is beat you.
• 1:07:56
  And the figure that we that we assume to be the master says
• 1:07:59
  congratulations and and guns her down.
• 1:08:02
  And her last line there? Look after yourself, Max.
• 1:08:04
  Lots of love is a very really. It's it's it's an incredible,
• 1:08:12
  incredible moment in a in a story full of incredible
• 1:08:14
  moments. Well, I'm going to ask you now,
• 1:08:16
  then, to pop into Part 5 and tell me, please, what is your
• 1:08:20
  favorite depiction of the Doctor?
• 1:08:22
  My favorite prediction depiction of the doctor is in the peanut
• 1:08:25
  style strip where the doctor with his question mark jumper
• 1:08:31
  he's talking to. He's talking to the Rani in her.
• 1:08:35
  The Rani. Favour, it's very quick.
• 1:08:37
  Will you just read it? Yeah, I'm a failure.
• 1:08:42
  I think sometimes I'm always going to be a kid.
• 1:08:44
  It feels like I've been this age for centuries.
• 1:08:47
  If only I knew what I was going to be when I grew up.
• 1:08:51
  Oh, is that all? Why didn't you ask that earlier?
• 1:08:55
  You're going to be an even bigger blockhead then Theta
• 1:08:57
  Sigma. That'll be $0.05.
• 1:09:00
  It's. Great.
• 1:09:02
  It's so authentic. It's so authentic.
• 1:09:06
  I feel like some of these visual references go slightly over my
• 1:09:10
  head, though I recognize them all as as as different genres of
• 1:09:17
  comic book storytelling. And you've got the kind of the
• 1:09:19
  private detective one with these beautiful shadows and it's it's
• 1:09:24
  a Tour de force. The TARDIS tail section.
• 1:09:27
  Where is the cat? I was going around going
• 1:09:31
  silence, Lizzie. Lizzie, what is she a duck, I
• 1:09:36
  mean. I don't even a fish.
• 1:09:38
  Fish, a duck? Then you've got that incredible
• 1:09:43
  where it's effectively Doctor Strange isn't.
• 1:09:45
  It, yes. Yeah.
• 1:09:45
  Yeah. And and that the the panel with
• 1:09:48
  all the all the eyeballs. Yeah, it's so strange that we go
• 1:09:53
  into gumshoe territory, don't we?
• 1:09:55
  He's, he's got the Venetian blinds on him.
• 1:09:58
  He's the detective. And the shadow of the side man
• 1:10:01
  behind. It's so clever, the way he
• 1:10:02
  brings in just images, literal, fleeting images of characters
• 1:10:07
  that we recognise. What's great about it is not
• 1:10:10
  only is it a chance to sort of visually depict the Ave.
• 1:10:14
  Doctor in all these diverse and really fun ways, but it's him
• 1:10:18
  working things out as he goes along as well, Yeah.
• 1:10:20
  Yeah, I think I said this last time we talked about this.
• 1:10:25
  It's doing the multiverse thing way ahead of its time.
• 1:10:29
  I mean, now obviously that's kind of almost passe, but it's
• 1:10:33
  it's doing it kind of better than anyone else has done.
• 1:10:37
  It certainly kind of way better than anything in the Multiverse
• 1:10:40
  of Madness. And then at the end of that
• 1:10:43
  part, you effectively have, I mean, I just kept seeing slutty
• 1:10:46
  Bart fast. Yes.
• 1:10:47
  I turn up. I'd say you, Doctor, you are
• 1:10:51
  going to be my replacement here at the Glory.
• 1:10:56
  And then we're back there and we're we're staring at this,
• 1:10:58
  this image that we've been seeing throughout on these on
• 1:11:00
  the the acolytes foreheads and they're on this this giant disk
• 1:11:05
  and we're into the realm of just another universe being painted
• 1:11:09
  and. Then if I thought that, oh it
• 1:11:12
  was weird, you then skip into six which has this half page
• 1:11:17
  spread of the omniversal spectrum.
• 1:11:20
  Yeah, which is just a mindfuck on the page.
• 1:11:24
  Yeah, yeah. And this is what I'm talking
• 1:11:26
  about when I say that you can't do these things in colour.
• 1:11:31
  Yeah, well, because it would be very jarring.
• 1:11:33
  Because it would just be a colour, it would be a mess.
• 1:11:36
  You could. I don't know that you could
• 1:11:38
  colour this very effectively because it would just be too
• 1:11:40
  dark, but there's but this detail is, and it is.
• 1:11:46
  You can just sink into this picture.
• 1:11:48
  It's like it's a bit like a Magic Eye picture.
• 1:11:52
  I asked between Spider Man and the 100 ones, who is that?
• 1:11:57
  Well, who the The mustachioed man?
• 1:11:59
  Yeah, seems to be like the War Doctor.
• 1:12:02
  I thought it was the fella who taught The Karate Kid.
• 1:12:06
  It could. It could also be like.
• 1:12:09
  No, it could be anybody. Oh my.
• 1:12:12
  But that. That for me, that's probably the
• 1:12:14
  most striking image in this entire book.
• 1:12:18
  Yeah, and I remember that at the time, and I remember just
• 1:12:21
  absolutely blown away by finding this in the centre of the
• 1:12:24
  magazine. You know it's.
• 1:12:27
  What do you think then, about waiting to drop the twist?
• 1:12:30
  Because it's in this part, Part 6, where we realise who Morning
• 1:12:33
  Star is. Well, and thank God I started
• 1:12:36
  buying it halfway through that story because otherwise this
• 1:12:39
  would have made no sense at all. But it really delivers and worth
• 1:12:43
  the wait. And again, you know, think about
• 1:12:44
  the amount of time that had passed between last, you know,
• 1:12:49
  seeing him wander off into the distance and and he's back here
• 1:12:56
  in a completely different time and completely different place
• 1:12:58
  like it's been planned all along.
• 1:13:00
  Well, quiet, Scott Gray says in the behind the scenes at the end
• 1:13:06
  that he really wanted to stress that it wasn't the dialects or
• 1:13:10
  the sidemen that was the Doctor's sort of ultimate
• 1:13:14
  opponent. It was humanity himself.
• 1:13:17
  So. So he goes down this route,
• 1:13:20
  which again is very dark. Very dark.
• 1:13:26
  And again, it's about consequences.
• 1:13:29
  And this, This is why, thematically, it feels so
• 1:13:31
  clever. He started off this, this series
• 1:13:34
  of stories confronting him with Grace Holloway and the
• 1:13:37
  consequences of his first night in this new regeneration.
• 1:13:42
  And now it just sort of feels like everything he's been
• 1:13:44
  through has been a consequence of that, and every everything
• 1:13:47
  he's encountered is in some way a result of his interfering.
• 1:13:52
  He's really made to confront, you know, whether what he does
• 1:13:55
  is is worth it. What you then get in Part 7 is
• 1:14:01
  an entire chapter. And now I can't believe they
• 1:14:03
  took out an entire chapter to do this, but I think it's so
• 1:14:06
  expertly done. It's all explanations and back
• 1:14:10
  story. So it's the master story and
• 1:14:13
  it's Morning Star story isn't it?
• 1:14:15
  The Master. What happened to him from the
• 1:14:17
  very moment we left him in the TV movie?
• 1:14:20
  And then Morning Stars. From the moment we left him at
• 1:14:22
  the end of the road from now, I'm.
• 1:14:25
  Very expertly balancing those two storylines and drawing the
• 1:14:29
  parallels between them, showing their their paths as kind of
• 1:14:33
  inevitably going to cross. Yeah, it's it's really
• 1:14:37
  incredible cat Serious story about becoming a Caribbean
• 1:14:45
  pirate, the Inquisition in Spain being tortured, the master
• 1:14:49
  finding him in his cell. The master says he wrote the
• 1:14:54
  Bible for the like in an afternoon.
• 1:14:56
  I thought that was a very biting line, yes.
• 1:15:00
  Yes. I yeah, I just sort of turned
• 1:15:03
  that out in an afternoon. And look what's happened as a
• 1:15:05
  result. Yeah.
• 1:15:07
  The entire history of the Earth has been changed and.
• 1:15:10
  Again, I I think this is a a story with a lot to say about
• 1:15:14
  blind faith. I'm not sure it's a it's about
• 1:15:18
  organized religion per SE. But I do think it's about not
• 1:15:22
  asking questions and not questioning your sources.
• 1:15:27
  Which so then that leads into what's part A.
• 1:15:30
  Part A is Croton versus Morning Star, The Doctor versus the
• 1:15:33
  Master. So this is where we get it's
• 1:15:36
  very important to the climax as well.
• 1:15:38
  We've got the prophecy of two, two people coming at each other,
• 1:15:44
  and one of them will prevail. And the Master, of course, is
• 1:15:47
  arrogant enough to assume that's him and the Doctor, and he will
• 1:15:51
  prevail. Which is a great twist, and one
• 1:15:55
  that I must confess I didn't see coming, even though it's it's
• 1:15:59
  all there. And they have those two fights
• 1:16:02
  taking place by side. And it's it's it's I mean you
• 1:16:07
  wouldn't want it to look like this every week.
• 1:16:10
  And it's one of those things that I think unless I saw it
• 1:16:13
  with my own eyes, I'd I'd be a little bit cynical about kind of
• 1:16:16
  how how can you deliver this kind of storytelling in graphic
• 1:16:19
  form. How interesting is 2
• 1:16:20
  simultaneous fights actually going to be to look at.
• 1:16:23
  And the answer is it's astonishing and maybe maybe this
• 1:16:28
  is my favorite bit of of artwork in the whole thing, this this
• 1:16:33
  simultaneous fight because it gathers pace, it's got an
• 1:16:37
  incredible sense of pacing. The build up to the fight is
• 1:16:40
  beautifully paced and then the just even the the the way the
• 1:16:43
  frames are spaced out, the way he starts to introduce curves.
• 1:16:47
  And then suddenly he introduces this omniverse and we're into
• 1:16:51
  back into the surreal landscape that we're in the previous
• 1:16:54
  episode. I I just.
• 1:16:56
  I can't express enough how impressed I am that somebody can
• 1:17:00
  make a series of stilled images feel like a violent, visceral
• 1:17:05
  fight. Yeah, because I was sort of
• 1:17:07
  flipping the pages, going, Oh my God, it was sort of building
• 1:17:10
  momentum and I was reading it faster and faster.
• 1:17:13
  And again, this incredible graphic invention that he pushes
• 1:17:16
  his way through these different styles of drawing.
• 1:17:19
  There's one where he goes into blocks.
• 1:17:20
  And again, I think we've seen Marvel attempt something like
• 1:17:23
  this, but nowhere near as successfully.
• 1:17:26
  What it does as well that I think so many master stories
• 1:17:30
  fail to do. It tries to examine their
• 1:17:33
  relationship a bit and give it a bit of weight.
• 1:17:36
  Like, you know, very often we just get out.
• 1:17:38
  We were friends at the Academy or Ioffer you a half share of
• 1:17:41
  the universe or something like that.
• 1:17:43
  The Doctor has lines like I've spent half my life cleaning up
• 1:17:46
  after you. The masters say you and I have
• 1:17:50
  masqueraded as gods for centuries.
• 1:17:52
  We save or destroy entire worlds.
• 1:17:56
  We take immortality and arrays, beings from history.
• 1:18:00
  Godhood is our ultimate goal is the assumption that he makes.
• 1:18:05
  And he quotes the doctor Packard himself.
• 1:18:08
  If we fight like animals, we die like animals.
• 1:18:11
  Isn't it the last? The last wise thing you said to
• 1:18:13
  me was survival. Oh dear.
• 1:18:18
  And there's a wonderful line towards the end of Part 9 where
• 1:18:21
  he says I have everything I've ever wanted and everything I've
• 1:18:25
  ever wanted is all I thought. That was great.
• 1:18:28
  I the arrogance of the Master. Anyone would say he's aiming for
• 1:18:33
  a fool, you know. Yes.
• 1:18:38
  But in terms of being visually epic, in terms of being
• 1:18:43
  narratively epic, I said to I sent you a message saying, you
• 1:18:48
  know, has Doctor ever been this big?
• 1:18:51
  Does it? Ever get as big as this?
• 1:18:52
  And yet it's ultimately just down to, down to character as
• 1:18:57
  well? As I said, it's it's on this
• 1:18:59
  grand scale, but it never loses sight of the the heart of the
• 1:19:02
  piece, which is the the the characters we're invested in.
• 1:19:06
  So coming in, what about the climax for this 10 issues?
• 1:19:11
  Almost a year to tell the story, building up to this huge fight.
• 1:19:21
  I mean, also a couple of months of genuinely thinking that
• 1:19:25
  Izzy's dead. Oh, of.
• 1:19:28
  Course, yeah, she doesn't appear for.
• 1:19:30
  She's she's she's been written out and but at the time you
• 1:19:34
  totally would believe that they would do that.
• 1:19:37
  They were doing everything. They were doing everything else.
• 1:19:39
  Why not kill a companion? And it's not until that fight is
• 1:19:44
  it? You realise she's in that tiny
• 1:19:46
  test tube, yeah? There's a lot to resolve.
• 1:19:51
  There's a lot of stuff to sort out in this final episode do.
• 1:19:54
  You know what that that proves the the joy of being able to
• 1:20:00
  read this month to month. Because I read this in a day.
• 1:20:03
  Yeah, Izzy was back within the day.
• 1:20:08
  No, we we actually thought he was dead.
• 1:20:10
  And it's a it's just a an adrenaline rush.
• 1:20:16
  This final episode, the fact that they crash in the roof of
• 1:20:19
  Saint Paul's and do it in there, that's.
• 1:20:20
  Great. Just, you know, why not?
• 1:20:24
  They say Saint Paul's was, you know, was the one thing that was
• 1:20:27
  standing throughout the entirety of both wars.
• 1:20:30
  Yeah, yeah. It takes.
• 1:20:33
  It's Croton, isn't it? It's Croton and Sato that go
• 1:20:35
  through that. Yes.
• 1:20:36
  Yeah, it is. And OK, so I I have a bit of an
• 1:20:42
  issue with the person sacrificing themself at the last
• 1:20:47
  minute. But I didn't have a problem with
• 1:20:49
  this because the the fact that that role was there has been set
• 1:20:54
  up for about 5 parts. Because the Doctor was offered
• 1:20:58
  their way back in the story. And the fact that it's Croton
• 1:21:06
  and I feel like I shouldn't be as moved as I was.
• 1:21:10
  But there's an image, the very last image of him going through
• 1:21:12
  the white guys. He's tiny in the middle of the
• 1:21:15
  image, Just this silhouette. It's an incredible image.
• 1:21:18
  I think that it's been so beautifully set up and like I
• 1:21:22
  said I'd I'd forgotten that Croton was only a companion
• 1:21:24
  really for kind of two stories. Hence as a kind of Sera Kingdom
• 1:21:30
  reference, I I feel that it felt like such a a a beautiful TARDIS
• 1:21:36
  team. It's like a perfect idea and we
• 1:21:39
  lived with them for a long time. So, so yes, it's genuinely
• 1:21:42
  moving and I think the fact that we've glimpsed this, this past
• 1:21:48
  that Croton hasn't wanted to confront as well, makes his
• 1:21:51
  journey really, really moving as well.
• 1:21:54
  And like we said earlier, you know, using the crystals
• 1:21:57
  introduced in part one. It becomes a key key part of the
• 1:22:00
  plot. To both of them, to Sato and to
• 1:22:04
  to cross on no. I think it's I think it's I
• 1:22:06
  think it's just beautifully judged.
• 1:22:08
  It's a it's a really carefully worked out piece of pacing and
• 1:22:13
  and storytelling and it and it just feels like so many things
• 1:22:16
  have been planted both in the glorious Dead and and in the in
• 1:22:19
  the stories that led up to it. One of my few.
• 1:22:22
  Of so many things so, so perfectly.
• 1:22:24
  Few frequent pleasures with the Master in Doctor Who is you know
• 1:22:28
  how he always rises high, usually around a cliffhanger,
• 1:22:32
  and then falls flat on his face at the end.
• 1:22:34
  Has he ever fallen? So I mean.
• 1:22:36
  This is the highest he's ever written, and so this is the most
• 1:22:40
  satisfying face palm I've ever seen.
• 1:22:43
  And it's so perfect that that it's not just a kind of He's not
• 1:22:46
  just sucked into the Eye of Harmony, he's humiliated.
• 1:22:49
  That's what makes it such a a perfect end for the Master, in
• 1:22:51
  the same way that it's a perfect way for all of the Other
• 1:22:54
  characters to to finish off this this journey.
• 1:22:57
  You know, the line that moved me the most in this last part was
• 1:23:00
  when Sato said at last at the point where he died.
• 1:23:04
  Yes, like the long, agonising, aching life that he's lived is
• 1:23:08
  finally over. Which is the value of of, you
• 1:23:13
  know, even if he wasn't planned to be this, this, this character
• 1:23:16
  that would follow through this arc.
• 1:23:19
  If you build strong characters, you can use them in that way and
• 1:23:22
  they will, they will touch you. I love that we finish in Covent
• 1:23:25
  Garden as well. There's something very Russell D
• 1:23:27
  Davis about this. The the final frame, it's it's a
• 1:23:31
  bit like the dock, the Knight thought.
• 1:23:32
  For Rose going for Chips, it's it's got that kind of urban
• 1:23:37
  feel. Bring it back to the domestic.
• 1:23:39
  After taking it, I was about to say, you know, galactic but
• 1:23:43
  multiversal. I don't know.
• 1:23:44
  Yes, omniverse omniversal. My one note at the end was poor
• 1:23:52
  paradost. Yeah, I guess that that that
• 1:23:57
  burns, didn't it? They just sort of go off and go,
• 1:23:59
  Oh well, that was a that was a thing, wouldn't it?
• 1:24:02
  Yeah, a lot of people died in that adventure.
• 1:24:06
  Oh well, let's not think about that.
• 1:24:08
  But as a whole, God. The ambition in that I justified
• 1:24:14
  it, justified the approach, but just the fact that he managed to
• 1:24:18
  pull off weaving in all those stories in a way that didn't
• 1:24:22
  feel it didn't jar. I don't think there's anything
• 1:24:26
  else quite like it. I don't think Doctor Who has
• 1:24:29
  ever done anything ambitious in in this way.
• 1:24:33
  I don't think Doctor Who. We talked about consistency and
• 1:24:35
  I think that's right. I think this is a very
• 1:24:36
  consistent run. How varied is it as well How
• 1:24:41
  many different kind of storytelling styles?
• 1:24:43
  It's it's brazen in its ability to to navigate comedy and
• 1:24:48
  tragedy and melodrama and intimacy and you know, it's it's
• 1:24:52
  a it's an astonishing, astonishing achievement.
• 1:24:54
  And they just know what to do in the Part 5, where we're going
• 1:25:00
  through all the doctors lives. They know to bring in Roger
• 1:25:03
  Landry in that, just for a couple of bits, because that
• 1:25:06
  suits his art style. Brilliant.
• 1:25:09
  It's just a well oiled team knowing what they're knowing
• 1:25:12
  exactly what they're doing, isn't it?
• 1:25:13
  And as we both said, it is. You can tell these huge epic
• 1:25:16
  stories, but it means nothing if you don't give a toss about the
• 1:25:18
  characters. And it's just those beats
• 1:25:21
  throughout this and the pay offs, that's what makes it seem.
• 1:25:26
  And I feel like we've got to know these characters.
• 1:25:28
  I mean it's it's very interesting reading this that I
• 1:25:30
  hear Paul Mcgann's voice so easily when reading this.
• 1:25:34
  It it feels like they've taken the kind of character quirks and
• 1:25:38
  ticks and and put them into the dialogue in a way that is is
• 1:25:41
  very skilfully handled. Because it doesn't, it doesn't
• 1:25:43
  ever feel like it's aping the script of the TV movie.
• 1:25:46
  But he's a fully formed doctor by the by the by the time you
• 1:25:49
  get here, you know who you're with.
• 1:25:51
  And Izzy's a fully formed companion.
• 1:25:54
  We've we've so relaxed with them.
• 1:25:56
  We're just in a position where they could do something truly
• 1:25:58
  awful to Izzy and and break our hearts all over again.
• 1:26:04
  But that's another graphic novel.
• 1:26:07
  One worth but worth mentioning. I mean, what did that whole
• 1:26:10
  thing with destry and body swap. I mean, there's great stuff to
• 1:26:15
  come I I love the glorious dead. But the but all four volumes,
• 1:26:18
  it's it's all great stuff. So moving on then, to what's
• 1:26:26
  probably my favorite Not the best.
• 1:26:31
  I think the best is the Glorious Dead, but my favorite of the
• 1:26:34
  set, the Autonomy bug. Which is on again, just like
• 1:26:40
  nothing else, although the we were talking about the Star
• 1:26:47
  Beast and how that sort of lent itself to to a modern, fast
• 1:26:53
  comic book piece of television. If if RTD was looking for
• 1:26:56
  another comic strip to adapt, this would be a.
• 1:27:01
  With a Disney budget? Are you kidding me?
• 1:27:03
  It'll be amazing. Wouldn't.
• 1:27:04
  It, yeah. This is basically a Pixar movie.
• 1:27:07
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Pixar robots. It, you know, you're absolutely
• 1:27:13
  right. It would need to be mostly
• 1:27:16
  animated, but it would look it would look gorgeous.
• 1:27:19
  Gorgeous and like to go from something as as sort of crazy
• 1:27:25
  and ambitious as do you know what?
• 1:27:28
  I wish people would have me drinks like that.
• 1:27:30
  You've got a training as crazy as the glorious dead to
• 1:27:37
  something as small as this. It's a quite a small story,
• 1:27:40
  isn't it? It's it's a small revolution.
• 1:27:44
  Yeah, and it's another character piece.
• 1:27:46
  It's just that the characters are mostly robots, and it's a
• 1:27:50
  cross between Alice in Wonderland and One Flew Over the
• 1:27:54
  Cuckoo's Nest. Because why not?
• 1:27:56
  Or the villainess is supposed to be Nurse Ratchet, isn't it?
• 1:27:59
  Yeah, yeah, I'm very clearly so. And and and these are the
• 1:28:03
  conceit is these are robots who have developed personalities.
• 1:28:06
  The trouble was the 2nd I read that all I could see was Louise
• 1:28:09
  Fletcher playing that awful woman that's strapping robots
• 1:28:12
  into chairs and torturing them horribly.
• 1:28:15
  And what's that? A happy thought or?
• 1:28:18
  Well, Louise Fetcher, who's the woman who's played Nurse Ratchet
• 1:28:20
  in One Over the Cookiness, she's a fabulous actress.
• 1:28:22
  Yeah, she honestly, I'll say she's long overdue to be in
• 1:28:25
  Doctor Who, but she died three years ago, so that's not going
• 1:28:28
  to happen. Roger Landry's art.
• 1:28:34
  Please can we talk about this? Well, apparently he wasn't
• 1:28:39
  really a fan. In fact, apparently he didn't
• 1:28:43
  know much about Doctor Who and hadn't really watched it very
• 1:28:46
  much. And he was called in to do this
• 1:28:48
  story called Happy Death Day, which is later on in the same
• 1:28:51
  volume which is a one off anniversary special.
• 1:28:55
  I think it was the 35th anniversary story and rather
• 1:28:58
  than taking a kind of a serious approach and having all eight
• 1:29:02
  doctors looking for a key or something like that, it's done
• 1:29:05
  as a massive piss. Take the Doctors are caricatures
• 1:29:09
  and it's actually the the perfect celebratory story.
• 1:29:13
  And they're fighting the Beige Guardian, yes, who is modelled
• 1:29:18
  on David Hyde Pierce, but eerily looks a lot like the Celestial
• 1:29:23
  Toy Maker. I just kept seeing Niles.
• 1:29:26
  Niles from Fraser. Well that's that's, that's who
• 1:29:29
  he was modelled on. But, but there's there's a bit
• 1:29:32
  of Neil Patrick Harris in there as well, isn't there?
• 1:29:35
  I'll tell you what the the double acts that they formed in
• 1:29:38
  this in is that his first one then?
• 1:29:42
  That's his first one. So this this so happy Death Day
• 1:29:45
  is a pure comedy and it's full of in jokes and and visual jokes
• 1:29:49
  and the doctors are paired off and two of them find themselves
• 1:29:56
  back in Albert Square and fighting the EastEnders cast.
• 1:30:00
  And is it Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy just talk kind
• 1:30:04
  of awful gap to each other. You've got Colin Baker, who's
• 1:30:09
  he's not allowed to pun, so you know, And he delivered those
• 1:30:12
  terrible puns. Yes, it was James Bond puns.
• 1:30:14
  So that Patrick Trout was like, oh please don't you know, it's
• 1:30:18
  so funny. It's not a yes because it's not
• 1:30:21
  a rest on warrior robot. It's a wildy and witty force.
• 1:30:25
  But OK, if he wasn't, I'll talk to who you fan.
• 1:30:29
  How? How do you think so?
• 1:30:32
  It's so, isn't it? Come.
• 1:30:35
  On I mean you can see sometimes where they have used stock
• 1:30:40
  photos, because there's a joke in this about a stock photo.
• 1:30:44
  It's Patrick Trout. Somebody was down in that in
• 1:30:46
  that stock pose, doesn't he gets a telling off?
• 1:30:50
  Poses and come on. Oh, and there's a conversation
• 1:30:54
  between the 7th and 4th doctors, isn't there?
• 1:30:57
  Where they're talking about things that they've been
• 1:30:59
  allergic to in various. That's right.
• 1:31:01
  They're both they're both at them at it's.
• 1:31:04
  I mean, it's basically like they've they've taken bits of
• 1:31:07
  convention answers from Tom Baker and Celeste McCoy, just
• 1:31:11
  knit them into a conversation with each other.
• 1:31:13
  It's just about it says my hair is uncurled and to the colour my
• 1:31:17
  hair uncurled and the colour blue began to smell yes, which
• 1:31:22
  is something that Tom Baker would come out with, isn't it?
• 1:31:25
  And then it's left to the First Doctor and the 8th Doctor to to
• 1:31:28
  solve the situation and and there's this lovely payoff where
• 1:31:30
  it's it's all a computer game anyway, that Izzy's playing on
• 1:31:33
  the spine, Time Space Visualiser.
• 1:31:35
  So language has been pulled in just to do this this anniversary
• 1:31:41
  silly one off and I think TV action the other one of might
• 1:31:45
  have come next actually which was another anniversary Doctor
• 1:31:51
  Who magazine anniversary and it's a it's got beat the meep in
• 1:31:56
  it. It's got beat the meep in it,
• 1:31:57
  and it's got Tom Baker giving convention quotes.
• 1:32:01
  Hasn't it? It's got more Tom Baker.
• 1:32:03
  It's got the actual real Tom Baker in this because the the
• 1:32:05
  the way they defeat beat the Meep is addressed Tom Baker up
• 1:32:08
  as the Doctor, which is a lovely.
• 1:32:10
  I believe there's a sequence where Larry Grayson, the cast of
• 1:32:14
  Are You Being Served? Guards from Blake Seven are
• 1:32:18
  Chasing. The Doctrine of the Cast of
• 1:32:20
  Grange Hill, But. Listen, what do we say at this
• 1:32:23
  point? Scarper.
• 1:32:26
  It's so funny. Is that Is that Roger Landry's
• 1:32:28
  as well? That's Roger language as well,
• 1:32:30
  and you can go through every frame of this and look for the
• 1:32:32
  visual reference. The bit where they run through
• 1:32:34
  the set of faulty towers it's and oh the two basils.
• 1:32:39
  Cybil faulty gets mixed up with basil brush.
• 1:32:42
  But I've got a question then. Are they just bringing in this
• 1:32:45
  artist to do the comedy strips? I think at first they are, yeah.
• 1:32:50
  And I think that there was a realisation that they had
• 1:32:52
  something really wonderful there and that he could do quirky, but
• 1:32:57
  he could also do touching and and, you know, character drama.
• 1:33:03
  And of course, the autonomy bug lulls you into a bit of a false
• 1:33:06
  sense of security, because it looks like it's going to be a
• 1:33:08
  throwaway comedy story again. That's exactly where I was
• 1:33:12
  going. And I was going to circles right
• 1:33:14
  back round to the economy, which has such a touching ending where
• 1:33:18
  the Doctor basically the robots are thinking for themselves and
• 1:33:21
  this insane Cruella de Vil character is trying to torture
• 1:33:25
  them into subservience. And the Doctor's basically
• 1:33:29
  saying, no, they have independent thought they could
• 1:33:32
  be a civilization and people will accept them as they are.
• 1:33:35
  And I forget what Corella Deville's called now.
• 1:33:39
  I just kept calling it that. She's essentially saying, no,
• 1:33:42
  they're insane. That's that's why, you know,
• 1:33:44
  it's Doctor Who in an insane asylum, technically.
• 1:33:47
  But you get that wonderful ending that sit, that that
• 1:33:50
  picture at the end of robots and humans sitting down looking over
• 1:33:55
  the city. It's gorgeous.
• 1:33:58
  And the robots? Are being individuals, being
• 1:34:01
  themselves doing mad things. And you realise who the narrator
• 1:34:05
  of this story has been all along.
• 1:34:06
  It's this cute dark robot who hasn't asked a word throughout.
• 1:34:11
  As a self-contained story with visual invention and brilliant
• 1:34:15
  jokes and quirky characters and genuine emotion, when that is
• 1:34:20
  being directed at automatons, I just think that's an astonishing
• 1:34:24
  piece of work. It is.
• 1:34:25
  It is. It's a it's a it's a beautiful 3
• 1:34:28
  parter. It's it's so perfectly realized
• 1:34:31
  as well and he doesn't. It's it's funny because he
• 1:34:33
  doesn't really draw Paul McGann as Paul McGann.
• 1:34:36
  He's got another take on the Doctor.
• 1:34:37
  He's a bit more kind of rugged looking, but he somehow captures
• 1:34:41
  the character of the Doctor, the morality of that Doctor and it,
• 1:34:45
  and it builds further on on what's been established in in
• 1:34:48
  the 8th Doctor strips. I I don't know quite why he
• 1:34:52
  draws Izzy as if she's had a ton of filler in her lips, because
• 1:34:55
  she's just got the fullest lips during his script at his strips.
• 1:34:59
  But do you know what? Can I just say one?
• 1:35:02
  Just one word for the full page spread of all the robots that
• 1:35:06
  Izzy faces when she first meets them?
• 1:35:10
  The amount of detail in that picture is incredible like that.
• 1:35:16
  That's going to take a while to draw that picture.
• 1:35:18
  That's a lot of work and and again it's it's the quality of
• 1:35:22
  of black and white art. I think that this is, this is
• 1:35:25
  the kind of detail that we're not going to see again once it
• 1:35:27
  goes into colour and you could you could just sit studying this
• 1:35:30
  picture for for hours I think. But I can imagine that he didn't
• 1:35:34
  get yeah, I want this robot and that robot just draw a page full
• 1:35:38
  of crazy robots. I think so.
• 1:35:40
  I think he's been tasked with giving and they've all got The
• 1:35:43
  thing is, and this is actually quite a difficult thing to
• 1:35:47
  communicate in in in a in a piece of line drawing the fact
• 1:35:50
  that they've all got their faces painted on is really clear, but
• 1:35:54
  they all have their own personalities as well.
• 1:35:56
  I love this device. You know they have to wipe off
• 1:35:58
  their faces and draw that their their expression on to show how
• 1:36:01
  they're feeling. And then the the emperor, you
• 1:36:04
  know, the the small egg shaped robot where he just draws the
• 1:36:07
  two crosses and the sad face to express his emotion.
• 1:36:11
  It's it's fantastic. It's so great.
• 1:36:14
  And the use of fonts. Every robot has his own
• 1:36:17
  individual fonts, which I love. I'm assuming this is all time
• 1:36:20
  consuming. I would assume so.
• 1:36:24
  It it looks like a a hell of a lot of work and maybe they gave
• 1:36:29
  language a bigger run and maybe this was while the glorious dead
• 1:36:32
  was being put out. He knew that this was coming up.
• 1:36:36
  Do you remember those Patrick Trout and strips where it didn't
• 1:36:39
  look like Patrick Trout at all and the artwork was just all a
• 1:36:42
  bit terrible and it's. Very messy, very very messy
• 1:36:45
  artwork. Yeah.
• 1:36:46
  Like that's sort of like in a tie in magazine.
• 1:36:49
  That's the sort of thing you could probably come to expect.
• 1:36:51
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:36:52
  What they're actually delivering at this point, it's I'm going to
• 1:36:56
  be bold and say it's genuinely artistic.
• 1:36:59
  Oh, I think it's. Yeah, unquestionably.
• 1:37:00
  If artistic means it it it's a piece of art that draws out an
• 1:37:06
  emotion, well then it works for me.
• 1:37:08
  Yeah, absolutely. And apparently Adrian Simon
• 1:37:11
  works on bigger art boards, so it's his.
• 1:37:13
  His stuff is reduced down from, I think, a three.
• 1:37:17
  Well, we have gone through the glorious Dead in some depth
• 1:37:21
  there. On to my final and favorite part
• 1:37:33
  of the episode and that is recommendations.
• 1:37:37
  What have you got for me, Comic strip?
• 1:37:39
  Wise it. Would be funny if I recommend
• 1:37:42
  the one that you've chosen again.
• 1:37:44
  Well, I've got two, so there's. I'll go to the other one then.
• 1:37:46
  Look, I'm going to, I'm going to go for Obvious because it's the
• 1:37:51
  one that I loved the most when I was younger.
• 1:37:56
  And that is what was once published as The Dalek
• 1:37:58
  Chronicles. But I think has more recently
• 1:38:01
  just been rebranded The Daleks, which is the TV 21 strips, which
• 1:38:08
  was single page strips and they ran for a few years and I just
• 1:38:13
  think they're one of the most beautiful things to come out of
• 1:38:15
  the 60s for Doctor Who. They have these bright colours
• 1:38:21
  that the Doctor Who strips couldn't compete with the, you
• 1:38:24
  know, the Doctor. As we said that the William
• 1:38:25
  Hartnell strips were very much four children and quite
• 1:38:28
  childishly drawn. They couldn't compete with this.
• 1:38:31
  This was Gerry Anderson's publication and you first of all
• 1:38:34
  you got Richard Jennings giving these detailed kind of almost
• 1:38:40
  steam punky depictions of the Daleks and this very, I think
• 1:38:46
  it's it's of its time, but it's a very beguiling world that's
• 1:38:51
  painted where David Whitaker and Terry Nation were still kind of
• 1:38:54
  creating the world of the dialects and they were given
• 1:38:56
  more personalities and there's a Talek Emperor who's his own
• 1:39:00
  person. All the little bumps, doesn't he
• 1:39:03
  around it. All the lies around his.
• 1:39:04
  And and the massive head yeah. And the Dialects are you know
• 1:39:07
  they have to have conversations they have to fall out with each
• 1:39:09
  other. You've got to have Dialects who
• 1:39:11
  you know have rebellious tendencies and they've and and
• 1:39:14
  because the Dialects are heroes of their own strip they come up
• 1:39:17
  against other monsters. I I think the the artwork is
• 1:39:23
  beautiful to look at and then it it's it goes up a gear.
• 1:39:26
  There's there's a one off by Eric EADS, I think his name was
• 1:39:31
  and that's more in the kind of Thunderbird style style you
• 1:39:34
  recognize if you've seen any of the old Thunderbirds comics,
• 1:39:37
  that's beautiful and colorful and it's like Thunderbirds meets
• 1:39:40
  the Daleks from the movies. And then an artist called Ron
• 1:39:43
  Turner takes over and it's suddenly the whole thing goes
• 1:39:46
  into almost an art deco quality of graphic design.
• 1:39:51
  And the the page layouts are suddenly really exciting and I
• 1:39:55
  think every single one of his pages is we're talking about.
• 1:40:00
  I I I think again these are these are just every every page
• 1:40:03
  is a piece of artwork beautiful to look at and the stories are
• 1:40:07
  great. You know they're they're great
• 1:40:09
  adventure. You know they're they're yarns
• 1:40:11
  and they are they feel a bit dated now but by God, they they
• 1:40:15
  they keep coming up with new new challenges for the Daleks, new
• 1:40:18
  ways to make them kind of scheming and exciting and
• 1:40:21
  powerful. The You know, it's a province of
• 1:40:24
  Dalek mania and the likes of which we'll never see again.
• 1:40:27
  I love the fact, like you say they're the heroes of the piece.
• 1:40:30
  So it's like how will the Daleks escape this time?
• 1:40:32
  You know, it's like how did we ever get here?
• 1:40:35
  But oh man, some of the the bitchy interplay is fabulous.
• 1:40:39
  The power struggles. It's brilliant.
• 1:40:44
  I think some Doctor Who, oh, I seem to remember some Doctor Who
• 1:40:47
  art was in an exhibition before and I I swear some of those
• 1:40:52
  early die because that sort of pulpy sort of 60s art that pops
• 1:40:57
  with colour, it's just made to be on a wall.
• 1:41:00
  Isn't it particularly the wrong Turner ones?
• 1:41:02
  They they they looked like pop art at the time.
• 1:41:06
  They went to huge lengths to get the original copies of this for
• 1:41:11
  the for the the the Booker Z and I think they call them slightly
• 1:41:15
  pretentiously now that was put out a few years ago.
• 1:41:19
  I looked, I checked. You can't get it from Panini
• 1:41:21
  anymore. But you can get them on eBay,
• 1:41:23
  and if you haven't read these I just I highly recommend you get
• 1:41:25
  hold of. A Yeah, I think I'm going to
• 1:41:27
  need to get hold of those. Well, unfortunately I'm not
• 1:41:29
  going for something quite as exciting as that.
• 1:41:33
  I've got two choices and I think I'm going to go for the 2nd, but
• 1:41:36
  I'm going to mention the first, which is The Cruel Sea by Rob
• 1:41:41
  Shimmer, which is a Knife Doctor comic strip.
• 1:41:45
  The the They didn't last very long because he wasn't around
• 1:41:49
  for very long. But this was Rob Shimmer's only
• 1:41:53
  strip for DWM, and it's got his hallmarks all over.
• 1:41:57
  Have you have you read this one? I haven't read this one, but you
• 1:42:00
  had me at the words Rob Scheerman.
• 1:42:02
  I'm telling you now, if Rusty Davis didn't read The Cruel Sea
• 1:42:06
  when it went out and it didn't influence Wild Blue Yonder,
• 1:42:09
  which is just aired, then it's a remarkable coincidence.
• 1:42:13
  Because there is artwork in this where people melt, where mouths
• 1:42:18
  fall down and people crawl into them, where people turn
• 1:42:21
  absolutely enormous. I'm going to try and find you
• 1:42:23
  one of them more disturbing images that appears in in this
• 1:42:29
  graphic novel. I mean, Rose, this is Rose.
• 1:42:34
  This is her enormous head there coming out of that panel.
• 1:42:38
  Well, OK, yeah, I can see totally see where you would
• 1:42:42
  think of Wild Blue Yonder. That's interesting, because Wild
• 1:42:44
  Blue Yonder reminded me of Scat. So which is Rob Sherman?
• 1:42:47
  Isn't? It Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:42:49
  Why? Do you know what?
• 1:42:50
  I think Russell Davis might be a fan when when the Daleks were
• 1:42:54
  being used in series one, I think, he said to Nick Briggs.
• 1:42:57
  You know, like Jubilee, we'll do it like Jubilee, you know, I
• 1:43:00
  don't know what's Jubilee wasn't.
• 1:43:02
  It. It's weird.
• 1:43:06
  It is scary. It's it's some of the bizarreest
• 1:43:12
  art you're ever going to see in Doctor Who Magazine.
• 1:43:14
  I'm not entirely sure how it got printed because some of it is
• 1:43:18
  very, very disturbing and typically Rob Sheeran.
• 1:43:21
  It's an imaginative story with an emotional punch at the end as
• 1:43:24
  well. Very much in the new series
• 1:43:26
  style, Very much sort of soap opera emotion, but it works a
• 1:43:32
  tree, so check that out. How interesting that he's only
• 1:43:35
  done the one. Well, one TV episode and one
• 1:43:39
  comic strip. Yeah, I mean I, I, I, I think
• 1:43:44
  his Wordsmith 3 is is always just something to luxuriate in
• 1:43:53
  and I can imagine how well he writes for the for the visual
• 1:43:56
  format actually. I'm currently going through the
• 1:43:58
  1st 50 releases of Big Finish Audios for Finish Big and every
• 1:44:03
  time Rob Shuman turns up it's just the highlight.
• 1:44:07
  Amazing, but the what I'm actually going to highlight is
• 1:44:11
  beautiful Freak from the Oblivion set, because I would
• 1:44:18
  have thought it was nigh impossible to tell a character
• 1:44:22
  piece that moving in a single part and it's just a beautiful
• 1:44:28
  character tale with really striking artwork.
• 1:44:31
  It's effectively the Doctor taking Izzy, who's been turned
• 1:44:36
  into a fish woman who's been turned into Destry, into the
• 1:44:39
  TARDIS, and trying to get her to acclimatise to that new form and
• 1:44:45
  to get her to breathe under the sequence where she's under the
• 1:44:48
  water and he's trying to get her to breathe.
• 1:44:51
  But it's so unnatural to her. I just wouldn't believe you
• 1:44:55
  could. You could tell something that
• 1:44:56
  powerful in still images. I know I keep saying in still
• 1:44:59
  images but it's extraordinary. It's funny, isn't it?
• 1:45:02
  Because they are still images. But when I think back to that
• 1:45:05
  story, I don't remember still images.
• 1:45:07
  I remember movement. I remember Bubbles under the
• 1:45:10
  under the water. That's an astonishing one off
• 1:45:13
  and and they it's sort of they earn it, don't they.
• 1:45:17
  I mean they plan this trajectory for that character the likes of
• 1:45:21
  which few if any other Doctor Who companions have have have
• 1:45:24
  been on and they earn this incredible character study.
• 1:45:31
  This is just astonishing situation for a character to be
• 1:45:34
  in and just a A1 off episode where she gets to grieve and to
• 1:45:40
  explore and discover about herself.
• 1:45:44
  What they've also got is the beautiful TARDIS imagery from
• 1:45:49
  the TV movie. Yeah, but they don't really go
• 1:45:52
  to the places we've seen before. We look in Izzy's bedroom.
• 1:45:54
  There's a shattered mirror with the Doctor's reflection in it to
• 1:45:59
  to express, you know how how disturbed she is.
• 1:46:02
  Bold. Is that the this image here of
• 1:46:05
  the swimming pool? Oh, look at that.
• 1:46:07
  Well, the fact that the TARDIS has a swimming pool that fits in
• 1:46:10
  with the design of the 8th Doctor's TARDIS.
• 1:46:11
  With a window reflected, it's just astonishing it it's
• 1:46:16
  incredibly good. So I wanted to say that because
• 1:46:20
  I think it's worth pointing out that the single part stories, as
• 1:46:25
  good as the comedy ones are and they're brilliant, that every
• 1:46:29
  now and again they can just do a small there's a Frobisher one as
• 1:46:31
  well, isn't there later. On very very touching story
• 1:46:35
  again and it's and it's comical but it's but it it it's very
• 1:46:39
  moving and it's just after Izzy's left and you see the
• 1:46:42
  Doctor. You've sort of given the the
• 1:46:44
  punchline away but you see the Doctor talking to the bum and
• 1:46:47
  and and exploring again. It's just a moment of
• 1:46:49
  reflection, really. Not much story to speak of, but
• 1:46:53
  a but a character moment. What I'm going to say is, after
• 1:46:57
  listening to us for an hour and a half go, what about how
• 1:47:01
  fabulous these comic strips are? If we haven't convinced some
• 1:47:04
  people to go out and give them a go?
• 1:47:06
  If they haven't, then I think they're mad.
• 1:47:08
  But give it one final push. Why should people go and read
• 1:47:11
  the comics? Because the 8th Doctor comics
• 1:47:18
  are the most consistent run of Doctor Who for any Doctor in any
• 1:47:23
  medium ever. Is that too bold a statement?
• 1:47:28
  I don't think it is. No, I don't think it is.
• 1:47:30
  Like I I was a massive fan of the 8th Doctor books, but I know
• 1:47:33
  they're very up and down, but the UPS are huge highs.
• 1:47:38
  And I like Paul Megan on audio, but bugger me.
• 1:47:42
  He's got so many stories now. I wouldn't, even if you were
• 1:47:45
  going to start with McGann. Like, where the hell do you?
• 1:47:47
  Start which Yeah. Which McGann do you start with?
• 1:47:50
  Whereas the strips are there, you've got what, 4 volumes?
• 1:47:53
  4 volumes and they follow a cycle so perfect that it could
• 1:48:00
  almost have been planned that way.
• 1:48:03
  None of it was. I mean, in fact, it's so good.
• 1:48:06
  Russell T Davis offered them the regeneration.
• 1:48:10
  And in retrospect, thank God that they decided against that
• 1:48:15
  and it just ends with Paul McGann or he off into the
• 1:48:18
  sunset. That's how it should end.
• 1:48:19
  This feels completely self-contained.
• 1:48:21
  There's no need to start with Ground Zero.
• 1:48:23
  You don't need the Doctor before he strides out of the TARDIS
• 1:48:26
  into four volumes of sheer, varied bliss.
• 1:48:32
  I knew this was going to be a good conversation, and it's very
• 1:48:35
  different from anything else I've talked about and I've done
• 1:48:38
  on the book club before. I just want to say thank you
• 1:48:42
  very much. It's been really fun to explore
• 1:48:44
  the comics. It's been really exciting to
• 1:48:46
  talk about it, yeah, yeah. And it's made me want to go back
• 1:48:47
  and read them again, which is inconvenient because I've not a
• 1:48:51
  lot of time at the moment, but fortunately.
• 1:48:53
  Now I've got to go and spend my Christmas reading transit.
• 1:48:57
  Oh, whose fault is that? I wonder, and I'm hoping.
• 1:49:01
  I'm really, truly hoping that's going to be a revelation.
• 1:49:05
  That book I remember the first time I read it.
• 1:49:07
  I was so appalled I refused to write a review.
• 1:49:10
  It's the only book I didn't write a review.
• 1:49:12
  No. But since then I've spoken to
• 1:49:17
  many smart people that said sort of come away from the ick and
• 1:49:22
  focus on the setting. I think that book has many
• 1:49:27
  things to enjoy and I will happily launch a defence of it
• 1:49:33
  in the next Hamster Book Club. And I'll just say until next
• 1:49:37
  time.