To tide us over until November

Book: Doctor Who Omnibus 1

Authors: Gary Russell, Leah Moore, John Reppion, Tony Lee, John Ostrander, Richard Starkings, Rich Johnston, Charlie Kirchoff, Tony Lee

Artists: Nick Roche, Jose Maria Beroy, Stefano Martino, Micro Pierfederici, Ben Templesmith, Paul Grist, Kelly Yates, Adrian Salmon, Eric J, Tom Mandrake

Published: 2013 (IDW)

Pages: 416

Dragon*Con loot, you guys! Actually my only piece of it besides the tract marks on my left elbow and the free t-shirt I got for giving platelets. That, by the way, is a terrible way to get over squeamishness of needles and blood. It took over an hour and I almost threw up.

Anyway, so continuing the trend of buying a book at each place I make a trip to, I bought this Doctor Who comic book, got one of the artists to sign it, and read like twenty pages the entire weekend. But when I got back, I had half a Labor Day still to kill so I celebrated by doing absolutely no labor except getting through these stories.

And I wish they had been selling a volume of just the six one-shots collected for the Through Time and Space section because those were all gorgeous and different and provocative in examining humanity. My favorite was the one where there’s a planet that’s being terrorized by a monster that feeds on empathy so the aliens have trained themselves to show no emotions but then when they die they record their last words onto these portraits that they hang in this gallery and they’re all emotional things they wished they had said to each other and Martha Jones gets all achy about how uselessly complicated they made things like that, and the art is this blurred-background-sharp-doodle-lines stuff that brings just the right things into focus.

Also they bring in Donna for a couple one-shots. OH YES. Except the one about the planet that treats its womenfolk as subhuman is a bit too on-the-nose when the crowd who buys this probably descended from the first 20^th century ladies lined up to gain the vote.

The longer two stories that sandwich the one shots – eh. The first one’s got a convoluted plot about giant cat alien guardians of the universe, or something, I couldn’t work that out even as I was reading through it, and the second one’s guilty of leaning too heavily on nostalgia to solve its plotline, although it does use the TARDIS’s organic nature in a slowly revealed, brilliant way that gets ignored a lot.

I am glad I bought this, and I love the cover, and I read some of it while eating the best pulled pork and pecan pie in Atlanta at Fat Matt’s Rib Shack waiting for the blues band to set up. So of course I’m keeping it.