The Flood

The best of the Paul McGann collections, by a small but important margin.

First off: the only real dud in this collection is "The Nightmare Game"; as an American born in the '80s, I don't have any special affection for 1970s footie and my guess is I never will. While I respect Gareth Roberts' attempt at a 1979 Doctor Who Weekly-style story, it all just falls a bit flat, and feels exceptionally inconsequential. The art is also the weakest in this installment, by far.

But the other strips included in "The Flood" are, by and large, exceptionally good. Scott Gray has proved himself the best writer for the Doctor Who strip since Steve Parkhouse left in 1985, and if his ideas aren't quite as wide-ranging and crazy as Parkhouse's, he's certainly better at pacing his strips. That's definitely the strong point of the later McGann strips, as seen here and in "Oblivion": Gray's work makes you feel like you're reading a continuous run of stories, an actual "season," and even the tiny, less event-driven stories have some part to play in driving the story forward.

It also helps that this is the first collection not to have one or more one-off strips - usually humor-based - separated from the main run of the story. "The Land of Happy Endings," a loving tribute to Neville Main's William Hartnell comics of the '60s, essentially fills that role, as does "Where Everyone Knows Your Name," the book's opener. They're both slight but they do contribute to the eighth Doctor's emotional journey.

The best in the book, without a doubt, is the eight-part finale "The Flood," which nicely caps off the eighth Doctor's nine-year stay in the DWM strip (far longer than any other Doctor). Like the earlier "Children of the Revolution," this one brings back an old enemy and makes them far more interesting than we've seen in years. Gray's Cybermen are far and away better utilized than Russell T. Davies' in the new series, and you can see how the strip may have influenced elements of both the Series One and Series Two finales. Except, actually, it's better. And kudos to Panini for finding the money to expand the last part and give the Cybermen a *real* metal breakdown.

Finally, there is the usual series of intriguing behind-the-scenes notes, complemented by a plethora of sketches and, this one time, the script for and story behind the infamous "eighth Doctor regeneration" version of "The Flood: Part Eight," which was never actually used.

Panini is already spoiling us with the very high quality of these graphic novel collections, but in terms of actual bang for your buck, this one may actually be the best yet. I still slightly favor the crazy science-fantasy of the Davison and Colin strips by Parkhouse, but this is the first time I've seen the later strips ever come *close* to giving that run competition. It's just a shame it all fell back down again, into child-friendly, easily-solved stories, once the ninth Doctor entered the scene. ( )

The final volume of DWM's eighth Doctor comic strips was definitely my least favorite of the three I recently read. After the climax of Oblivion, Gray opts to do some light, standalone, companion-less stories, and unfortunately, none of these (aside from "Where Nobody Knows Your Name") have much to recommend them. They're not bad, but they're not much to make them exciting, either. The Nightmare Game, Gareth Roberts's contribution, is particularly dull/pointless. Fortunately, things get a little better with the return of Destrii in Bad Blood (though I feel the return of Jodafra was bungled; the one-dimensional villain here is nothing like the enjoyable fop from Oblivion), and things become absolutely magnificent with The Flood, which again, beats the new series to its own game, providing a gripping, world-shaking conclusion to ten years of the eighth Doctor. (And how can anyone fail to like the melancholy whimsy of "The Land of Happy Endings"?) The endnotes are also on top form this time, as we see just how the return of Doctor Who to the telly impacted the strip-- for the worse, I'm afraid. I want my Ninth Doctor: Year One featuring Christopher Eccleston and Destrii!