The Lost Dimension, Book 1 was pretty gosh-darned epic, bringing in Doctor after Doctor, keeping their stories pretty tight and giving them all the mood of their particular era. It managed to give each of the New Who Doctors an epic challenge of their own, threw in some lovely cameos from Classic Doctors, and one fairly major one from a non-Doctor, and established a pulse-pounding threat that really brought home the joy of the comic-book medium – free from TV budgets and the inconveniences of human mortality, it can tell the stories that might never be dared in other media.
Book 2…
Well…Book 2 doesn’t quite do that. Or rather, it doesn’t do just that. In fact, Book 2 fills in some of the answers behind a couple of plot-threads in the first book, and expands the explanation to more Doctor action, and a long cameo sub-story from another non-Doctor.
Going spoiler-free here will hamper your enjoyment and understanding – we kick off Book 2 with the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana, running into a pure nostalgiafest as three of the lower value villains from eras past pop in and kick a bit of galactic ass. There’s a certain joy in seeing them all, and especially in seeing them all together, for reasons that make good in-story sense, but it’s fair to say that we’d reasoned out the Fourth Doctor’s cameo in Book 1 as just terribly ‘him,’ and so to have it explored in detail here feels like a pure nostalgiafest for – dare we say it? – the sake of padding. Good padding. Fun padding. But…erm…padding, all the same.
Similarly, the non-Doctor cameo here by a Person Of New Who Importance makes sense of something from Book 1 that we were certainly waiting to have unravelled for us, but having this particular character unravel it, out of the blue, takes us by surprise and makes for another strand of what feels less like necessary diversion than it does like padding. Again, good padding. Fun padding. And very true to character padding. Nevertheless, while their story-strand goes on here, there’s a sense of tra-la-la diversion from the real stories, the Doctor-centric stories established in Book 1, which gave us most of the dashing about and drama in that Book.
When we get back to those stories – boom! It’s like a public announcement – ‘We now return you to your regularly scheduled universal peril.’ Once that kicks off, there are more surprises, and the return of a comic-book companion that brightens up the page, as well as the kind of brain-twisting imagery regular readers will have come to expect of the Eleventh Doctor comic-books. There’s a meet-up between two seeming opposite Doctors by temperament, which works out really rather better than you’d imagine it would, and shows up the genius of the show, in that they’re less than five years apart and yet are completely different essences of the same character. And in terms of bringing the story to a satisfactory conclusion, there’s a story-thread which doffs its various hats to The Day of the Doctor, while sitting alongside it as a logical bookend in a way that’s rather wonderful, and compassionate, and hankie-worthy. And that’s the overall vibe with which you’re left after the universe has given us this bumper bag of sweeties, turned inside out and upside down and back to front and sideways – you’re left feeling wonderful, and like you’ve been on a sugary ride into the heart of budget-breaking, impossible-in-any-other-medium Doctor Who. If there’s one nit to pick, it’s that the character-art in the Fourth Doctor section feels almost idealised, as though Tom Baker and Lalla Ward have been ‘youthed’ into versions from contemporary comic strips, and the Fourth Doctor certainly looks more sharply cheekboned and textbook-heroic than he did on screen by the time he was travelling with the Second Romana. But to let that sour your experience of this comic-book would be to note that the sea is exactly the wrong shade of blue for your liking. When writers like George Mann, Cavan Scott, Emma Beeby and Gordon Rennie merge their imaginations and mindscapes, what you end up with is a grand canvas on which the many worlds and personalities of Doctor Who are painted with something akin to genius. And when they in turn have those incredible Whoscapes rendered into vivid life by artists like Ivan Rodriquez, Wellington Diaz, Rachael Stott and Mariano Laclaustra, you get Who like Letts, and Hinchcliffe, and Holmes, and Dicks would have made at the height of their powers if you’d given them the wizardry, the budget, and the best technicians in the game of 2018’s Hollywood.
And you get it between covers, to stack on your bookshelves. Doctor Who’s been ridiculously lucky over its lifetime – it’s had more golden ages than any one show could hope to have. The Lost Dimension, Books 1 and 2 together, represent a new golden age – the age of Doctor Who in Titan Comics. Get Book 2, imagine the Fourth Doctor with sharp cheekbones and looking young, and go where the story wants to take you. You’ll be so much better for it when you’re done.
Tony Fyler lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the 70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By day, he runs an editing house, largely as an excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book. With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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