Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen #2 - A Review

Banished from Gallifrey by The Doctor's Twelfth incarnation, the Time Lord President Rassilon has formed an unthinkable alliance with The Cybermen. Granted the power to travel through time, The Cybermen have begun to propagate themselves through time and space, threatening prehistoric Earth, the Sontaran Empire and even Gallifrey itself! Thankfully, The Doctor has a habit of arriving wherever and whenever he's needed... but now the universe needs four Doctors to save it!




The good news is that the artwork in the second issue of Supremacy of the Cybermen is far more consistent than it was in the first issue. The bad news is that the artwork is now consistently awful.

Ivan Rodriguez is easily the worst artist to be employed on any of the Doctor Who comics since Titan Comics took over the licence. At best, his artwork resembles off-model coloring-book pages. At worst, they resemble animation cels from The Legend of Zelda CD-i games. Colorist Nicola Righi doesn't help matters, with her bright-hued palettes being so inappropriate to what is meant to be a dark, disturbing story that it makes even those pages handled by Walter Geovani look terrible!

The most damnable part of this remains that there is a great Doctor Who story underneath all the rushed, shoddy artwork. George Mann and Cavan Scott are two fantastic writers and it's a damn shame they couldn't be teamed with artists who could match their vision. Maybe we'll get lucky and Walter Geovani will pencil the next issue by hmself?

Doctor Who: Supremacy of the Cybermen #1 - A Review

In 2006, The Doctor and his companions Rose Tyler and Captain Jack Harkness return to the London of Rose's time to find The Cybermen are three days into an invasion of Earth...

Meanwhile, in a null zone in 24th Century Deep Space, The Doctor and his companions, Gabby Gonzales and Cindy Wu, discover that the largest shopping mall in the universe has been taken over by cyborg Sontarans...

Earlier, on a prehistoric Earth, The Doctor and his companion Alice Obiefune - in the middle of retrieving some long-extinct fruit for The Doctor's friend Madame Vastra - learn that The Silurians of that time have become physically enhanced by some kind of technology...

And near the end of Time itself, The Doctor arrives on the planet of Karn, seeking a path to Gallifrey in order to investigate what is causing tsunamis that threaten to pull apart the whole of the space time vortex...



The first chapter of Supremacy of the Cybermen proves to be something of a mixed bag. The script by George Mann and Cavan Scott is fantastic, establishing the setting and the various Doctors and their companions with great efficiency. The action sequences are all thrilling and the dialogue is true to form for all the characters involved.

The problem lies in the artwork, which I'm sad to say is mediocre at best. With three artists and two colorists at work on this book, there's very little sense of uniformity between the various sections. This would be bad enough with great artists utilizing dissimilar styles but the sections involving the Ninth and Eleventh Doctors are outright amateurish. The characters look off-model, continually caught with their faces in odd expressions, with Jackie Tyler looking the same age as her daughter in some panels and like a melting wax figure in others!

Is it worth suffering through for a good story?  So far, yes. But art snobs may do well to avoid this trip on the TARDIS.