Titan Comics 2014
Written by Robbie Morrison
Illustrated by Brian Williamson & Mariano Laclaustra
Coloured by Hi-Fi
Clara and the Doctor landed amid the bright lights of 1960s Las Vegas for rest and relaxation, but their luck quickly ran out! A group of intergalactic high-stakes marauders, known as the Cybock Imperium, crashed the party, intent on world domination – and on erasing all who stand against them with the help of a stolen Time Lord weapon! As Clara flees for her life alongside legendary lounge singer Frankie Seneca and his Wolfpack, it’s up to the Doctor and boxer Sonny Lawson to muscle their way past the Cybocks... without rolling snake eyes on the dice of fate! How much is the Doctor willing to gamble to save Earth from being wiped from existence?
I am a firm believer that this series is much more interesting than his run on the television show ever has been. What Robbie has done here with the whole Cybock Imperium these squid like people are incredibly fun and weaving the beginning of the story to the end well it’s obvious to me that his writing skills shouldn’t be ignored. By setting the story in the heyday of the “Wolf Pack” and using Las Vegas as a backdrop for them to infiltrate Earth and set up a stronghold to take over has been geniusly done.
Brian, Mariano and Hi-Fi bring it all to life with such a vividness and and realism that it’s just so easy to get lost in. I do like that we really see such great faces, facial expressions and emotion coming from the page that you do get drawn into the story in such a delightful and powerful way. Seriously this Doctor has that incredible likeness to his real life counterpart it’s almost uncanny. Then the Squid race and their ships and all the imagination required to bring them to life yeah it’s really remarkable stuff.
The fact that the Time Gun of Rassilon has been around and locked up and not been stolen a dozen times before this has me wondering but then after what happens with it this issue I don’t know if it will be a threat anytime soon. Of course with all the time travel going on here you never do know and that’s half the fun. I do hope that while Kronos has been dealt with this way the Cybok Imperium will return with a hardon for the Doctor, the last Galifrayen left alive. Well almost.
I have to admit as much as I enjoy the television program I think it manages to really translate well and in some cases better in comic book form. We really get a better look at the aliens without have a special effects budget, we get more opportunities for characterization as well as the ambiguous style of the Doctor himself, his quirks etc, come across nicely through Robbie’s writing and well quite literally there is not time or place they cannot go easily enough so that a two part story actually has the ability to tie into one from earlier or one down the road.
Titan really does have the best iterations of the Doctor in comics i’ve ever seen.