Script: Scott Gray Art: Adrian Salmon
Master Who by Noe Geric 10/1/20
A special strip celebrating the Master's 30th anniversary. In this one, we follow the incredible Delgado Master visiting an old house owned by Moriarty and his gang of fictional villains. The Master is perhaps the only good character of the story; he's exactly like we know him, and we don't learn anything new about him. All the other characters are the bad-guys cliche and Moriarty (the great leader) is crap. The Master beat everyone in three panels and the story ends.
I can summarise the story like this. Nothing new is said about the Master. We've got the ''I am the Master and you will obey me'' line, the evil plan and the evil laugh of Ainley's Master. The story is quite flat. The Master enters the house where all the bad guys are, wants to join their club for whatever reason and beats them all with Venusian karate.
The comic is supposed to show us than the Master shouldn't be compared to Moriarty, that he's far more powerful than this little human. So Moriarty briefly appears at the end and is quickly killed.
The story isn't original. It's fun to see what the Master is doing when he doesn't fight the Doctor, but there's really nothing here. The Master acts like the Doctor but with ''evil purposes''. If he beat the bad guys, that's because he's more evil than them, that's the only justification. The Master IS the Doctor here.
Adrian Salmon's drawing are horrible. I really don't like what he has done here, and the colour doesn't help. Salmon has done great things (The Company of Thieves) and even the worst of the strip (Universal Monsters), but here it's bad. Only the Master is good; all the other characters are unrecognisable most of the time.
This story is quite useless and not really a celebration. There could've been better way to tell a great story in seven pages, but we've only got traditional Doctor Who but with the villain as the hero. I give it 4/10 because it's not the worst strip of the DWM, but it isn't really original except for the Master's point of view.