Panini Publishing The Dragon's Claw A Graphic Novel Collection

Written by	Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse
Drawn by	Dave Gibbons and Mike McMahon
Published	2004
ISBN	1 904159 81 8

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 11/8/05

Doctor Who Graphic Novel #2: Dragon's Claw is fantastic news. The Iron Legion collection was great, but still better is the fact that we now have volumes 2-3 in the shops with 4-7 promised to come. Those will collect the McGann strips, starting with the entire Threshold saga from Endgame to Wormwood. After that we'll get the arc which culminated in The Glorious Dead, the Izzy-is-a-fish arc and then finally the post-Izzy run which ended with The Flood.

Whatever you thought of those strips at the time (and I think people will be astonished at how much better they'll look collected into graphic novels), it's wonderful at last to be getting proper comics archives. And make no mistake, these are definitive collections. Quality paper, painstaking digital restoration, no horrible colourisation... personally I think every Doctor Who fan should be stockpiling these. Anyone who buys these first three collections will have acquired well over 500 pages of comics history. Oh, and they're bloody good as well.

As a collection, Dragon's Claw is a bit of an odd fish. Iron Legion (#1) contained mostly long stories, 34 pages apiece. Tides of Time (#3) is a single interweaving epic, with each story leading into the next. However these stories are from the era when the Weekly became the Monthly and the strip became a mix of one- and two-parters. Dragon's Claw (DWM 39-45) is the handover strip from when DWW became DWM, but otherwise it's a perfect 50-50 split between 16-pagers and 8-pagers. (No, I tell a lie... War of the Words is actually 9 pages.)

This doesn't make it a bad read, though! Dragon's Claw is a terrific romp of an adventure set in 1522 China in the legendary Shaolin monastery. (If that doesn't mean anything to you, ask a martial arts freak.) As an aside, the story's writer is the same Steve Moore who went on to pen The Trigrams of Han and in-depth Fortean Times articles on Chinese topics. He knows his stuff!

The Collector, Dreamers of Death, War of the Words and The Freefall Warriors are further adventure romps. Junk-Yard Demon also falls into that category, but with an eccentric twist courtesy of art by the genius Mike McMahon (instead of by the genius Dave Gibbons, who drew everything else in this collection).

The Life Bringer is a strange one. Set who knows where and who knows when, this pits the Doctor and K9 against the Greek gods. No, really! They've sterilised the galaxy, but Prometheus wants to seed the stars with men again. In response Zeus chained him to a mountain. This story is one hell of a mindfuck, not least because these really are godlike gods. They toss around thunderbolts and reshape galaxies. We've seen other writers try to introduce mythology (classical and otherwise) to Doctor Who, but never with even half as much effect as here.

Spider-God, The Deal, End of the Line and The Neutron Knights are more sombre. Doctor Who hasn't often dabbled in tragedy and oddly its most successful and sustained run was in DWM's comic strip of the early eighties. For more examples see the Davison and Colin Baker eras, but of them all the biggest kick in the stomach is possibly End of the Line. Spider-God, The Deal and The Neutron Knights are merely downbeat, with the last of those having a Logopolis-like funereal atmosphere (concluding with an almost haggard portrayal of Tom Baker making his final appearance).

However when I was eight, End of the Line practically traumatised me. Parkhouse and Gibbons create a bleak, appalling world of cannibals and poisonous wastelands. I won't say more, but... brrrr.

Do I even need to mention that these writers and artists are practically gods of the comics industry? For its first eight years, the DWM strip rode the wave of a huge UK comics renaissance that reads like a Who's Who of the industry's all-time greats. Parkhouse, Moore, Gibbons, McMahon... it hardly gets better than this.

Continuity-wise it's fairly light. There are Sontarans, Cybermen and K9, but most of the monsters and characters are all-new. We say goodbye to Sharon (first seen in The Star Beast), but K9's final appearance (two stories later) goes unremarked. We'd already seen it on TV.

In fact this collection is more significant for its comic strip continuity. Sharon departs, but there's the debut of Dr Ivan Asimoff, who would return to help the 6th Doctor fight Astrolabus. The Deal introduces the Millennium Wars, a thousand worlds in conflict for a thusand years, and The Neutron Knights is practically The Tides of Time part zero. Catavolcus, Merlin, Arthur and the rest are all introduced here.

This collection is very different in tone from ,a href=csgraphiciron.htm>The Iron Legion. The Weekly's comics were rollicking adventures (albeit with bleaker fare in the back-up strips), but Steve Parkhouse's accession saw the strip go darker and deeper. Parkhouse's Whoniverse isn't quite like anything else in Who. It lasted for four years and built itself up into a wild, witty, disturbing multiverse of richness, magic and towering imagination. Its full flowering was yet to come, but this volume contains its seeds. I could hardly recommend it more highly.