Daniel Indro

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-weeping-angels-of-mons-by-robbie-morrison-da...

Next in the sequence of Tenth Doctor comics, continuing his adventures with New Yorker Gabby Gonzalez. Most of the album is taken up with the title story, which on the face of it looks well qualified for my list of Belgium references in Doctor Who, except that most of the action is explicitly set across the border in the (fictional) French town of St Michel. Gabby gets a bit more character development here, and knowing as we do what the ultimate fate of Amy and Rory is, the Angels are a source of real menace. A shorter story at the end, Echo, takes Gabby back to New York to fend off an alien threat and reconnect with her family. Enjoyable stuff.… (more)

This comic features the Doctor’s scariest enemies, the Weeping Angels. If you’re like me, you’ll probably be not blinking for most of your reading. I yelled out loud when the comic revealed how one character prevented himself from blinking. Yikes! The First World War setting was a good one, and it was interesting to see where people ended up when they had been attacked by the Weeping Angels. I liked the writing and the Scottish connections—Robbie Morrison is easily my favourite Doctor Who comics writer. I was less interested in the smaller story, Echoes; the art was less interesting and because the story was shorter, there wasn’t much to it. It was fine, but The Weeping Angels of Mons was definitely better. The only thing Mons did not have enough of was the biplanes featured on the cover!… (more)

When they were introduced in the classic Who episode “Blink” the Weeping Angels were a great concept, but I felt their subsequent reuse in the TV series devalued their impact. But their use here makes total sense.

If there had to be a follow up Angels story, then this was the right one. The battlefields of WW1 makes the perfect setting for the Doctor’s reencounter with these iconic creatures.

It’s a heart-felt poignant story of duty, and sacrifice that hits all the right notes of classic Who.… (more)

I'm of two minds about Titan's Twelfth Doctor ongoing. I find the plots very uninteresting. Evil fire monsters who are ancient enemies of the Time Lords invade the Earth, blah blah blah. It's Doctor Who at its most generic, which is a shame, because on screen, the Peter Capaldi era was Doctor Who at some of its most inventive and clever. In his three seasons, we only got three alien invasion stories by my count, and all of them (the 2014 Missy/Cyberman two-parter, the 2015 Zygon two-parter, and the 2017 Monks trilogy) did really interesting and clever stuff with the concept, and mostly used alien invasions as a way of exploring other issues: mortality, xenophobia, compliance and resistance. The Hyperion storyline does nothing like that; these are just stompy alien fire monsters who want to burn down the Earth and drain the sun, and the human guest characters are about as complex as a bad drawing. Plus there's this really clunky bit where the Doctor leaves in the middle of a crisis to get the stuff he needs to defeat the aliens from other times and places, which I think creates more problems than it solves.

But writer Robbie Morrison really gets the voices of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and Jenna Coleman as Clara. I can imagine Capaldi saying these lines, and can hear how he would balance warmth and coldness in that way only he can do. So even if the experience of reading the overall story was meh, the experience of reading any individual page was usually pretty enjoyable, so long as the Doctor was on it. (On the other hand, George Mann, who pens a single-issue story about Victorian vampires, writes a pretty generic Doctor.) So far the best this series has been is the Las Vegas story in vol 2, which was fun and inventive just like the twelfth Doctor's era on screen. If Morrison can do more stuff like that and less stuff like this, he can do something really interesting, I reckon. I hope so.

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