Doctor Who: Evening's Empire

This is another fine anthology of seventh doctor tales from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. The flagship tale is Evening's Empire which has a story behind its creation which is as involved as any of the recent complicated (confusing?) TV tales.

Each Doctor has at least one epic comic strip story. For the Seventh Doctor, Evening's Empire is it. Written by Andrew Cartmel, the script editor for McCoy's era and therefore arguably the man with the best grip on Seven and Ace, the story features a lot of elements of the TV show of the time, coupled with a scope they could never have achieved on a BBC budget. The Doctor is helping UNIT track a fallen spaceship when Ace is kidnapped and finds herself in the future in a decadent civilisation seeming modelled on ancient Rome. And there is cyberspace, showing that this was the 90s. The art is frankly magnificent. Even if there are places where you can tell which TV story the pictures of the Doctor come from, the photorealism is astonishing. There is a mix of styles as some of the original art was lost and the artist has redrawn it which almost makes one wish he had redrawn the whole thing.EE isn't the only story in the collection. There is a Dan Abnett story featuring the most dangerous lifeforms in the universe (that look a bit like the Alien from Alien) which is very enjoyable, a Scott (Warwick) Gray story about a memorial that's more than it appears, another Cartmel story inspired by, of all things, the Crow comic about a samurai brought through time to deal with cultists and a Marc Platt story about the TARDIS playing up with a nice set of visual plays that would only work on a comic page, along with a couple of text stories.The stories are all playing on the predominant idea of the time that the Seventh Doctor detaches from humanity to play a larger game. We saw an element of this in some of the final TV stories but the comic strips and the New Adventure novels of the time would take this to a more exaggerated degree, making Seven the darkest of Doctors, dismissing the great humanity Sylv invested in him. As such this collection does remind me a lot of the nineties and where Who was then. It seems so different to what came before and after, when Doctor Who went for a more mature style, tackling thanatos and eros head on. Now we might feel the edginess is a bit excessive, which is why I've only given it four stars. It also feels like the richest vein of Seventh Doctor stories in the collections presented so far.

Great im 18 yr old again!

An interesting and exciting tale, that would not work in any other media, this comic playfully uses comic format to twist reality. The art is great, and compliments the stories well, with psychedelic and fantastical images that would not work in any other media. The characters are well defined and the scope of the stories are often ambitious.

Why advertise a different cover ie you are going to send a book of with different cover.The goods advertised are not the goods received. I.E the cover is different. As this was to be a another artist redoing the art work etc,how do I know this is the artwork I was expecting in the book not a previous item.Also does not mention its black and white either.If anyone has this the cover I have the dr In black and white. Ace in a green top and blue Jean's with a broad sword in her right hand. And guy to her right with a hand gun. To her left a couple of solider and a girl in dark blue just wondered if anyone got a copy of the one advertised.