• The Eight Doctors by Noe Geric

The Eight Doctors by Noe Geric 28/10/24

This is the multi-Doctor special we should have seen instead of Dimension in Time. This is the anniversary special that's too clever too be on television, the special strip for the show's thirty-five anniversary, and it's not what you think it is. I'm always worried about strips featuring Roger Langridge's artwork; they're often ludicrous and in a (too) comical fashion. The story (like The Autonomy Bug) often suffers from this cartoon-style art, and I find myself avoiding these stories in the first place. But Happy Deathday is a special case. While the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors tried too hard to put the (titulars) Five Doctors, a menagerie of old enemies and a plot in one 90 minutes episode, Happy Deathday managed to throw the eight Doctors against all their previous enemies in one eight-page strip. That's a bold move I really admire.

The story sees the Beige Guardian (apparently related to the Black and White Guardians from the TV show) kidnap all the Doctors and makes them fight all the enemies they've already beaten in the past. We follow four pairing of Doctors fighting a small army of their enemies in the sort of typical places the show visited during it's first twenty-six seasons (space stations, a quarry full of rocks, an english village). Of course, all is not as it seems, and someone is apparently manipulating the events from behind, someone even more powerfull than the Beige Guardian.

As the story is following the comedy path, it's full of jokes. Most of them (particularly the meta ones) work perfectly well. Others feel too complicated for their own good (the Wildean With Enforcer is perhaps too much). Perhaps we don't see enough of the Hartnell and McGann Doctors, but their scene at the end is the highlight of the story, with the first Doctor explaining what he found about the Beige Guardian. It's also a fun little exercise to identify each monster in the panels; most of the classic-era enemies are present, and they manage to be all beaten in three pages! The Beige Guardian (the only original character of the story) is also a fun joke itself about the show's villains. The final ''twist'' is perhaps not as surprising as it tries to be, but it manages to conclude the special with something more interesting than just seeing the Doctors going back to their TARDISes.

Happy Deathday is perhaps one of the best multi-Doctor stories in any medium. It tries something experimental: a special episode using continuity for fun. The artwork adds to the comical elements, and this is the sort of strip that you can re-read just in case you missed some of the jokes. An entertaining experiment. I shall also point the small ''fourth-wall breaking'' during the First Doctor's speech. I missed it on my first read, but it's a nice addition and a good use of comic-strip form! 9/10