The Forgotten
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IDW Comics The Forgotten |
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| Published | 2008 |
A Review by Finn Clark 17/8/12
Inoffensive but pointless. Fanwank apalooza, with extra fanwank on top. Gary Russell's Agent Provocateur had more of a reason to exist, although The Forgettable scores better on the metrics of "not grotesquely incompetent" and "won't make you want to bludgeon the Doctor and Martha to death". I didn't despise it or anything, but it's basically a DWM anniversary special one-off that happens to be 132 pages long instead of eight. Does it matter in the slightest? Hell, no.
It's The Ten Doctors, basically. The Doctor finds himself in an exhibition about himself, then spends five-sixths of the series having flashbacks to mini-stories starring his past incarnations, each about seven pages long. These have fannish little touches like Hartnell and Troughton being coloured in black-and-white... and these are different styles of black-and-white to boot! The former has just a hint of sepia, while the latter's monochrome is more reminiscent of a black-and-white TV image. You'll notice similar subtleties in the colouring of all the Doctors' stories, in fact. However, the likenesses are weak. I thought that was Liz Shaw in the back of Bessie until the Brigadier called her Miss Grant, for instance. I'm not a likeness Nazi, but here everyone basically looks the same and there's no real attempt at capturing the essence of, say, Troughton or Tom Baker. It's not just that they don't look like the original actors, but that they don't have a huge amount of character.
As for the plots of these mini-stories, Hartnell gets a historical, Davison plays cricket and so on. These are mostly a waste of time and I'm not giving Tony Lee a free pass on this because there are quite a few memorable DWM one-parters of around this length. There's nothing of interest in the 1st-3rd and 6th-8th Doctors' stories. McGann is part of the Time War and given a companion that appears to suggest the time period of Utopia, which I have a feeling would be a plot hole since I thought the whole point of that era was that it was so far in the future as to be beyond even the Time War. The discussion of the Troughton story also ignores Season 6B, The World Shapers and so on, which I wouldn't have thought twice about if the book weren't also retconning the 1996 TVM and name-dropping the house at Allen Road.
Turning to the non-pointless stories, Tom Baker's one has a French minotaur called Taureau, which makes it appealingly mad. Davison's story has lovely, simple colouring, a funny line about Australians and quite a good plot with the Judoon. Finally, Eccleston helps organise that famous 1914 Christmas Day football match between British and German soldiers in World War One, which is a rather lovely occasion to see, even if I'm not sure about yet another iconic historical event having turned out to have been due to alien interference. Yes, I know he's just the Doctor, but even so.
Here and there, I was reminded of other comic strip eras. "That would be me. I am the Doctor. These are my companions," says an unrecognisable Hartnell. It's TV Comic! There's also a 1980s DWM buzz in seeing a dodgily drawn McCoy.
As for how many Doctors, companions and monsters appear, it would be quicker to cite the ones who don't. The black-and-white companions are sparsely represented, with Steven Taylor being the only one to have been in neither season 1 nor 6. The only others not to appear are Liz Shaw, K9, Mary Tamm's Romana, Donna and Captain Jack, unless you count Grace Holloway and/or Adam from The Long Game. K9 would appear to be the most surprising omission, especially given that Tony Lee uses Kamelion.
Overall, there's just not that much to this one. It has a few nice touches, such as the cricket, the contrast between the philosophies of the 3rd Doctor and the Brigadier, and the simple effectiveness of how Tony Lee summarises the Doctor on page one. Compare with Gary Russell's eight-page version of the same thing in Agent Provocateur. I also quite liked the Doctor's goodbye at the very end, while for some reason I got a kick out of seeing a Voc from Robots of Death walking side by side with a Clockwork Robot from Girl in the Fireplace. It's also worth noting that Pia Guerra is an Eisner-Award-winning artist thanks to her work with Jose Marzan, Jr. on Y: The Last Man, which I think makes her the fourth Eisner-winner to work on Doctor Who after Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and Paul Neary, unless you count Grant Morrison via All Star Superman. (They should get Kevin O'Neill to do a Who strip. He's one of the last big 1970s names not to have worked on DWM and who today might still be prepared to do it.)
Tony Lee also wrote F.A.Q. in DWM 369-371 and that was bollocks too. I didn't mind The Forgotten, but I don't really see the point in either writing or reading it.