Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #3 - Titan Comics

DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR No. 3, February 2019

It may well have been hard for many of this edition’s audience to comprehend just why anyone within its creative team thought it would be a good idea to simply chronicle a single conversation for almost the entire twenty-two page periodical’s length. Yet Jody Houser’s narrative for Issue Three of “Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor” debatably does just that as it follows the titular character’s discourse with an armed rival time-traveller who initially simply wants her ship, and then later, after a nice cup of hot tea with Yaz, Ryan and Graham, disconcertingly decides to join the TARDIS crew on “a proper Indiana Jones job” upon an alien planet..?

Admittedly, this publication’s final few panels does eventually depict something akin to the exciting “movie serials of the 1930’s and 1940’s”, due to the Time Lord’s party haplessly activating a rudimentary trap whilst exploring a tomb and subsequently finding themselves about to be crushed to death by an escape-proof pit’s constantly closing walls. But this moment of pulse-pounding tension is fleeting at best, and disappointingly seems to have been ‘bolted-on’ to the script’s ending in order to both provide this comic with some semblance of a cliff-hanger and allow Jodie Whittaker’s “most thrilling” incarnation to once again disagreeably wave her sonic screwdriver all over the place like some sort of demented fairy godmother; “It’s all very low-tech. Very nicely done if it wasn’t trying to kill us. Sonic’s not going to do us much good with the release points already triggered…”

Fortunately, much of this comic’s unsuccessful pacing and sedentary sequencing can arguably be forgivably forgotten, courtesy of Rachael Stott’s magnificent pencilling, which genuinely manages to capture all the mannerisms and facial gestures of the ongoing series’ television counterparts. The freelance artist does a corking job of portraying the leading cast members with Graham O’Brien’s wisecracking “whenever faced with the Doctor's eccentricities or dangerous situations” immediately making the reader think of how Bradley Walsh would’ve delivered just such a witticism during the programme’s actual broadcast. Indeed, despite the word-heavy dialogue questionably suffocating any life out of this particular book’s storyline, Stott’s clean-looking illustrations at least imbue her figures with something resembling entertaining energy and permit a modicum of enjoyment to be gleaned from an actor’s familiar grimace here or unconvinced scowl there.

The regular cover art of "DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR" No. 3 by Rebekah Isaacs & Dan Jackson