Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #7 - Titan Comics

DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR No. 7, June 2019

It is decidedly difficult to imagine that many of this edition’s 5,535 readers in May 2019 agreed with either the website “Rogues Portal” that this was “the kind of comic we need right now”, or with the extremely positive recommendation from “Comicbook.com” that the title was “a great place to get an extra dose of Doctor Who.” For whilst this lethargic instalment to Jody Houser’s “Hidden Human History” storyline indubitably focuses upon “the first woman to play the character in the series” and her televised TARDIS crew, absolutely nothing happens within this twenty-two page periodical except an awful lot of tedious talking and protracted walking…

In fact, it is arguably hard to see just how this publication progresses the “critically-acclaimed” writer’s overall plot by even a smidgeon, considering the Time Lord (once again) merely converses with the (now) two hundred year-old Stilean Flesh Eaters, before deciding to leave the pack of dangerous, blood-thirsty extra-terrestrials to their own devices on Earth and travel to Canada “a century and a half from now.” Such utter indifference to so deadly an invader to human history genuinely beggars belief, especially when the disinterested female Doctor has literally just had to step in so as to thwart the aliens from sucking an elderly local resident dry; “Based on the blood volume, I’d guess that she was fed on within the last few hours.”

Admittedly, Houser does try and spice things up a little bit by reintroducing Schulz and Perkins from this ongoing series’ previous adventure, as a pair of much older Time Agency operatives who have been “tracking temporal disturbances centred on minor wars in Earth’s history.” But whilst such an innovative ‘time leap’ worked well enough for Professor Travers in the 1968 broadcast story “The Web Of Fear”, the duo’s pedestrian presence within Issue Seven of “Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor” debatably appears to have been done simply to help populate and pad out a disconcertingly high number of panels with dreary dialogue-heavy discourse.

Disappointingly, Roberta Ingranata’s artwork doesn’t seemingly help matters either, as despite the Italian’s remarkable ability to pencil the actors’ likenesses, the fact that all the figures do is talk provides her with little opportunity to imbue any dynamism into her work. Indeed, the illustrator may well have been so bored with her part in the creative process, that at the start of the comic when the time traveller’s exploration of North Carolina is suddenly interrupted by Schulz and Perkins, she erroneously places Magda incredulously witnessing the “wibbly-wobbly” event, despite the fact the young girl had previously been left behind in Sixteen-Century Europe.

The regular cover art of "DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTEENTH DOCTOR" No. 7 by Sanya Anwar