Fast Thoughts - The Week of 7/2/08

DOCTOR WHO #5 - You know, this is the first issue that didn't have me groaning at the presence of Martha. This is, coincidentally, also the first issue where there weren't any moments of forced romantic tension between her and The Doctor. But that's my hang up and doesn't really have any relevance to the story.

Apart from that... I dunno. It's not that this is a bad comic. But it just seems to drag compared to the TV show and the original comics currently being reprinted in DOCTOR WHO CLASSICS. It doesn't feel like Doctor Who, to me. It feels like an overly decompressed comic that just happens to have a character called The Doctor, who travels around time and space.

Still, I'll probably pick up the advertised The Forgotten Doctor Who special that is coming up, if only to see how an "official" Ten Doctors story stacks up compared to the fan-made fan-fiction comic The Ten Doctors.


FABLES #74 - Another "how they did it" issue, where we have the full details of The Free Fables war on The Adversary and his forces spelled out for us. No pun intended there as the major brunt of this issue - dealing with the invasion of the Imperial City itself - does involve a spell. I won't say more, though I suspect that at this point you all are either already reading this book as attentively as I am or you are wishing I would stop saying that you SHOULD be reading this book.


SAVAGE TALES #8 - Hamlet is widely regarded as the greatest of Shakespeare's plays and indeed the greatest play written in the English language. And yet, like everything in this wide world, it is infinitely improved by a woman in a scale-mail bikini.

In all seriousness, the opening story - in which Red Sonja visits a place much like Elisnore Castle - is an amusing spin on the habit of many pastiche writers to take a classic story and alter the heck out of it to make it into something fit for the sword and sorcery genre. Still, if one can get Forbidden Planet from The Tempest, why not Hamlet into Momento Mori? Even if the influence is obvious, one must give Vito Delsante credit for the conceit that the king's ghost was not really the king's ghost, but the ghost of his jester - getting revenge for his mistreatment in life by making his leige's son kill his entire family in the name of false vengeance.

The rest of the issue is made up of the familar back-ups of classic pulp literature. Another story on the Atlantis of Kull. The next part of an Alan Quartermain story. And for you fans of the monthly Red Sonja book, there isa story of Osin; the one-handed bard and his efforts to save the world on his own in the wake of Sonja's death which is easily the best thing in the book.