Titan Comics picked up the Doctor Who license from IDW a while back, and since then they have been doing a multitude of ongoing series with the various Doctors. The ongoing for the 10th Doctor wrapped up its 3rd year recently (and I read the last issue of it), so I might as well give my thoughts.
Year 3 has The Doctor travelling with two human companions – Gabby Gonzalez and Cindy Wu, a pair of childhood friends from New York, with Cindy having an unrequited crush on Gabby. They were also joined in an earlier story by Anubis – the son of Sutekh the Destroyer (from Pyramids of Mars) who may or may not be the same character who appeared in the Faction Paradox series.
The main ongoing arc for this series relates to a lot of head games with various forces messing with the protagonists perceptions of reality – in particular our companions, from “Proto-Nestines” making duplicates of Cindy and placing them in a faux-Feudal Chinese scenario, to dealing with various weird extra-dimensional (and chronological) entities, all somehow linked to the color red.
Gabby and Cindy are really fun protagonists, and I really appreciate the fact that neither is particularly romantically involved with The Doctor (and that Cindy is either a lesbian or bi). The writing is also generally clever, and there’s some visual shorthand that comes up in this comic (along with the earlier Third Doctor comic) that I really like – the visual shorthand for Time Vortex effects is the visual pattern from the opening credits from the start of the First, Second, and Third Doctor’s opening credits – which was just an effect of pointing a camera at a display that’s showing the output of that same camera and recording the results.
Also, I do have one complaint – Gabby and Cindy barely come up on the covers on these comics. Indeed, the covers have little to nothing to do with the stories contained within. I’m really disappointed with Titan Editorial’s lack of direction to their artists when it comes to getting cover art.
Year 3 hasn’t gotten a collected edition as of this writing, but some of the individual stories have, and when the complete series comes out in a collected edition it will be available from this page on Amazon.com. Buying anything through that link helps support the show.
