Script: Gareth Roberts Art: Mike Collins, David A. Roach, James Offredi
A Review by Finn Clark 16/9/06
It's like the best Faction Paradox comic never published. The story begins with "We're through, Uncle Bloodfinger!" over a cityscape of Olde London Town in the late 16th century. Time-active beings want to meddle with the history of William Shakespeare, his world and thus also the early 21st century. Could you get more Mad-Larrian? To be honest I wish DWM had gone the whole hog and actually got permission to turn the villains into Faction agents instead of generic interdimensional demons, unimaginatively called Shadeys. One of Gareth Roberts's problems is that he loves playing with cliche as a form of self-aware comedy, which can at times be funny while still leaving you wishing he'd invented something original instead. I'm thinking particularly about his aliens. Making this a Faction Paradox story would have split 8DA continuity like a rotten fruit, but it's not as if that's unprecedented for DWM's comic strip and besides it might have been a laugh. The only possible stumbling block might have been that this tale is much more fun than the ill-fated official Faction Paradox comic from Mad Norwegian Press and Image Comics, cancelled in 2003 after two issues of Lawrence Miles going nowhere fast.
I'm not the greatest fan of Gareth Roberts's comic strips, but I liked this. He's actually writing about something! He's having fun with language, contrasting Shakespeare's English with its modern equivalent. The poetry is lovely, but there's just as much playfulness with today's idiom. "And I was like 'What?' and she was like 'Yeah'..." It's full of nice touches, and of course the great thing about Gareth is that he has opinions. He doesn't merely trot out the party line about "Shakespeare was a god and we should worship him" (although he was and we should). He has Rose giving commentary, speaking up for every schoolchild who ever suffered through English lessons.
It's witty, on both a script and a plot level. It concludes with an emotional realisation, but it also gets a laugh out of undercutting its own Big Heartfelt Moment. I also love the fact that this is a story not about Shakespeare, but about a forgotten playwright who hated his guts and today isn't famous at all. As with Gareth's musings on the nature of mankind in Only Human, it's simultaneously a good joke and a serious point, in this case about the nature of fame and how we imagine we'll be remembered. Of course the Doctor and Rose do meet Shakespeare in the end, but he's not the main character. That's Robert Greene. I don't know anyone who likes the "it's pointless doing a historical story that's not about someone famous" philosophy, so I was tickled by the fact that this story feels almost like a deliberate commentary on it.
I also like the art. Mike Collins, David A. Roach and James Offredi have always been good at doing lively, colourful artwork, but I don't think they've ever done anything as atmospheric and characterful as this story's decaying, hate-racked Robert Greene. They also draw one of the liveliest William Shakespeares I can remember seeing in the comics medium, who's certainly far more interesting than the stuffed shirt we saw in Sandman. I've said before that I felt their lively, jolly art didn't always have the dramatic weight of Eccleston on TV, but here they've nailed it. He looks like the 9th Doctor, not a cartoon character.
Incidentally this was DWM's first proper two-parter in over fifteen years, or more precisely since 1989. They'd also published The Keep (DWM 248-249) and Hunger From The Ends Of Time! (DWM 157-158), but the former was just a lead-in to their multiverse-straddling Dalek epic, Fire and Brimstone, while the latter was a reprint from The Incredible Hulk Presents and only ten pages long altogether to boot. Was it thought that you couldn't tell a worthwhile story in only two episodes? Within the writing styles espoused by DWM's comic strip in ages past that may even have been right, but here Gareth Roberts does impressively with this underused format. Admittedly he's been given nine-page episodes to play with instead of just seven or eight, but even so there's more story and life here than in quite a few three or four-parters I could mention.
Despite my opinions of Gareth Roberts's comic strips, I must admit that he's been the bright spot in the wasteland that is official BBC Books policy regarding New Series Adventures. His writing is always full of character. He brings his casts vividly to life, nailing the 9th Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack to the page a million times better than anyone else to date, but furthermore his own personality always shines through. These qualities have been diluted in his comic strips, which only need scripts instead of full prose, but A Groatsworth of Wit is one of his finest efforts. It's sly, lively and in the end warm. Incidentally Gareth's written about this era before, with A Groatsworth of Wit being set in 1592 and The Plotters being set in 1605. That had some of his best writing, too.