The Doctor goes to Antartic and finds Vikings, Ice Warriors and a ton of continuity.
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Transcript:
Graham: The Doctor arrives in Antarctica to find Vikings and a whole mass of old continuity and then faces a greater challenge when he takes Bill shopping. We’ll tell you all about it as we take a look at Dr Who: The Twelfth Doctor – The Wolves of Winter. Straight ahead.
Announcer: Welcome to the Classy Comics podcast where we search for the best Comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
Host: We’re now to the point in the Twelfth Doctor comics continuity where he began to travel with his series 10 companion Bill Potts and they continued on to some adventures in the comics rather than going with one-off comic-only companions. This book contains 4 issues and 2 different stories. The first is a 3-issue story the titular Wolves of Winter, where the Doctor arrives right after Vikings land in Antartica fleeing other Vikings and wanting to protect their treasure and pretty soon there are some mysterious goings on and the Doctor and the Vikings bump into the Ice Warriors and the Ice Warriors are on Earth on the trail of the flood. Now this is another continuity point, if you’ve been following Doctor Who, going back to the 10th Doctor era, the second to last television stories for the 10th Doctor. The Waters of Mars had the Doctor facing off against a Martian virus that took possession of human host and sought to wipe out everyone at a Mars colony and in many ways this story is before this because we’re back in the time of the Vikings, a several hundred years before the events in the Waters of Mars. The Antarctic setting really does create a great sense of atmosphere particularly the way the art is laid out in this book and there is a lot going on.
There is also another villain from the Doctor’s past. This one from classic Doctor Who, and I won’t reveal it as a big spoiler here, that shows up. I think writer Richard Menic deserves credit for managing to get this to hang together as a story with its own continuity and just really work as a story because there are some Doctor Who stories where they’ll just throw out a bunch of continuity. Ooh Dalek, Ooh I Cybermen, Ooh Ice warriors, aren’t you impressed but this is actually a really good story with some solid twist and some actual surprises. It does use a lot of continuity and the more that you’re into Doctor Who, the more you’re going to appreciate this story but I think it is absolutely a solid, well-told tale.
The second story is “The Great Shopping Bill” and in this one, this is after the point in series 10 when it was revealed that Missy was what was being imprisoned in the vault. She had had a sense of death conferred on her for her crimes but the Doctor had decided to rehabilitate her by locking her in this vault and pledging to keep guard on it for as long as it took and not to go off-world, though he does fudge a bit on that during the course of series 10. At any rate, it’s found that the dimensional stabilizer is failing and in order to keep the vault secure for Missy, as well as to keep Missy alive, they have to find a new one and it finally occurs, thanks to Bill’s suggestion to go to the Ubermart, which is a giant intergalactic market with anything you could imagine including dimensional stabilizers. Anyway, in the store Bill finds a lost little girl and tries to get her back to her mother. However, there’s confusion, robots end up chasing after them, particularly when the Doctor reports Bill missing. It’s a sweet, short little story. It’s a fun read, not particularly great but I think enjoyable.
Well overall I thought this was actually a pretty decent volume. I don’t think it was great by any means. I think that when Doctor Who comics are truly great, most of the time they’re telling stories with new creatures and new situations that are original to the comics. This one relies a lot on old continuity and also expects a lot of knowledge of that from the readers. I think the less you know about Doctor Who coming in, the less you’ll get out of it but that’s generally the case with all spinoff media but this one’s probably a little less assessable than most. Still I will give this a rating of somewhat classy. It’s a fun read and just another enjoyable volume you for the Twelfth Doctor.
Alright, well that’s it for now. If you do have a comment, send it to me classycomicsguy@gmail.com. If you like the program, be sure and rate it on iTunes and follow us on Twitter at. From Boise, Idaho, this is your host Adam Graham signing off.
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