With the San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) less than a month away, news is coming in fast and furious on con-exclusives. Titan is offering a cornucopia of SDCC only merchandise, with triptych covers featuring the 10th, 11th and 12th Doctors, an SDCC exclusive story line featuring the 12th Doctor and Clara battling a mirror-bound alien threat at the con itself, and two 10th Doctor vinyl figures including a 50th anniversary 10 wearing 11’s Fez! Titan will be at booth #5537. From Titan:
DOCTOR WHO: THE TWELFTH DOCTOR SDCC EXCLUSIVE
When the Twelfth Doctor and Clara turn up at San Diego Comic Con, a quick selfie outside the TARDIS reveals an alien threat among the con-goers and cosplayers! The green-skinned Lady of Neverness can only be viewed through mirrors, photos and quantum snapshots, and has turned up in the background of photos all over the convention! But if enough people view her at the same time, she’ll gain the power to breach into our dimension… to feed on the life-force of the whole planet! Can the Doctor and Clara defeat her and save the day?
Find out in this exclusive new short story, only available at San Diego Comic Con 2015! Plus, go behind the scenes of the comic with writers George Mann and Cavan Scott, and artist Rachael Stott – and get an early in-print glimpse of the Doctor Who 2015 Event – Four Doctors! All under two amazing covers from fan-favorite artist Alice X. Zhang!
When writer Cavan Scott talked to us about taking on the Ninth Doctor back in March, he mentioned he would be adding another Doctor to the long list of Time Lord incarnations he’s written for. This issue is what he was hinting at! Scott has previously written for Doctors: 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and now 12! The issue offers a choice of two gorgeous covers from Zhang, who really lovingly captures the Doctors and now a Companion in her oil-paint portraiture style:
Then there’s that nice series of interlocking covers featuring the three Doctors looking very British in front of the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, and the London Eye. The special covers are unique to SDCC, and contain the latest issues in the ongoing series of the Doctors.
Doctor Who: Tenth Doctor #14, which is the penultimate issue of the ongoing series, finds 10 and Gabby separated by an “ancient force from the centre of the galaxy” according to the release from Titan. Can Gabby hold her own alone? Check out our interview with series writer Nick Abadzis to get your 10th Doctor fix before the issue drops.
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #14 is part one of a two-part season finale, that teams Al Ewing and Rob Williams up on writing duties for what Titan calls “an unmissable mini-epic.” Will companion Alice “find peace — or be marooned far from Earth? Will Jones fulfill his cosmic rock god destiny — or die among the stars? And who will be left to join the Doctor as we head into Year Two?” Check out our interview with Ewing and Williams and see if the spoiler hints they gave us have come to pass yet…
And finally Doctor Who: Twelfth Doctor #11 finds the Doctor and Clara “Fresh from their adventures in Las Vegas” and apparently the Doctor and “eager for a change of scenery, but their next destination aboard the TARDIS will prove a SHOCKING change of pace!
Check out the the neat Triptych effect below of the SDCC exclusive covers below:
But what would a menu of SDCC con-exclusives from Titan be without adorable vinyl figures? Fear not, you’ve got your pick of tiny Tennant’s:
Be warned, spoilers abound!
Ghosts of India - Mark Morris
Mark Morris' Ghosts of India is set in India in 1947 at a time when the country is in the grip of chaos, as it's torn apart by internal strife. When the Doctor and Donna arrive in Calcutta, they are instantly caught up in a riot and parted from each other. Barely escaping with their lives, they soon discover that the city is rife with tales of 'half-made men' who roam the streets at night and steal people away. It is said that these creatures are as white as salt and have only shadows where their eyes should be. With help from India's great spiritual leader, Mohandas 'Mahatma' Gandhi, the Doctor and Donna set out to investigate these rumours. What is the real truth behind the 'half-made men'? Why is Gandhi's role in history under threat? And has an ancient, all-powerful god of destruction really come back to wreak his vengeance upon the Earth?
Well no. It's actually an alien who's capturing India's poor and using them to create its half-made men - but it takes 5 human beings to create one half-made man. To make matters worse, the alien's spaceship is leaking radiation and infecting the populace, causing horrible growths on man and beast alike, and turning any living creature that's affected by the radiation into a psychotic killer.
This story's quite interesting - not least for using Ghandi as a secondary character, but Morris really hasn't captured Donna or her relationship with the Doctor very well. And most of the other minor characters are only sketched in, relying on the reader's knowledge of the "British family in India" stereotypes.
The Doctor Trap - Simon Massingham
In The Doctor Trap, Simon Messingham does a better job of capturing Donna's voice, but this story has a desperately complicated plot that includes a surgically altered double of the Doctor with whom he keeps switching places, a hell of a lot of robots, and a group of 12 hunters known as the Endangered Dangerous Species Society: they make it their business to hunt down the last examples of any species that's about to become extinct in order to make sure the species is wiped out. And now they're on Planet 1 hunting the Last of the Time Lords.
Planet 1 is the creation of Sebastiene, who may look like a 19th century nobleman but most assuredly is not. He is determined to add the Doctor to the collection in his Trophy Room, but the Doctor is equally determined not to be added.
Shining Darkness - Mark Michalowski
Mark Michalowski was responsible for one of my favourite Ten & Martha novels (Wetworld), and it turns out he's also written my favourite Ten & Donna novel: Shining Darkness. Michalowski has Donna's voice down perfectly, and he also captures their relationship beautifully.
For Donna Noble, the Andromeda galaxy is a long, long way from home. But even two and a half million light years from Earth, there's danger lurking around every corner, and a visit to an art gallery turns into a mad race across space to uncover the secret behind a shadowy organisation known as The Cult of Shining Darkness. From the desert world of Karris to the interplanetary scrapyard of Junk, the Doctor and Donna discover that appearances can be deceiving, that enemies are lurking around every corner - and that the centuries-long peace between humans and machines may be about to come to an end.
It's clear to me that Mark Michalowski really likes Donna - at one point she takes on the mantle of The Ginger Goddess to a race of aliens who hold an artefact that the people she's with want to get back - just as he really liked Martha, and that really added to my enjoyment of the book. He captures Donna's willingness to learn from her travels and her ability to change her mind beautifully - this is the Donna who begged the Doctor to save just one family in Fires of Pompeii and didn't hesitate to join him in pulling the lever that would destroy Pompeii but save the world. I recommend this story.
NB - make sure you read the novels in the order above because there are some brief references to The Doctor Trap in Shining Darkness (you can read the last two the wrong way round, 'cos I did, but I wished I hadn't!)
For those who wish for more Ten & Donna stories (there's only one more Ten & Donna novel scheduled for release in January), there is another audio novel coming out in October: The Forever Trap by Dan Abnett (author of the Torchwood novel Border Princes). Like Pest Control, this story will only be available in audio format.
Review x-posted to my LJ.
