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TARDIS Guide

Review of The Glorious Dead by DanDunn

27 March 2025

This review contains spoilers!

Wow! I mean wow! I said before how much I envied the generation who grew up with these comics while I when I was little had the crappy Adventures magazines and Battles in Time which were mainly just there to give the toddlers something colourful to look at for a couple pages. This story exemplifies top tier comic book storytelling, it culminates a series of previous stories that builds to a rematch between the Doctor and the Master with the fate of all reality at stake, and that's no exaggeration! This is the most visually stunning comic story I've ever come across in Doctor Who, the range of art styles used to show all the different realities the Doctor's pulled through is astonishing. But it's not just his side of the story that works well, we also have Izzy and Kroton the Cyberman facing off against an unstoppable enemy that ties into a previous story that's basically Ashildir from Series 9 but done right! Despite his short stay in the TARDIS, Kroton the Cyberman has one of the most powerful character arcs of any companion and it pays off in a brilliant ending. Unlike Ground Zero (which I also love), the pacing does flow at a more organic rate, we spend a lot more time with our characters and these different settings and the way the story keeps building and building the stakes is perfect.

As I mentioned, this features the Master in the first of a few depictions of what happened to him following the events of the movie and I think it's the best version, the way he's manipulated the events of not just the story but events leading up to the story makes this one of his best depictions. The cosmic battle between him and the Doctor does carry that old trope of "we're not so different from each other", but again, it's visually stunning and it does actually carry a lot of weight to it and calls into question some of the Doctor's flaws. The ending is a bit corny with how hope triumphs over evil, but again it's a perfect sendoff for Kroton. This is a masterful comic and I recommend reading the omnibus right from the beginning to set the stage perfectly.


DanDunn

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