Doctor Who: Final Sacrifice

Back when I started this blog a few months ago, I teased a few books that I had recently read. I might have promised to review them, and I know with certainty that I didn't review them. One of the books that I never got around to was Doctor Who Volume Two: Tesseract, the volume preceding this one. We can be thankful that by this point in time I feel like I'm getting the hang of things...months go by, tons of comics come out, ta da! I have some things to say about Volume Three at least.

Let me start off by saying that I really admire what Tony Lee was able to accomplish with this ongoing Doctor Who series. Well, at sixteen issues it might not have been a very long running series, but it was a quality story. Before IDW greenlighted this series they had been doing a bunch of one shots and miniseries. There were definitely some good stories from that era, but doing the ongoing was an even better idea. What Lee got to do here was make a long running story and set up a bunch of comics that just felt exactly like watching a season of the tv show unfold. Maybe it was just a more comfortable approach to the Doctor.

Tony Lee made his own storyline and supplied his own companions, so it wasn't like the comics were meticulously sandwiched in between plotlines during the seasons of the Tenth Doctor. He gave the series its own breathing space and it was great to watch it all develop.

I had a thought about Doctor Who comics that would be really neat. I'm sure it will never happen, because it would need the BBC to try something pretty risky with one of their perrenial cash crops. But wouldn't it be neat if you could get a comic-exclusive version of the Doctor? "Doctor Who comics from IDW...the only place you can experience the adventures of the Twelfth Doctor!" Just so that you would never have to worry about how it all fits together. But maybe that would be missing the point altogether...would people care about a Doctor they had never watched on television? I'm not sure.

So this final trade paperback collection is entitled Final Sacrifice. The sacrifices are, as is often par for the course in a Who story, the companions. I liked them. Emily Winter and Matthew Finnegan. The Doctor found them in the early days of Hollywood back in volume one. The Advocate's big scary plan nearly comes to fruition and the mysterious Tef'Aree finally gets a little less mysterious. Fifth dimensional beings are a little bit difficult to wrap your head around.

The story ends with the Doctor heading to Mars, which means that all of this adventuring directly precedes one of the specials they did before David Tennant left the show. So they did please the fanboys who wanted to know how all of the puzzle pieces fit together after all.

Matthew Dow Smith is a terrific artist. I feel like I've seen a lot of people who draw somewhat similarly to him, and he is certainly doesn't hide a Mike Mignola discipleship. Despite that, he still seemed pretty original to me. I liked how there wasn't the creepy factor that often comes with comics adapted from film where you can tell what frame the artist paused on to get the perfect facial expression. I like the stylization. 

The grand conclusion to the "Tony Lee season" isn't the only reason to look into this collection. It also reprints the Doctor Who Annual, which was quite a treat because it features three stories that are all centered around the TARDIS. The first one is entertaining although it feels like it strays a little too far from what is acceptable as a DW story. An alien goes pretty far to try and sap the energy from his trusty ship, masking himself in the guise of a human traffic control officer. Just slightly more odd than what you see in a typical Who tale. Al Davison returns to close out the TARDIS book, and his style was wonderful in the earlier issues of the Tony Lee series for reasons altogether different from why Smith shines. Davison has the kind of detailed style that allows him to pull off the likenesses of actors, and he does so very naturally. I do wish that he could have been involved with a few more issues.

Here's an example of why I was a fan of Al Davison's work on the series (from his TARDIS story reprinted in this book).

So this is the final collection of IDW comics featuring the Tenth Doctor, and of course they plugged right along and started a new series in the Matt Smith era. There's already a trade out that I'm late in reviewing...