Vikings versus Aliens
Creative Staff:
Story: Richard Dinnick
Art: Brian Williamson
Colors: Hi-Fi
Letters: Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy Betancourt
What They Say:
“THE WOLVES OF WINTER” -PART ONE OF THREE!
Featuring Bill Potts – the Doctor’s most recent companion.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Bill Potts, the Doctor’s most recent companion, and the best we’ve had since Donna Noble (sorry, Clara! I still love you!) finally makes her comic debut, and while it’s certainly nice to see Pearl Mackie’s character join the series, it’s a pretty lackluster start.
In the 9th Century in the North Atlantic Sea, a ship of Vikings take shelter on a snowy island. Another group of Vikings pursues them, eager to take the treasure they so adamantly guard. While they explore the land, two shooting stars crash into the nearby mountains, and a little blue box appears out of nowhere. As the Doctor says, “Vikings. Again!”
After the obligatory scene where the Doctor convinces the people that he’s there to help, the Time Lord and his companion join a search party to find a missing man who had been sent to investigate the impact sites. In the caves under the ice they discover something that I really, really, really want to tell you about because it’s one of my favorite Doctor Who alien races, but I don’t want to ruin your fun. To put it in algebraic terms, Vikings + X = Happy Dr. Josh.
Okay, in theory it should make for a happy me, but this is a very journeyman comic. It does what it sets out to do well enough, but there’s nothing that makes it stand out or engage the reader. A great deal of the issue coasts by on the strength of the show. Being a fan of the series, I carry that affection over to the comic. I want to see the Doctor and Bill get into a new mystery, so I stick around for the ride, but taken on its merits alone, the comic just doesn’t much.
It starts off pretty choppy, going from the Vikings to the TARDIS and back again without any real sense of narrative rhythm or pacing. When the Vikings and the Doctor do meet, the story picks up a bit, especially when the Vikings try to fit the Doctor into their own worldview and cosmology (“There’s a bit more Loki than Odin to you”), and maybe if the comic had played that out a bit more, it might have been a more enjoyable read, but the writing and the art force the story forward, creating a herky-jerky rhythm that prevents the reader from immersing themselves into the story. It reads like a case where the creative team tries to force the story into a formula when they needed to let it grow organically instead.
This pro forma feeling permeates both the writing and the art. While Richard Dinnick captures Capaldi and Mackie’s speech patterns and general attitudes well, they come across flat and two-dimensional. The art only exacerbates the issue. While the Viking designs look fine, the Doctor and Bill seem to stand apart from the scene and the other characters. Their facial expressions are awkward at times and don’t quite match the tone of the scene. There’s too much photo-referencing going on here. It’s almost like Xerox images of the actors inserted into a Prince Valiant comic.
That’s actually the part of the art that worked the best. I wasn’t being flip when I referenced Prince Valiant. The art and color do call to mind that comic strip (as well as some of the old Roy Thomas Conan stories from the Seventies and Eighties), and that helps create a visual identity and sense of verisimilitude for the Vikings, but it also makes the Doctor and Bill stand out all the more. Even more than that, though, the line work and the color come off flat. There’s no depth or dimension to it, and that sucks away much of the narrative energy. It’s not that this is a bad comic, it’s just that it’s not a very good one.
In Summary:
Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor 3.5 starts a new creative team and a new story. Bill Potts, the Doctor’s latest Companion from the series, makes her debut here, and the setting and the players possess a great deal of potential, but the story feels like it’s being forced into a formula, and the art is flat and unappealing. Hopefully the story will pick up with the next issue. Dr. Josh gives this a…
Grade: C+
Age Rating: N/A
Released By: Titan Comics
Release Date: 5 July 2017
MSRP: $3.99
