I was a bit disappointed by The Four Doctors, and it is such a shame too, because this five-part comic miniseries was simply bursting with potential.

The art was very impressive overall, although it seemed to wear down over time. Neil Edwards did some great work with his art while Ivan Nunes brought a lot of life to these books with his colouring, but by issues four and five, the high quality nature of their work felt slightly diminished.

Story, on the other hand, is all over the place to me. You have some really cool ideas about the Voord and the villain has a very intricate, but relatively well thought-out plot. It's all really well done in my opinion and there are some very great many ideas behind this story that were absolutely worth exploring. So the plot is cool, but the story, largely expressed through dialogue with occasional bouts of narration, is just awful. So many lines feel out of character, and a few panels I found absolutely baffling with regards to trying to understand what they were saying. Almost reading as if they were poorly translated online or something!

It's a little shocking this was written by Paul Cornell. On the one hand, he does a great job with certain measures of specificity. He has a really good handle on the different Doctors (at least sometimes) and our three companions, Alice, Gabby, and Clara. He has a lot of specific knowledge about the rebooted series he uses quite effectively (or maybe Andrew James kept a tight lid on continuity via editing). But those strengths of a writer were really inconsistent here, especially in the dialogue. Maybe it was the absence of World War I content.

While this is far from the worst multi-doctor crossover, it is equally far from perfect or even remotely one of the better ones I have encountered. Its closest analogue is Day of the Doctor, but that story does what Four Doctors was trying for so much better. This felt far less coherent, a lot less funny, and Four Doctors even gets a little schmaltzier and cheesier than Moffat's writing on his most self-indulgent of moments. In a lot of ways, it was a pretty rough read, and that sucks, overall.