The Tenth Doctor Complete Year One

DOCTOR WHO: The Tenth Doctor Complete Year One
Writers: Nick Abadzis and Robbie Morrison
Artists: Elena Casagrande and Daniel Indro
Publisher: Titan Comics
368pp 
Published: November 21, 2017

Traveling around in time and space means the passage of time is not linear. Between The Doctor leaving your sight and his return, he could quite easily have had dozens of other adventures over a few hundred years and saved as many worlds. For the companion, nothing has changed. For the universe everything has.

This is a major contributing factor to the wealth of spin-off media taking place in the Whoniverse. The Doctor is not constrained by the same limitations of other massive franchises. His continuity is fluid. As long as the possibilities of time and space remain infinite, we will never run out of stories about The Doctor.

What happened after Doctor Ten left Donna? He battled Cybermen at Christmas, faced The Waters of Mars, and prevented The End of Time, before regenerating for (seemingly) the eleventh time, right? Well, he also met an idealistic dreamer named Gabby Gonzales, saved the world from a race of beings feeding on negative emotions, visited an art gallery of block transfer sculptures, fought the Weeping Angels on the battlefields of WWI, and stared down the son of Sukhteh. And that was just the FIRST year!

Titan Comics has collected the entire first year of their ongoing Tenth Doctor line in an omnibus called DOCTOR WHO: THE TENTH DOCTOR COMPLETE YEAR ONE. It features the writing talents of Nick Abadzis and Robbie Morrison, as well as showcasing the mastery of artists Elena Casagranda, Eleonora Carlini, and Daniel Indro. The creative teams assembled have come together to tell the kinds of stories that only comics can tell, and do so exceedingly well.

What comics offer that other mediums don’t is the ability to tell larger than life stories with a fast pace that resonate. Readers have the ability to pause on a specific panel, re-read a line of dialogue or caption, and allow it to sink in. Onomonopias may give you an idea of what a particular action sounds like, but the reader is the final arbiter of the minute details. Unlike novels, comics don’t need to stop the action cold in order to set the scene - you turn the cover and you’re there.

The artists here take full advantage of their lack of budgetary constraints to lay out mind-bending pages of alien worlds, cosmic monsters, and even a few easter eggs for a reader to take in with awe. We have scenes of The Doctor (whose likeness is at times impeccably captured, especially by Casagrande)opening Gabby’s eyes to beautiful, ethereal sea creatures in the sky, and the stuff of nightmares invading the minds and bodies of the innocent, goliath statues tearing through ancient alien castles, a tank running down a small army of Weeping Angels, the not-God Anubis looming over tiny Earth primitives on his golden pyramid spaceship, and so much more. This is the vision of the Whoniverse fully realized.

As writers, Abadzis and Morrison write a Doctor that is at once instantly recognizable and a little foreign to us. He is still hurting over the loss of his friend, Donna, dreading what he feels coming, yet still regarding the universe with joy. Despite his assurance that he can never bring another human into this life, he sees in Gabby Gonzales a need to see what he sees. Some part of him knows that he has no choice but to bring her along.

Gabby Gonzales is such a fun, likable, and capable companion that it’s hard to imagine that she never appeared in the show. We see how her life of duty to a hard-working family that has sacrificed everything to give her a future is strangling her and pray that The Doctor will take her to the stars. Once he does, her love of art, knowledge, and the impossible are infectious. What the writers have given us is a character worthy of the title companion.

The first year of The 10th Doctor’s ongoing adventures delivers everything Doctor Who stories require: danger, heart, humor, loss, and the promise of more to come, on a scale that television has yet to match.

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