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A review by baticeer
Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time, Volume 1 by Scott Tipton, Lee Sullivan, Simon Fraser, David Tipton
3.0
This collection of IDW's 50th anniversary Doctor Who comic collects the stories featuring the first four Doctors. Not providing an overall rating because these four interconnected stories are very different and it is hard to decide on something between them. Each story, from one issue of the monthly comic, has a different artists, but the writing team is the same throughout.
Issue 1 of this is definitely the worst story in the volume. The art is occasionally charming but usually too stylized to the point where it's just grotesque, and the writing is just bad and unsuited to the era. Not recommended. Skip it.
Issue 2 is definitely the best of these four stories. The art is strong with alien environments and peoples depicted beautifully, and the characterization of the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe is perfect. The story is fairly simple but highly enjoyable. I loved it! Recommended reading for all Second Doctor fans.
Issue 3 was fine, I guess? The art and writing both were highly unmemorable but it wasn't bad. Recommended if you're reading the whole series through, but don't go out of your way to pick it up.
Issue 4 was quite good. The art was good and the story decent, but nothing special. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I was more of a fan of the Fourth Doctor and Leela just as an era of the show.
If you'd asked me to guess I would have said that Scott & David Tipton sat down to write the first story with only a very dim knowledge of the First Doctor and just threw something onto the page. But then they went "Wait a second, maybe we should actually try for the next one." So they sat downed and watched significant parts of Season 6 together and really gave the Second Doctor story everything they had, but then they were like "Eh, that was exhausting." And just wrote some fairly generic stories for the Third and Fourth Doctors, but because they were more familiar with them than they were with Hartnell, the characterization wasn't abysmal. The shift in quality is actually quite strange.
Very little of the overarching plot develops in the first four stories. All we get is that someone mysterious is kidnapping the Doctor's companions from out of his timestream. I think the second volume adds more detail to the overall story arc, but these just feel like standalone stories so I haven't assessed that arc yet.
I have to say that I wish IDW had collected this in 2 volumes of 6 issues instead of 3 volumes of 2. They're pretty skinny graphic novels and it feels like they're really trying to suck as much money out of us as possible.
Issue 1 of this is definitely the worst story in the volume. The art is occasionally charming but usually too stylized to the point where it's just grotesque, and the writing is just bad and unsuited to the era. Not recommended. Skip it.
Issue 2 is definitely the best of these four stories. The art is strong with alien environments and peoples depicted beautifully, and the characterization of the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe is perfect. The story is fairly simple but highly enjoyable. I loved it! Recommended reading for all Second Doctor fans.
Issue 3 was fine, I guess? The art and writing both were highly unmemorable but it wasn't bad. Recommended if you're reading the whole series through, but don't go out of your way to pick it up.
Issue 4 was quite good. The art was good and the story decent, but nothing special. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I was more of a fan of the Fourth Doctor and Leela just as an era of the show.
If you'd asked me to guess I would have said that Scott & David Tipton sat down to write the first story with only a very dim knowledge of the First Doctor and just threw something onto the page. But then they went "Wait a second, maybe we should actually try for the next one." So they sat downed and watched significant parts of Season 6 together and really gave the Second Doctor story everything they had, but then they were like "Eh, that was exhausting." And just wrote some fairly generic stories for the Third and Fourth Doctors, but because they were more familiar with them than they were with Hartnell, the characterization wasn't abysmal. The shift in quality is actually quite strange.
Very little of the overarching plot develops in the first four stories. All we get is that someone mysterious is kidnapping the Doctor's companions from out of his timestream. I think the second volume adds more detail to the overall story arc, but these just feel like standalone stories so I haven't assessed that arc yet.
I have to say that I wish IDW had collected this in 2 volumes of 6 issues instead of 3 volumes of 2. They're pretty skinny graphic novels and it feels like they're really trying to suck as much money out of us as possible.