City of the Damned is definitely a step down from Doctor Who and the Iron Legion, but not a severe one. Dave Gibbons remains an exceptional artist, but definitely has less variety of cool things to draw in comparison to the Iron Legion. He does a good job with this distinct setting - a world where a city of people have purged themselves of all emotions, enforced by a violent police state called the Moderators. Below the city, a group of people try to preserve human emotion, each embracing a single feeling.

Once you get a feeling of the setting, and our main enemy in the form of a swarm of blood bugs called the Barbara. What I like about this is both the Moderators and emotional humans are both presented in shades of grey. The Moderators are horrible but think they are making the best society they can make, and can be reasoned with in the face of a crisis. The other humans the Doctor meets in this story, a rebellion of sorts, are much better off being allowed to freely think and feel, but they are unstable and chaotic to the point they would all make good henchmen for the Joker in any given Golden Age comic.  It's a weird dichotomy that makes it hard to root for either side of the conflict between Moderator and freedom fighter, but not in a way that feels fully thought out, either.

I don't regret reading this, but would be unlikely to repeat the experience. City of the Damned definitely borrows from a lot of dystopian fiction, ranging from Judge Dredd to 1984, but it is original enough. It struggles with tone a bit, ranging from some pretty brutal and intense scenes to overly silly humour I did not find funny, while the Doctor teams up with gimmicky characters so simplified they most reminded me of the Seven Dwarves from the Disney Snow White film. Make of that what you will.