Doctor Who: Eleventh Doctor Year Three #13

Writer: Alex Paknad el & Rob Williams 
Artist: JB Bastos & Luiz Campello
Cover A: Blair Shedd Cover B: Photo

There are times when Doctor Who comics seem to be the ultimate storytelling form for Doctor Who. Such a malleable franchise deserves an equally malleable format. Comics are unrestricted by a television budget. Nor are they concerned with appealing to a larger audience than the one they’re guaranteed. Their stories can be as broad or as intimate as they want. As bold and new, or referential. Doctor Who comics can be anything.

No other line of Doctor Who comics exemplifies this better than The Eleventh Doctor series published by Titan comics. Their characters are rich, complex, hilarious, and charming. Their plots range from personal trials to epic battles (quite often both at once). Some concepts are simple and fun, while others are mind-bendingly brilliant. Most impressive of all - no matter how intense a story gets, there’s always room for a bit of silliness.

Number 13 in this Doctor’s third year of comic book adventures takes all the elements of Doctor Who that work best and brings them together with utterly gorgeous art by JB Bastos & Luiz Campello . The Doctor’s world has never looked more cleanly detailed, with not a single line out of place.

The story is a climax of sorts. The Doctor and Alice inhabit a world built on their memories, complete with a Gallifreyan skyline and sonic screwdriver buildings, with the two of them experiencing some pretty intense amnesia. The Doctor isn’t quite sure what he is, what he should be, or how to dress. His new wardrobe is mishmash of his old wardrobe, harkening back to Doctors past in a splendid way. Alice is with her mother, always thinking of the man from her dreams with the bow tie.  

A character losing one’s memory can often seem like a tired gimmick. More often than not the trope is used to change a character’s personality or a lazy effort of introducing conflict. Here, amnesia is both a tragedy of what was lost and a celebration of all the adventures we’ve had with these two phenomenal characters. Throw in an offshoot of The Silence controlling everything, characters surviving in the consciousness of a previously very dangerous sapling, and all the heart a Time Lord’s biology can muster, and you’ve got Doctor Who as you know it and love it best looking better than it ever has before.