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Laddar... Doctor Who: Evening's Empireav Andrew Cartmel, Dan Abnett (Författare), Marc Platt (Författare), Richard Piers Rayner (Illustratör), John Ridgway (Artist)
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. A collection of Doctor Who comic strips from the early 1990s, an odd time for the franchise when fandom and tie-in media were kicking their heels in the vague hope of a new season being announced (they'd have a long time to wait). Andrew Cartmel, the final script editor of the show's original run and the man generally credited with leading its late rejuvenation, contributes two stories (including the title one) and continues the good work he did on the show. The influences on the stories collected in Evening's Empire are totemic of the period and worn openly – Aliens, cyberpunk, The Punisher – but that's fine; they at least show an awareness of the franchise's wider cultural context. As late as 1987 Doctor Who was still acting as if the competition was Blake's 7 rather than Predator. Occasionally the attempts to push the tone in new directions are misjudged, but failure is an important step towards success. Look at the strip "Ravens", for example, in which the Doctor takes a bereaved samurai from feudal Japan to a near-future service station so he may save a different mother and daughter from a murderous gang of yoofs. The violence and idea of the Doctor commissioning direct slaughter don't feel appropriate for either the brand or character, but the story is a terrific exploration of the show's concept. The Doctor walks between times; actions and consequences, problems and solutions can be five hundred years and 6,000 miles apart for us, but clearly connected for him. The TARDIS isn't just a protagonist delivery system. 'Success' is a difficult and absolute term. A casual reader might be confused by this collection (by both the tone and the stories' increasingly complex relationship with the contemporary New Adventures tie-in novels) but for the die hards interested in the evolution of Doctor Who, this is a fascinating little source text. inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
Ingår i serienDoctor Who {non-TV} (Comic Strips) DWM Comic Strips - Original Publication Order (issues 180-192)
Evening'sEmpire, aDoctor Whocomic strip from the 1990swritten by Andrew Cartmel, was never completed in the pages ofDoctor WhoMagazine. Although aversion was printed subsequently, this new collection contains the firstpublication of the full story as originally intended, withbrand-new artwork from theoriginal artist, Richard Piers Rayner. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)741.5941The arts Graphic arts and decorative arts Drawing & drawings Cartoons, Caricatures, Comics Collections European British IslesBetygMedelbetyg:
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This set of stories take us into, ahem, "Virgin territory." I suspect I'll have more to say about this when I read the next volume, but here we get the first references to the New Adventures. In The Grief, Ace includes the Timewyrm among the most dangerous foes she's encountered; the internet tells me that Ravens take's place during Cat's Cradle: Warhead; and then in Cat Litter, we start getting footnotes that clarify placement (it opens with one saying recent adventures were seen "both last issue and in Nightshade" and ends with "Next: After Love and War, a new companion and... Sontarans!"). For the DWM strip—which for a long time barely even seemed to acknowledge that there was a tv programme—this is a huge change, and a weird one that I wish was explained more. John Freeman's notes, though, mostly focus on the issues surrounding Evening's Empire, and don't give any sense of why he might want to hitch DWM's narrative to a series of novels that were only just getting off the ground. On Down the Tubes, he off-handedly mentions that Ravens "was the first story where we tried to work with Doctor Who novel publisher Virgin, after meeting with the editor Peter Darvill-Evans and trying to cross promote what were then the only new Doctor Who adventures," but that's it. My impression is that this was a decision ultimately regretted by his successors at DWM, and part of the reason this entire era of DWM ultimately ended up kind of orphaned, but... why did they do it? Anyway, more on that when I get to Benny Summerfield's debut in Emperor of the Daleks.
Overall, this is a dark set of stories. I don't know if I would want all my Doctor Who to be like this, but it works more than it doesn't, and I found it more to my taste than many other DWM runs (i.e., #44-57, #100-47).
Living in the Past
This text story clearly should have been in the previous volume, telling as it does the story of how Ace joined the Doctor between Train-Flight and Teenage Kicks! As a story, it's okay; I found it a bit dull but the climax is amazing (Ace leading a dinosaur army), and well drawn by Cam Smith. It kind of ties into the then-ongoing Mandragora storyline; the Doctor says "I'm being distracted by trivia there's something more important going on elsewhere," but it doesn't quite fit in that the Doctor thinks, "Considering the state of the TARDIS, he was lucky to have ended up on the same planet," when in Distractions he says he can't leave Earth if he wants to!
Evening's Empire
More than any story of its era, this feels to me like Doctor Who does Vertigo. The DC Comics imprint wasn't actually launched until Mar. 1993, but of course it drew on preexisting DC comics lines, most notably The Sandman. This has the feeling on many of those stories: journeys into people's psyches, abuse both sexual and parental, mental trauma, criticism of religion, difficult page layouts and transitions. Delete the Doctor and Ace, and this could come straight out of Hellblazer or Animal Man or Black Orchid, anything trying to be Gaiman, Morrison, or Moore, but not actually written by them.
It's okay. For me, it's let down by two things. One is Richard Piers Rayners's artwork. His drawings seem reliant on photo reference in a way that often works to the detriment of the imagery. I can see the argument for why someone's mouth should be open when they are talking, but it never looks good to trace a photo of someone's open mouth. His Muriel Frost is unrecognizable as the same woman from The Mark of Mandragora, and looks like a series of an actress's glamour headshots rather than a moving, living, breathing human being. Individual images look good, but overall this doesn't flow. Though, to be honest, it is a lot like reading a mediocre Vertigo title.
I came to like it less after reading Cartmel's discussion of it in the notes, where he says he wanted to write a narrative countering adventure stories where the women are fantasies for the men. Given that, the way Frost is drawn rankles; and given that, it seems bizarre that Evening's victims are barely discernible as people, and that Ace even feels pretty peripheral; the character of Ives pretty clearly exists only to suffer a horrible fate later on. I am not sure you can write a story criticizing putting women at the margins if you yourself put women at the margins!
That said, there's stuff to like here. Cartmel, for obvious reasons, excels at portentous Sylvester McCoy dialogue; the twist about the scale of the crashed UFO is a good one; seeing Frost's home life is interesting even if it doesn't entirely come off.
Conflict of Interests
This is, I think, the first Doctor-less "main" strip in DWM's history. It follows a Foreign Hazard Duty team trying to secure some ruins for archeological study on an alien planet; they run into Sontarans. This was fine; the ending is nice, but I feel like even at seven pages it's a tad longer than it needs to be.
The Grief
The Doctor and Ace find a group of Dan Abnett space marines—not the FHD, though—investigating a planet upon which was trapped an ancient evil. I hate it when new monsters are cheaply claimed to be in the big leagues, and I found the soldier characters hard to distinguish at first, but otherwise this is a solid piece. I particularly like how well Abnett captures the voices of both the Doctor and Ace.
Ravens
Again, there's a bit of a Doctor-Who-does-Vertigo vibe to this. But I don't have a problem with that—isn't that what Doctor Who always does, take pop culture and chews it up and spits it out in its own imitable fashion? If the show had been on screen still, you could imagine it going in this direction, and though I think that would run against its populist appeal, this was an era where there was no tv show, and the strip thus didn't have to appeal to a broad audience. I thought this was much better executed than Cartmel's similar attempt in Evening's Empire. Great dark inks by Smith and Pini really support his pretentious seventh-Doctor-as-God stuff. If there's a criticism I have, it's that if you told the whole thing in order, it'd be a bit thin for three parts; it's basically just one scene told incredibly complicatedly! But what a scene. It does very well the ordinary-people-plunged-into-horrifying-world vibe.
Memorial / Cat Litter
John Ridgway is back! I'm sure these are both solid stories on the basis of their writing, but getting Ridgway back for the first time in a while adds an inestimable something—and both of these are stories that play to his strengths. (He does a good Ace likeness, for one.) Memorial is a somber but uplifting tale; slight in terms of plot, but what it does, it does well, communicating the Doctor's horror at war. Ridgway is equally at home in horrifying space vistas and the English countryside in mourning. Cat Litter I didn't really get from a writing perspective, but if you say, "John Ridgway, Ace is trapped in the TARDIS and it's a gameboard," obviously it will look great. I didn't know I needed to see Ace running from a pair of giant D20s, but now I can't imagine why I didn't.
Stray Observations: