Script: Paul Cornell Art: Gary Frank
The rendezvous you want to avoid by Noe Geric 22/12/20
After writing the incredibly good Timewyrm: Revelation, Paul Cornell began to do comic strips. And that's terribly bad. With useless continuity, an old dull monster and a plot so thin it can't even fill five pages, Cornell has beaten the record of the worst and most useless Doctor Who comic of all time (and space). The Seventh Doctor and Ace are fighting an Ogri on a beach. That's all...
The Doctor was apparently waiting for the creature to show up (easy to kick-off the plot even before the story began, when you've got the 7th Doctor), and he beats it just with the help of water and fire. I've never seen something as ridiculous as that. The Doctor putting the creature in a bucket and throwing it into the fire! The story is five pages long, but most of the panels are just filling the space with 'Ho!', 'Wicked!' and 'Schluuuupp'. For no apparent reason, Ace even throws a surfboard hoping it would kill the creature... Really?
The artwork is correct, and that's the only good thing about that crap. I don't even know why the editor accepted that to be published! Cornell himself admits that Seaside is a pile of rubbish. Five pages wasted for a poor sequel to a (nearly) good TV story! Writting a story in five pages isn't easy at all, but there's a lot of better things to do! Cornell just did the most unoriginal thing in the world, and that's a shame knowing he can do great things like Timewyrm: Revelation (but that's not the end of his bad stuff period, The 100 Days of the Doctor is yet to come)! We learn nothing in that story except that Ace likes to watch fire. I give it 1/10 just because Gary Frank wasted his talent trying to draw the weakest script in the DWM comic history.