Endgame
A Graphic Novel Collection
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Panini Publishing Endgame A Graphic Novel Collection |
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| Published | 2009 |
A Review by Finn Clark 25/6/10
I always used to think this was the worst that the DWM comic strip ever got, although that was before Tennant. It's easy to think of these stories as the strip's equivalent of Season 24, although the neatness of this analogy is undermined by the fact that this run goes from the end of 1987 up to mid-1989, which is getting close to the start of Season 26. Nevertheless, the basic principle still holds. This is a time when the strip was floundering around with a right old rag-bag of artists and a run of scripts that are best remembered for doing crossovers with Death's Head and the Sleeze Brothers.
Apparently there were financial reasons, with the magazine in trouble and bad artists being cheap. Nevertheless, I remember it as a shock at the time. There's no way I was going to be happy about going from the magnificent Ridgway to the likes of Kev Hopgood and Tim Perkins, or worse still Martin Griffiths and Cam Smith. That doesn't mean they'd do work like that these days, of course. A lot of these people were young and starting out on their careers. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that there's stuff in here that doesn't look fit for publication. Often the pencils are sloppy, the inking is unclear and their 7th Doctor's face appears to be made of silly putty. It looks even worse if you're seeing it in the pages of DWM, by the way, which at the time seemed to have an air of cheapness. I'm sure that was mostly thanks to their financial situation (i.e. it literally was cheap), but the magazine's dog-ugly interpretation of the McCoy-era logo back then didn't help. Today, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the strips looked in this graphic novel, printed on good paper and collected together into a very nice looking book. Despite my memories, I was excited to read them.
So, are they good? I don't know if I'd go that far. They're passable, with the best of them merely reaching the heights of "quite amusing" rather than getting even near the level of the best of Steve Parkhouse, Jamie Delano and so on. Apparently Richard Starkings' brief as editor to his writers and artists was to make the strip more like the TV show, with "The Something of the Something" titles and aliens that should look more like actors in rubber suits. No, really. He says so in the commentary on page 177. However are the stories better than I thought they were? Definitely. Going into detail on them one by one is a job for another time, but in one specific sense I think they're even an improvement on the later Colin Baker strips. Script problems were more likely to get forgiven in those days because it's always good to see John Ridgway's art even when the stories aren't going anywhere, but think back to the likes of Exodus (DWM 108), Salad Daze (DWM 117), Profits of Doom (DWM 120-122) and so on. They're boring. They waste time on pointless TARDIS scenes involving the 6th Doctor, Peri and Frobisher, then never really get into gear thereafter even once the plot's under way. That's the big difference between these early McCoy strips and pretty much everything else for years and years around them: no companions. This 7th Doctor travelled solo. Admittedly he has Frobisher being uncharacteristically whiny and then leaving in Cold Day in Hell (DWM 130-133) and then Olla for a couple of milliseconds or so, but that's it. There's no Gus, Peri, Ace, Benny, New Ace, Izzy, Destrii, Shadye, Feyde and so on.
This makes them feel a bit bland and random, especially compared with the preceding Frobisher era, but at least it makes it harder for the writers to faff around. Once Olla's gone, the only TARDIS scene is the one at the end of Crossroads in Time (DWM 135) and that's cool because it has the Doctor managing not to get killed or dispossessed by Death's Head. You'll get the odd single panel in the console room in Planet of the Dead (DWM 141-142) and Follow That TARDIS! (DWM 147), but that's different.
I should probably expand on that "no companions" thing, by the way. My mental image of the strip for some reason has the Doctor travelling solo, yet that's not the case when you actually look at the stories. Technically speaking, the DWM Doctor's solo adventures cover the first two stories in the Weekly (DWW 1-16), then a couple of years between Sharon/K9 and Gus (DWM 52-75). After him you've got Frobisher, Peri and Olla until the companionless McCoy run of... well, this collection, basically. Ace doesn't appear until Fellow Travellers, but that was after guest companion slots for Abslom Daak and Sarah-Jane Smith. Since then, the only companionless run in the strip to date has been the Izzy-Destrii interlude in 2003, fourteen years later! Furthermore, even theoretically companionless stories will tend to have companion substitutes like Dr Ivan Asimoff, Justin, Shayde, Vesuvius, Maxwell Edison and so on. Admittedly, Richard Starkings wanted the writers of these early McCoy strips to create companion substitutes too.. It's just that they happened to be rubbish at it. I can see that the likes of Leapy and Nathaniel Derridge are meant to fulfil that function, but there's a reason why no one's remembered them. They're in Invaders from Gantac and Claws of the Klathi respectively, by the way.
However in a way, you could say that Starkings succeeded in his goal. These stories do resemble Season 24 more closely than their predecessors did the Saward era. There's a similar sense of whimsical incompetence, but also a kind of freedom. Neither the strip nor the TV show really knows what to do with it, but it's there. All four stories of that season could be described as goofy, in a manner that doesn't feel dissimilar to the silliness of The Crossroads of Time and Follow That TARDIS! If you had to pick an era for this kind of story, you'd pick this one. The strips could even be said to capture a specifically Season 24 version of McCoy's Doctor; for instance, with Grant Morrison giving us one of those scrambled sayings he used to come out with.
Then there's the story variety. You've got two rather dull stories which remind one of the previous comic strip era, possibly because they're the two drawn by John Ridgway. You've got a Grant Morrison story in which nearly half the action takes place at the microscopic level, then on the other hand the startling sight of the Doctor condemning almost an entire species to drown as he sails away in Time and Tide. There's quite a lot of hard SF tucked away in here, you know. You've got a historical in the surprisingly detailed Victoriana of Claws of the Klathi, for which both the writer and artist did more research than you'd expect. You've got comedies like Keepsake (which works) and Invaders from Gantac (which doesn't, but is still a cool idea). Aliens invade Earth by mistake! Then finally you've got The Crossroads of Time, Follow That TARDIS! and Planet of the Dead, which are about as self-indulgent as the DWM strip ever got and yet are also some of the most successful stories in this run. I don't much like Death's Head as a hero, but he's great as a Doctor Who crossover character. The Sleeze Brothers should have been funnier, but they're still a laugh. Finally Planet of the Dead has the goofiest-looking aliens in the history of the comic strip and doesn't even pretend not to be fanwank, but it's a light, fun read that on its own terms succeeds. Seven Doctors and six companions! That's all it's even trying to be.
Broadly speaking, I've even realised that I like the art. At times it's inexcusable, but tucked away in here is the debut of Lee Sullivan, a respectable amount of John Ridgway, a lovely looking story from John Higgins and one of my personal favourites, Geoff Senior. He's cartoonish, but in a good way. I also have a lot of time for the Braithwaite-Elliott character designs in Time and Tide, while I really enjoyed the artists' jam session in Follow That TARDIS!
Overall, this collection really surprised me. Its stories work much better in this nicely presented form than they did as occasionally amaterish snippets in a scraggy monthly magazine. There's nothing here that's special, which is something that the DWM comic strip used to manage surprisingly often, but on the other hand I'd remembered it as a slightly horrible period in the strip's history and that didn't hold true at all. They're a fun, breezy collection that even has me thinking better of the departure of the sainted John Ridgway. Variety is good, yes? It's still a nadir if we're going to be brutally honest, but it's a more interesting nadir than I thought it was and less of a downturn than I'd been bracing myself for. Too many of the stories are mediocre and show a poor understanding of what it takes to write for comics, but there's some lively fun stuff in there too. Simon Furman suddenly becomes good, a first for him in DWM, apparently kick-started by The Crossroads of Time in which he's doing a crossover from his best work, Transformers.
My favourite story? If we're being serious, Time and Tide. If we're not, Crossroads of Time or Keepsake.
"Pah! Your puny blows are like love taps!" by Neil Clarke 2/9/10
I fully appreciate how miraculous it is that these strips are being cleaned up and reissued as trade paperbacks, so it pains me to say this... but only completism should compel you to buy this particular collection.
Comics are, I think, the most underrated medium of Doctor Who, but they're one of my favourite formats because they're the only other visually oriented one, beside the series proper. I guess the novels are ultimately ideal, because there is the potential for so much more nuance and detail, but nothing beats being able to see a story unfold.
However, whereas the Tides of Time and Voyager collections make me want to rave, the most you could say of this is that it's quite fun, if you're in the right mood, but entirely disposable. In the introduction, the strip editor of the time, Richard Starkings, talks about making the strip more diverse, with self-contained and varied stories to mirror the series itself. Unfortunately, as his editorship followed Steve Parkhouse and John Ridgway's magnificent, fantastical opuses, this is total idiocy.
By some distance, the most throwaway phase of the strip (most recently rivalled by the uncertain period coinciding with series one in 2005, where DWM struggled to find a voice or tone), this collection even fails in being particularly like the series as it was. Unpopular it might be, but the bold, borderline-deranged concepts of season twenty-four would lend themselves very well to the strip format; instead, we get an endless juvenile obsession with robots, spaceships and Star-Trek-dull aliens (a trait continuing from the first predominantly disappointing collection, the preceding World Shapers). It's just so dreary and flat. (And, yes, I appreciate that the series itself has its share of these things but, at best, there's always been more to it; this incarnation of the strip doesn't even seem to appreciate this multilayering is possible.) I mean, robot-suited mercenaries; who ever thought that'd be interesting, unless given some unique spin. Which it isn't. It's so very lazy and unoriginal.
I always consider the Fourth Doctor strips to be fairly basic, playing as they do with quite pulpy and often-cliched B-movie ideas (emotionally oppressed populaces and a sci-fi Roman empire) but, by comparison to this, they're assured, confident, well-paced and stunningly drawn (incidentally, it's very odd - but welcome - seeing Dave Gibbons' recognisable Watchmen style applied to Doctor Who). They feel like proper stories, written by people who understand how to construct effective tales. Those in A Cold Day in Hell!, by contrast, are barely stories at all; more like inept, weedy vignettes, which lack enough interesting ideas to go round, even despite their brevity.
Okay, we can't always expect the fairytale sophistication and variety of arcs like The Tides of Time or Voyager, but come on. Those were possibly the most perfect statement of what DW can be: grand, whimsical, magical... The fact that that approach was deliberately ousted for this makes it all the more tragic! Also, that Starkings specifies he wanted artists to make monsters look like rubber-suited extras absolutely beggars belief; comics effectively provide an unlimited budget for every single frame: why restrict that?!?
As I said earlier, if you're in the right mood, some of these stories have a likeably silly goofiness... I just can't help contextualising them against their superior predecessors. These are pretty much what I imagine Doctor Who Battles or Adventures' strips must be like; basic, pedestrian, and undemanding even to a child audience.
The incompleteness of this collection's approach is exemplified by Planet of the Dead (no relation) - and let's not even start on the imaginatively barren tediousness of cramming as many past companions and Doctors into a story as possible. In fact, there isn't even a story; those appearances are its entire raison d'etre. (Compare to the later Ground Zero, where the appearance of Susan, Sarah, and Peri was gradually foreshadowed, and who warrant actual characterisation... ) However, it is good to see Jamie punch Adric in the face, in any context, even in spite of Lee Sullivan's empty backgrounds and nondescript stylelessness.
As for the art in general, though I appreciate the attempted variety, the diversity isn't really extreme enough to be effective; instead, it seems desperate, like they had to scrape each strip together with whoever they could find. (This inconsistency reminds me of The Flood, the least successful Eighth Doctor collection; a companionless Doctor jumping between unevenly varied tones and styles.)
Without a key artist holding it together, this collection ends up feeling bitty and incoherent. By contrast, the current Tenth Doctor stories get away with a diverse array of artists working in idiosyncratic styles - recently Adrian Salmon (Universal Monsters), Sean Longcroft (Mortal Beloved), Roger Langridge (Death to the Doctor!), Paul Grist (Ghosts of the Northern Line), and writer/artists Dan McDaid (Hotel Historia) and Rob Davis (The Deep Hereafter's Dick Tracy stylings). All of these are more extreme variations from the general norm than allowed here, but they work precisely because the strip is underpinned by the incumbency of Martin Geraghty and Mike Collins as the main artists. This way there is variation, but within an overarching coherency (something helped in part by consistent lettering).
I'm cheered whenever Geraghty appears; though he may not be groundbreaking, he is fab because of his impressive consistency and good likenesses - and is, obviously, excellent really. The DWM strip is lucky to have him, as he pisses over all of these weaker earlier images. Very noticeable, by comparison, is his stronger use of solid areas of black ink. Also, he makes me miss the complexity, sophistication and invention of the Eighth Doctor arcs: the mock-regeneration and seemingly new Doctor; the Dallas-style 'It was all a dream' moment of the Doctor waking up in bed with Grace and the 'Omniversal' varients of his life; Izzy's transformation. Having said that, it's really pleasing seeing a return to the arc format that characterised the Eighth Doctor's strips, in the use of the gap year to pair the Tenth Doctor up with strip companion Majenta Pryce, in the 'Crimson Hand' arc.
Collins, on the other hand, is completely mediocre, with a bland, cartoonish lack of detail or good likenesses, and none of the stylistic rigour of, say, Salmon. And how many times: the Tenth Doctor wears high-top Cons, not shell-toed sneakers, goddammit!)
All in all, I can't wait for the increased Andrew Cartmel influence on the Seventh Doctor strips; I've had the old, horribly-colourised Mark of Mandragora collection for years; overall, it's possibly even more pathetically shallow than Cold Day (a sobering thought), but Cartmel's Fellow Travellers is brilliant. It's still slight, plot-wise - let's say low-key - but with enough interest, depth, and characterisation to work; a simple (but adult) concept effectively realised. I can't wait to see Arthur Ranson's fantastically near-photorealist art without the felt-tip all over it!
Where Fellow Travellers has an authenticity perhaps due to Ace's presence, the continuity-twisting presence of Frobisher and continued referencing of Peri in Cold Day seems misplaced. Personally, I'd rather the strip either disassociated itself from televisual partnerships altogether, as per the Fourth to Sixth Doctor runs, or actually adhered to the televisual companions; a weird halfway-house mishmash just doesn't work The New Adventure-based strips featuring New Ace and Bernice will be interesting, in that regard (though I'd rather see Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester in a visual medium, myself... just me then? Chris'd probably never be as hot as he is in my head anyway.) Incidentally, I wonder if the completed Evening's Empire'll get published too.
I'm not, however, looking forward to the arrival of Absalom Daak - the concept of DW having its very own irony-free musclebound action hero is like slipping hardcore porn into CITV programming (well, probably only a matter of time). The character shows how massively the editor of this period fundamentally misapprehended DW. And it's just so eighties. Ick.
In terms of individual Cold Day stories, The Crossroads of Time is probably my favourite story here, being visually most solid, stylish and consistent (and, coincidentally, probably the closest to Gibbons' style and with an almost acceptable McCoy likeness!), as well as having a fun silliness which - crucially - seems to derive from an awareness of its own absurdity ("Hmm... Roomy, yes?"). I know nothing of Death's Head (I freely admit to not really knowing much at all about comics outside of DW), but it was nevertheless the most satisfactorily fun, with its lack of depth not feeling like a massive problem.
A Cold Day and Redemption! are depressingly blah, while the period setting of Claws of the Klathi! should be welcome but, even when venturing into the Victorian era, we still get aliens, a spaceship and a robot! The art is quite good, but a bit sketchy and unconfident, with no real solidity or depth.
Culture Shock! is simple but, like Crossroads of Time, it works because it's set up as a slight idea, not just an imaginatively lacking story proper. The messy scratchiness of the art works, but once again the McCoy likeness is dreadful. Keepsake, on the other hand, boasts possibly the best art, with a good use of shadow and 'lighting', and rugged, detailed faces, but the story is forgettable. Similarly, Echoes of the Mogor! includes some lovely Ridgway panels, but is still a tame Aliens rip-off; Ridgway just doesn't seem suited here; he rose to Parkhouse's big ideas, but comes over a bit banal when faced with mundane stories and is crap at McCoy, who's started to look like David Lynch regular Michael J Anderson (The Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks)...
Time and Tide is bright and bold and that's about it (and who is this man in the question mark jumper?!); Follow that TARDIS! isn't quite cartoony enough to work as a comedic 'madcap runaround'; a style akin to the later occasional Roger-Langridge-drawn light-relief stories might have worked (not that this collection really needs light relief). Finally, in Invaders from Gantac!, it appears the most underwhelmingly banal story really was saved til last.
Even the titles show up this period's naive, dated approach. The juvenile overuse of both exclamation marks and embarrassingly crap made-up SF words like Klathi and Gantac really grates, while needlessly hyperbolic titles like 'Crossroads of Time' seem absurd, and just make me think of Eddie Izzard's "Room With a View... OF HELL!" routine.
Given my appreciation of the strip in general, the underwhelmingness of these stories made me try to decide my favourite strips from the whole DWM run. Though I am affectionate about a lot (for example, nearly all those comprising the Endgame collection), bona fide favourites are relatively few and far between - and also quite predictable, I suppose. Incidentally, I can't help thinking what a shame it is that, apart from a couple of strips in the nineties, the first three Doctors are unrepresented in strip format, apart from in wildly apocryphal TV Action/Comic strips (were they even available).
Voyager and Once Upon a Time Lord for their hallucinatory richness; The Curse of the Scarab (straightforward, but enlivened by Geraghty's art and thethirties Hollywood studio setting); Endgame for its exploitation of the surreal potential of the Toymaker's domain, and Tooth and Claw (again, no relation) for Fey and the decadence of its island setting and monkey servants; the recent Thinktwice for its technicolour excess; the inevitable Tides of Time (and Stars Fell on Stockbridge); Fellow Travellers; Happy Deathday; the Fey-only Me and My Shadow; Land of Happy Endings; Target Practise; and, inevitably, the wonderfully mythological The Cybermen.
And, yes, there's no IDW there; from what I've seen, their output embraces a distressingly gleeful approach to fanwank, and awful fan-art styles, encapsulated by the ten-Doctor spread in The Forgotten, where each incarnation looks like a 16-year-old twink version drawn by someone entirely unfamiliar with the actual actors' appearances.
Unfortunately, none of A Cold Day's overarchingly simplistic and unsophisticated stories match the invention, imagination, beauty or humour of the best of the above strips. The consistently atrocious Seventh Doctor likenesses really don't help matters either. It's like no one really cared enough to try that much. And, no, I refuse to believe that reflects the show at the time.
Ah, well. I think I'm just going to have to wait for the Threshold arc to see the light at the end of the tunnel.