Written by Gary Russell. Art by Stefano Martino, Mirco Pierfederici, Nick Roche, Jose Maria Beroy.
Colours: Charlie Kirkoff, Tom Smith. Letters: various. Editors: various.
Doctor Who: Agent Provocateur 2008 (DC TPB) 144 pages
Written by Gary Russell. Art by Stefano Martino, Mirco Pierfederici, Nick Roche, Jose Maria Beroy.
Colours: Charlie Kirkoff, Tom Smith. Letters: various. Editors: various.
Reprinting: Doctor Who #1-6 (IDW series) - with covers
Rating: * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Published by IDW Comics
Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction TV series in TV history. It premiered in Britain in 1963 and was cancelled in 1987. And then, after persevering in other mediums (novels and audio plays, and one TV movie) returned in 2005 for a successful TV series revival. And during much of that run, including the long hiatus, the various incarnations of the character have also appeared in British comics in Doctor Who Weekly magazine.
So part of the gimmick for this comic book mini-series featuring the current Doctor, played on TV by David Tennant, is that it was the first Doctor Who comic made by an American publisher (other Doctor Who comics were simply reprints of the British comics). Not that it has severed all ties with Merry ol' England, as it is written by Gary Russell who has been involved with Doctor Who novels, audio plays and the TV version (reflecting a trend in modern TV-based comics of trying to suggest a greater fidelity to the source material by recruiting writers actually associated with the source programs).
The premise has the Doctor and then-current companion, Martha Jones, just tooling about the galaxy in the Doctor's time/space ship, unaware they are being ensnared in a scheme set afoot by a self-called pantheon of higher beings -- a scheme that somehow relates to a rash of planetary populations vanishing.
The story unfolds rather episodically at first, so that instead of simply being one, six issue story, the first few issues each tell a story -- though, with the exception of the first issue, the stories tie into the bigger arc.
And at first it works pretty well. I'll admit, I have some mixed feelings about the modern TV series in general -- for all that the old series was notorious for its cardboard sets and problematic f/x, and for all the modern series has a bigger budget and more consistently strong performances, the modern series can strike me as just a little...cartoonier than the old. Tennant's Doctor is wild n' wacky and the pacing more frenetic than fast paced. Still, I can reasonably enjoy the new TV series, and Russell maybe reflects that hyperactive frivolousness a little too well (the mini-series beginning with the Doctor and Martha racing around the cosmos in pursuit of...the universe's best chocolate milk shake!) it nonetheless makes for an agreeably breezy page turner. And by threading the greater arc at first through the background, it allows the looming menace to be more intriguing as we wonder where it's headed.
Russell has a decent feel for the two leads, even if he maybe tweaks them even more in a wide-eyed-everything-is-a-grand-adventure mode than perhaps even the TV series did. Though the nature of the humour of Tennant's Doctor is his delivery of rapid fire monologues, punctuated by quirky digressions, which, attempted in a comic book form, can just make for rather verbose panels.
Still, the first few issues work as just fast paced little romps of intrigue and adventure, taking the duo from an alien space station to 1970s earth and onto strange worlds.
Unfortunately, as the overall arc moves to the fore, I'll admit I found myself not always sure if I knew what was going on, or why. One of the pantheon seems to be pursuing his/her own agenda in a couple of issues, which the Doctor discovers...yet then it doesn't really seem to get mentioned later. The expository dialogue gets increasingly long winded, obfuscating rather than clarifying. Even why the planetary populations are kidnapped seems a bit vague as the explanation seems to contradict itself (I may be wrong, or it may've even have been a typo). For that matter, why one person is left behind on each world...isn't explained.
Or maybe if I read back over it, I would find I just missed the explanation. But that becomes another problem as, though I did flip back through the book, it was somewhat dissolutely. Reading the first few issues, I didn't necessarily grasp what was going on but, A, I figure it would become clearer as it went along and, B, I didn't care as I was content to just enjoy the light surface adventures. But toward the end I began to care about the fact that...I didn't care. I mean, surely the story's job is to make me care?
And, of course, a problem with Doctor Who in all its years (and all its multi-media versions) is that logic can be a bit, well, tenuous, as the stories build to grand apocalyptic climaxes with lots of running and shouting and explosions but where you aren't really sure it makes any kind of sense. If Star Trek could sometimes seem as though it was written by people who flunked grade 10 science...Doctor Who often seemed like it was written by people who never even took the course to begin with!
Even the notion that the Doctor's trusty sonic screwdriver ends up being crucial in the climax, as if it's the most powerful device in the cosmos, seems a stretch for a device that, in the original TV series was just a trusty tool to unlock doors and the like. But in a way, that reflects the modern TV series, in which everything is cranked up to the nth degree, and the Doctor isn't just a meddlesome Time Lord, but a veritable super being! A -- well -- a cartoon.
Another problem with the comics, I'll admit, is the art. Like with IDW's other Doctor Who mini-series, The Forgotten, a bunch of artists were brought in, making for an inconsistent visual look from issue to issue, though most affect a similar, angular, cartoony look -- which, I suppose, suits the lighter and sillier aspects of the story, but aesthetically isn't that appealling (particularly in a comic meant to evoke real actors). But even on that level, the individual artists can vary a lot, delivering some decent panels and composition...and others that look hasty or crudely drawn, some panels looking coarse and grainy as though maybe blown up from a smaller image. Ironically, for all that this is the first American-produced Doctor Who comic, it can look a bit substandard at times. This is even more ironic given the British Doctor Who strips counted artists like Dave Gibbons and John Ridgeway among their contributors (admittedly, I'm sure there were plenty of lesser talents as well).
And maybe six issues was just more than the story really warranted. Because though I started out reasonably enjoying this taken on its own frothy, fast-paced way, toward the end I found my interest starting to wane.
Cover price: $__ CDN./ $19.99 USA.
Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer 2007 (DC TPB) 208 pages
Written by Michael Moorcock. Art by Walter Simonson.
Colours: Steve Oliff. Letters: John Workman. Editor: Joey Cavalieri.
Reprinting: the four-part prestige format mini-series (2004-2006)
Rating: * * * * (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Published by DC Comics
Michael Moorcock's sword & sorcery hero, the albino Elric of Melnibone, is arguably the most famous fantasy series character after Conan the Barbarian, with a long, somewhat eclectic publishing history. Though written for short stories and novels, the character has enjoyed some comic book appearances. But other than an early 1970s guest appearance in a couple of Conan comics (written by Roy Thomas but with Moorcock credited as a co-plotter) such incursions into the four colour field have generally been simply adaptations of the text stories.
Until Elric, the Making of a Sorcerer, which is an original comic book adventure...and one written by Moorcock himself.
I mentioned that Elric's publishing history was a bit eclectic. And that's because the character first came into being in the early 1960s, featured in a few short stories and novels, culminating in the characters death. The series was steeped in a deliriously over-the-top adolescent angst, with Elric a star-crossed, tragic anti-hero, bemoaning his cursed fate as a puppet of cosmic forces he barely understood, saddled with a vampiric black sword, Stormbringer, that was as much a curse as an aide.
Moorcock himself has made no bones about his own shifting feelings about his most famous creation who, I suspect, was Moorcock's own personal Stormbringer -- something that he constantly casts aside...only to reluctantly be drawn back to.
He returned to the character in the 1970s, writing new stories to be inserted between the originals and concocting a whole "multiverse" where Elric was but one facet of The Champion Eternal. Then he moved away from the character again, often in essays and editorials implying, in essence, that he had out grown the mindset that created him. But Moorcock has returned to the character again and again, but I would argue, his ambivalence toward the character, and a perhaps understandable ambivalence to the violent, hack n' slash mentality of sword and sorcery in general,.has led to some problematic novels which seem to lack the undercurrent of tragic fatalism that was, after all, the point of the series...and even much sense of adventure (The Fortress of the Pearl, for instance, seemed slow moving and padded, as if Moorcock was writing to meet a word count, rather than from inspiration).
So for Moorcock to turn to comics might seem like one final, mercenary effort to squeeze a few more dollars out of a property even Moorcock no longer had much interest in. (a concern added to by some sloppy backcover text: misspelling the Moorcock novel, Behold the Man, or likening the story to the Lord of the Rings as if DC Comics itself didn't really have faith, or interest, in the Elric franchise and were simply trying to cash in on the TLOTR movies!)
In fact, despite having been a big fan of Moorcock and Elric in my younger days, I had become sufficiently discontented with Moorcock's later, 80s and beyond return to the character, that I hadn't, initially, paid that much attention to this series when it first came out.
So it was a pleasant surprise to find that the Making of a Sorcerer is actually pretty good.
Intended as a prequel to the Elric saga, it features Elric having to prove his worthiness to be heir to the Melnibonean throne by undergoing a series of dreamquests -- with his sinister cousin Yrkoon attempting to see him dead before he succeeds. The idea of the dreamquests is that basically Elric finds himself living the life of some ancient ancestor, each of the four "books" set in a different time, while also forming a sort of chronicle of Melnibonean culture. (As such, though each issue is part of the mini-series, the core plot of each issue is self-contained).
Moorcock adapts to the comic book medium quite well, the stories are decently paced, the scenes themselves told with economy. The plots brim with wild and dreamlike concepts, having aspects of folktales about them as Elric's world is full of demons and gods and talking birds, ancient vows and cryptic sorcery. At first blush, a series about Elric set before the main series -- and before he acquired Stormbringer -- and in which Elric is essentially not himself (as he is living the lives of ancestors) might seem like it's not really going to be an "Elric" series -- and in some ways, perhaps, it isn't. But in other ways, it is, as Elric is still caught up in the machinations of the higher realms and those of the Duke of Chaos, Arioch. Stormbringer even crops up from time to time.
Though not as deliberately bleak and nihilistic as the Elric stories could be, Elric himself less cynical and generally triumphing over his ordeals, nonetheless there is meant to be a melancholy progression as the trek through history is meant to show us how the relatively benign Melnibone of ancient history became the corrupt Empire of Elric's age.
How well this will all read for someone wholly unfamiliar with the Eric stories, I'm not sure. But I suspect it probably isn't the best jumping in point. Oh, the nature of the "historical" adventures means that the gist of the stories aren't really connected to the other Elric stories...but certainly themes and cryptic foreshadowing will only resonate for fans. Conversely, how well this adherers to the Elric mythos is also questionable, as the nature of a series written over many decades and, as noted, in various phases, means Moorcock himself has sometimes contradicted his own continuity (I believe). But though I've read most of the Elric stories, I haven't necessarily re-read them that recently, ad I didn't really feel you needed an encyclopedic recall of the Elric stories to enjoy this.
The art is by Walter Simonson -- no stranger to sword & sorcery type comics, having had a long and respected run on the mythological based Thor comics. Simonson's raw, energetic art might not seem the obvious choice for Elric (the first Elric comic I read being drawn by P.Craig Russell in his more elegant, dreamlike style) but it works well. In fact, I'd argue this may be among the best work I've seen from Simonson...and artist who, I'll admit, I sometimes have mixed reactions to, feeling his line work can be a bit cluttered and overly busy. Simonson's costume and set designs seem a mixture of Norse (appropriate for a guy who did Thor) and North American Indian influences. Again, not necessarily what you first think of when thinking of Elric...but Simonson quickly makes the series his own, visually speaking, setting the scenes against vast and sprawling, barren landscapes effectively evoking the idea of a world in its infancy.
The Making of a Sorcerer, surprisingly, emerges as one of Moorcock's better Elric tales in years, and perhaps showing Moorcock finding a way to reconcile his sensibilities of today with the sensibilities that first gave birth to the character. As such there is a melancholy undercurrent at times, and the idea of heroes who are pawns on a cosmic chessboard...without being narcissistically bleak or nihilistic. And though there is fighting and bloodshed, there's not an undue reliance on that. Moorcock paces out his tales well, so that the tempo is brisk, the sense of adventure and running about high...without it just being scenes of Elric hacking away at adversaries.
Sure, the twists and turns aren't always as twisty and turny as you might like -- you don't necessarily close the book marvelling at the clever machinations and re-reading scenes to see how certain things were set in motion. And, as it is a "prequel" you might feel that, by the time it's over, it hasn't really taken you anywhere as it is, in a way, a prologue. But, if one wanted to compare, you could say Moorcock succeeded more with his prequel quartet than say, George Lucas did with his prequel trilogy.
As I mentioned, what too easily could be dismissed as a mercenary, throw away effort by a creator milking one more go round form a character he no longer believes in, actually emerges as solid entry in the Elric canon.
Cover price: $__ CDN./ $19.99 USA.
Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe
see my review here
Graphic Classics: Jack London
see my review here
Graphic Classics: Rafael Sabatini
see review here
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