Robert Shearman
Författare till Tiny Deaths
Om författaren
Verk av Robert Shearman
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who, Volume 1: The 60s (2010) 61 exemplar
They Do the Same Things Different There: The Best Weird Fantasy of Robert Shearman (1800) 56 exemplar
Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium and The Lone Gunmen (2009) 28 exemplar
Running Through Corridors 2: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (The 70s) (2016) — Författare — 24 exemplar
The Dark Space In the House In the House In the Garden at the Centre of the World/Sanditon 2 exemplar
No Looking Back 1 exemplar
We All Hear Stories in the Dark, Volume 2 1 exemplar
We All Hear Stories in The Dark: 5 chapbooks 1 exemplar
Shaw Cornered (in Caustic Comedies) 1 exemplar
Roadkill [novella] 1 exemplar
The Politics of County Power 1 exemplar
Easy Laughter (in Caustic Comedies) 1 exemplar
White Lies (in Caustic Comedies) 1 exemplar
Fool to Yourself (in Caustic Comedies) 1 exemplar
The Runt 1 exemplar
Binary Dreamers (in Caustic Comedies) 1 exemplar
Restoration 1 exemplar
Associerade verk
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six (2012) — Bidragsgivare, vissa utgåvor — 138 exemplar
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories: Terrifying Tales Set on the Scariest Night of the Year! (2018) — Bidragsgivare — 62 exemplar
The Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback (Mammoth Books) (2012) — Bidragsgivare — 57 exemplar
New Fears II - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre (2018) — Bidragsgivare — 38 exemplar
Five Stories High: One House, Five Hauntings, Five Chilling Stories (2016) — Bidragsgivare — 31 exemplar
Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night: 10 Scary Stories to Give You Nightmares! (2019) — Bidragsgivare — 30 exemplar
Time, Unincorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives, Vol. 3: Writings on the New Series (2011) — Inledning — 19 exemplar
The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (Foundation Studies in Science Fiction) (2011) — Preface — 13 exemplar
Stories of Hope and Wonder: In Support of the UK's Healthcare Workers (2020) — Bidragsgivare — 11 exemplar
The Other Side of Never: Dark Tales from the World of Peter & Wendy (2023) — Bidragsgivare — 11 exemplar
The Future of Horror: The Collected Solaris Horror Anthologies, featuring House of Fear, Magic and End of the Road (2015) — Bidragsgivare — 7 exemplar
Flotsam Fantasique The Souvenir Book of World Fantasy Convention 2013 (2013) — Bidragsgivare — 5 exemplar
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Vedertaget namn
- Shearman, Robert
- Andra namn
- Shearman, Rob
- Födelsedag
- 1970-02-10
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- UK
- Födelseort
- England, UK
- Bostadsorter
- London, England, UK
- Utbildning
- University of Exeter
- Yrken
- playwright
screenwriter - Kort biografi
- Robert Shearman has worked as writer for television, radio, and the stage. He was appointed resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, the youngest playwright ever recognised by the Arts Council in this way, and has received several international awards for his theatrical work, including the Sunday TimesPlaywriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His plays have been regularly produced by Alan Ayckbourn, and on BBC Radio by Martin Jarvis. However he is probably best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA winning first series, in an episode nominated for a Hugo award. *from "About the Author" in his collection Tiny Deaths, c. 2007
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Concept seemed neat but the books were too big and unwieldy, didn't think the stories really had any purpose in terms of order read, many were just odd. Actually did not enjoy reading these. Weird, odd in many cases not actually scary.
A collection of fourteen little stories, most of which contain some surreal or fantastical element. Death is a recurring theme, as are bad/loveless relationships and characters with less than zero emotional intelligence.
The best of these were, in their own deeply strange ways, good enough that they left me sort of sitting there going "wow" afterward. But even the ones that didn't seem, to my rational brain, as if they should be particularly effective stories were still somehow weirdly compelling, and the combined result made for a decidedly memorable reading experience. I don't think this one is for everybody, but if "dark and strange and affecting in ways you don't necessarily even always understand" is your jam, this one will probably be your jam.… (mer)
The best of these were, in their own deeply strange ways, good enough that they left me sort of sitting there going "wow" afterward. But even the ones that didn't seem, to my rational brain, as if they should be particularly effective stories were still somehow weirdly compelling, and the combined result made for a decidedly memorable reading experience. I don't think this one is for everybody, but if "dark and strange and affecting in ways you don't necessarily even always understand" is your jam, this one will probably be your jam.… (mer)
1 
bragan | 6 andra recensioner | Jan 25, 2023 |
bragan | 6 andra recensioner | Jan 25, 2023 | 
Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.
I've always been a bit salty that this book exists. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I am salty that the DWM Special Edition The Ninth Doctor Collected Comics exists. I dutifully bought that, expecting that no such graphic novel would ever come out—there just weren't enough strip adventures to justify such a collection! Eight years later, and the size of these collections had been halved, and so I bought those stories all over again, with just one addition—a prose story that I already had! Well, that and the as usual excellent extras.
So this was a reread again for me, but the added context of the extras was new. I appreciated in particular that were get to hear a lot from Mike Collins, who illustrated every DWM strip of the ninth Doctor; this is one of those eras where we have a consistent artist but not a consistent writer. I've opined before that you need one of those two, otherwise the strip doesn't feel cohesive because you don't have an actor's performance to unify the various voices as the tv programme does. And Mike Collins does good work; he's been with DWM since 1987 as a writer, and since 1991 as an artist, but I knew him first from his work on Star Trek comics for Marvel and Wildstorm and Babylon 5 comics for DC. He's good at likenesses, great at storytelling—exactly the artist you want, I reckon, when you're suddenly producing a tv tie-in strip to an actual tv programme for the first time in over fifteen years!
It's funny, in the extras to both this and the next volume, The Betrothal of Sontar, editor Clay Hickman talks about how they felt they had to a go a bit more kid-friendly now that the tv show was back... but I would hesitate to call any of the DWM strips here notably kid friendly, especially Rob Shearman's! But overall, I remembered this era as a bit of a shambles, and rereading it I didn't find that true at all. It's not perfect, but this is a solid slice of Doctor Who comics. Certainly it's much better than what DWM was putting out last time the tv programme was still on!
The Love Invasion
The ninth Doctor and Rose debut with a very solid piece of Russell T Davies pastiche. There's a lot of running back and forth in 1960s London as the Doctor and Rose must piece together what links some overly helpful young women, the death of several prominent scientists, and a woman who keeps killing aliens. There's solid humor, a decent alien motivation, and a strong sense of the voices of both Eccleston and Piper. The main thing I didn't like was that there's sort of a fake-out double ending, which felt tacked on.
Art Attack
This is a decent story with a good ending, about the Doctor and Rose coming to a futuristic art gallery, and getting caught up in an evil piece of performance art. That said, I felt like there's a better version of this story somewhere in the multiverse: a comics story about art written by an artist seems like it could have done more fun stuff than the story does, and there's surprisingly little made of the fact that both the Doctor and the alien are the last of their kinds—that would have been the emotional center of the story on tv, I think.
The Cruel Sea
I was pretty surprised when Mike Collins noted this as one of the best comic strips he's ever illustrated—because to me it was the weakest story in this volume. It has striking visuals—a cruise ship on the red oceans of Mars, Billie Piper in a skintight spacesuit, a woman whose face looks like a fractured mirror—and some neat uses of the medium—the conversation between the two Doctors—but even though I'm a big fan of Robert Shearman's audio work for Big Finish and his original prose fiction, I found something deeply unpleasant about reading this story. Some of the visuals struck me as inappropriate for the Doctor Who of 2005, and some I just didn't like. Well rendered, but genuinely unpleasant to think about. It's the kind of thing Shearman makes work in prose or audio, I guess (there's some gross stuff in Scherzo), but when you have to actually see it, it's very different. The characters generally are unpleasant, too—this story is very much the epitome of something that's well-crafted but just did not work for me.
When I posted the above on GallifreyBase, Rob himself popped up to opine, "I absolutely agree with you! I'm so grateful to Mike Collins for his amazing art and lovely support, but I don't think I got this story right at all. I've never been a big comics fan, and so misunderstood the particular demands of the medium - and yeah, I think I got the tone wrong completely." Phew!
Mr Nobody / What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow
These two stories, one comics, one prose, are both from Panini's only Doctor Who Annual, and are both more child-focused than the average DWM strip. But they're still both solid. You can of course count on Scott Gray for a well put-together done-in-one, and Steven Moffat's story is a fun time travel loop. We should meet this Sally Sparrow again!
A Groatsworth of Wit
The ninth Doctor's DWM tenure comes to a quick end with this, a decently fun story with some good jokes and a nice last scene. Obviously this ended up a dry run for a David Tennant episode, like some many stories in this volume, but it's different enough to be worthwhile.
Other Notes:
I've always been a bit salty that this book exists. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I am salty that the DWM Special Edition The Ninth Doctor Collected Comics exists. I dutifully bought that, expecting that no such graphic novel would ever come out—there just weren't enough strip adventures to justify such a collection! Eight years later, and the size of these collections had been halved, and so I bought those stories all over again, with just one addition—a prose story that I already had! Well, that and the as usual excellent extras.
So this was a reread again for me, but the added context of the extras was new. I appreciated in particular that were get to hear a lot from Mike Collins, who illustrated every DWM strip of the ninth Doctor; this is one of those eras where we have a consistent artist but not a consistent writer. I've opined before that you need one of those two, otherwise the strip doesn't feel cohesive because you don't have an actor's performance to unify the various voices as the tv programme does. And Mike Collins does good work; he's been with DWM since 1987 as a writer, and since 1991 as an artist, but I knew him first from his work on Star Trek comics for Marvel and Wildstorm and Babylon 5 comics for DC. He's good at likenesses, great at storytelling—exactly the artist you want, I reckon, when you're suddenly producing a tv tie-in strip to an actual tv programme for the first time in over fifteen years!
It's funny, in the extras to both this and the next volume, The Betrothal of Sontar, editor Clay Hickman talks about how they felt they had to a go a bit more kid-friendly now that the tv show was back... but I would hesitate to call any of the DWM strips here notably kid friendly, especially Rob Shearman's! But overall, I remembered this era as a bit of a shambles, and rereading it I didn't find that true at all. It's not perfect, but this is a solid slice of Doctor Who comics. Certainly it's much better than what DWM was putting out last time the tv programme was still on!
The Love Invasion
The ninth Doctor and Rose debut with a very solid piece of Russell T Davies pastiche. There's a lot of running back and forth in 1960s London as the Doctor and Rose must piece together what links some overly helpful young women, the death of several prominent scientists, and a woman who keeps killing aliens. There's solid humor, a decent alien motivation, and a strong sense of the voices of both Eccleston and Piper. The main thing I didn't like was that there's sort of a fake-out double ending, which felt tacked on.
Art Attack
This is a decent story with a good ending, about the Doctor and Rose coming to a futuristic art gallery, and getting caught up in an evil piece of performance art. That said, I felt like there's a better version of this story somewhere in the multiverse: a comics story about art written by an artist seems like it could have done more fun stuff than the story does, and there's surprisingly little made of the fact that both the Doctor and the alien are the last of their kinds—that would have been the emotional center of the story on tv, I think.
The Cruel Sea
I was pretty surprised when Mike Collins noted this as one of the best comic strips he's ever illustrated—because to me it was the weakest story in this volume. It has striking visuals—a cruise ship on the red oceans of Mars, Billie Piper in a skintight spacesuit, a woman whose face looks like a fractured mirror—and some neat uses of the medium—the conversation between the two Doctors—but even though I'm a big fan of Robert Shearman's audio work for Big Finish and his original prose fiction, I found something deeply unpleasant about reading this story. Some of the visuals struck me as inappropriate for the Doctor Who of 2005, and some I just didn't like. Well rendered, but genuinely unpleasant to think about. It's the kind of thing Shearman makes work in prose or audio, I guess (there's some gross stuff in Scherzo), but when you have to actually see it, it's very different. The characters generally are unpleasant, too—this story is very much the epitome of something that's well-crafted but just did not work for me.
When I posted the above on GallifreyBase, Rob himself popped up to opine, "I absolutely agree with you! I'm so grateful to Mike Collins for his amazing art and lovely support, but I don't think I got this story right at all. I've never been a big comics fan, and so misunderstood the particular demands of the medium - and yeah, I think I got the tone wrong completely." Phew!
Mr Nobody / What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow
These two stories, one comics, one prose, are both from Panini's only Doctor Who Annual, and are both more child-focused than the average DWM strip. But they're still both solid. You can of course count on Scott Gray for a well put-together done-in-one, and Steven Moffat's story is a fun time travel loop. We should meet this Sally Sparrow again!
A Groatsworth of Wit
The ninth Doctor's DWM tenure comes to a quick end with this, a decently fun story with some good jokes and a nice last scene. Obviously this ended up a dry run for a David Tennant episode, like some many stories in this volume, but it's different enough to be worthwhile.
Other Notes:
- The Love Invasion, despite being three issues long, spans the entirety of Christopher Eccleston's on-screen tenure.
- The behind-the-scenes stuff about Mike Collins trying to get Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper's likenesses down was great. On the one hand, Eccleston kept shooting down images that were too heroic and good-looking and muscular, too American comics! On the other hand, Piper just said, "Ooh, he's given me hips and tits, I like it!"
- After all the talk of likenesses, it thus becomes very noticeable when Rose has a dream in The Cruel Sea about marrying Mickey, but we never actually see his face, presumably so the story could avoid an extra set of approvals just for a one-page sequence.
- Elements of The Love Invasion, The Cruel Sea, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays, and A Groatsworth of Wit arguably all ended up on screen. The latter two are obvious, but Clay Hickman makes the case that The Cruel Sea influenced "The Waters of Mars." Is this an offshoot of the Flood? A GallifreyBase commenter pointed out to me that the scene in Love Invasion where the Doctor counteracts being poisoned by eating random foods was lifted for "The Unicorn and the Wasp."
- Rose is the first companion to spontaneously appear in the strip since Benny, and only the second to ever do so. Every other previous companion was introduced, even if (as in Peri and Ace) it was a reintroduction. Between this and the Doctor's regeneration, the illusion of the DWM strip as a standalone continuous narrative is shattered. We're in for a lot of that over the next couple years...
- Rob Shearman is, I think, the first tv writer to work on the strip since Marc Platt. (Though one other strip writer here would go on to be a tv writer, as is the case with a couple past writers.)
- It's pretty mind-boggling to learn about the ninth Doctor strips we didn't get from the extras: Russell T Davies and Bryan Hitch writing the ninth Doctor's debut! Russell T Davies and Dave Gibbons writing his final episode!! It's a shame we've still never gotten an RTD Doctor Who comic. I don't know if comics would play to his strength like tv, but I'd certainly be interested to see it.
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Statistik
- Verk
- 47
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- 76
- Medlemmar
- 1,067
- Popularitet
- #24,131
- Betyg
- 3.8
- Recensioner
- 47
- ISBN
- 69
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- 1
- Favoritmärkt
- 13
Very clever, witty, self-aware, engaging, and layered. Reads better if you are familiar with the place of Doctor Who in pop culture during the "wilderness years", but Shearman as usual can do no wrong. From what I hear, the post-2005 Big Finish output gradually becomes more generic and less risk-taking, which is a great shame. Those early years sure were something.