GOOD THING: Tony Lee sets something up here which is actually a neat little "out" which explains away a lot of the minor little kerfuffles in recent Doctor Who stories. Namely, that there is a sort of temporal grace period before The Universe "accepts" a divergent timeline as "the normal way of things". This allows The Doctor and Rory, faced with the problem of finding a kidnapped Amy in 1888, to go forward in time to where Amy's death is part of a 2011 Ripper Tour of Whitechapel, find out where she was killed and then go back there to stop it.
While this has been hinted at in several stories which involved the characters mucking about with time travel (Father's Day and The Big Bang come to mind), this revelation helps explain way some of the problems caused by more recent stories, such as A Christmas Carol (where The Doctor goes back in time to change a miserly old man into a better person over a chain of Christmas Eves) and the Comic Relief specials Space and Time, in which The Doctor takes advantage of a paradox to solve the problem of what to do when The TARDIS becomes parked inside itself.
BAD THING: The artwork - once again by Tim Hamilton alone - is still bloody awful. It's marginally better this time, with Hamilton seemsing to have finally settled on a standard sense of proportions for Matt Smith's Doctor. Yet we still get random big Anime-style eyes on Amy Pond!
The Final Verdict: Tony Lee's Jack The Ripper mystery comes to a satisfying conclusion. What is more, it actually gives an official (and interesting) out to any future Who writers who wish to play about more with the rules of Space and Time Bill And Ted style. Pity the artwork is still rubbish.
Probably LONG too late, but I didn't really pay attention to the Dr Who entries till now:
ReplyDeleteI don't think I could even blame Tim Hamilton for rushing to try and catch up, getting the book on schedule if he had to follow up on Richard Piers Rayner.
Richard Rayner?
Richard Piers Rayner?
He's an outstanding artist, but this is the guy who spent -FOUR YEARS- on Road to Perdition.
If they hired him to do Dr Who because he's a british artist, they should have allowed him a -lot- more time. Treat him like he's Frank Quitely; they are -freaking slow- Brit artists.
Not to mention, the colorist doesn't seem to be helping the artists' cases - in the case of Rayner, Rayner doesn't do his usual detailing (probably because the last time I've seen his artwork was, what, Road to Perdition?) and the colorist doesn't help him out with detailing, and here... I have no idea, it looks like a screwy sort of shading.
... the eyes don't look animey..
ReplyDeleteWell, in that one panel they're much bigger in proportion to everything else....
ReplyDeleteAgree with Tarot-chan - the eyes look like that because the guy drew the head too big and put the eyes in afterwards, it seems like.
ReplyDelete