Four Doctors

8️⃣🔽 = ENJOYABLE!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

“DAY OF THE DOCTOR(S)!”

Multi-Doctor stories are always great fun, and Paul Cornell brings one of them for the Titan Comics line, bringing together Doctors Ten to Twelve as well as a couple of cameos from other incarnations to defeat a universe-shattering threat together.

Right off the bat, Cornell opens the story on Marinus (see The Keys of Marinus, 1964) during the Time War and introduces a cool new redesign of the Voord (it’s about time!). He then finishes the first issue by bringing back his own monsters, the Reapers (see Father's Day, 2005).

We learn by the end of issue 2 that the cool Voord are the baddies here, and I'm all in for it. They end up slighly underused, and their new abilities make them almost unrecognisable, but they are undoubtedly cool.

Further on, Cornell continues to throw in new ideas and take left turns as an excuse to play around with alternate timelines while referencing New Who. This is also where things turn very convoluted.

After two breezy and fun issues, the third and fourth are a bit heavier and less fun.

What makes this story exciting is that it is likely the only time we'll see the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctor in a story together, given that Peter Capaldi isn’t very keen on returning to the role himself. It's also fun to see this as a take on The Day of the Doctor (2013) in the Titan continuity, with two original Titan companions (Gabby for Ten and Alice for Eleven).

And sure enough, Cornell goes all in on the typical bicker and banter between the Doctors. He doesn't simply redo what Moffat did with Ten and Eleven in the 50th and adds a characteristically grumpy Twelve that I could easily imagine Capaldi playing.

It's fascinating how Cornell builds most of the story around a possible future version of Twelve (a sort of Valeyard), had things gone down very differently for him.

This is constantly action-packed and fun, and it flies by instantly. Most of it is action, followed by comical banter and very little introspection or actual fleshing out of the plot—but that's fine because it's all fun.

The art is fine, but the faces aren't always accurate, especially on Tennant and Smith.

A nice little nod to the fantastic Ninth Doctor there at the end!

I really liked this, and reading it after the series’ leading up to it this time instead of on it’s own without context for the new companions made me like it even more. I love the touching on the time war and how it affected other species, the new Voord designs are a real treat. The glimpse we get of War is very fun to see, and that moment at the end with 9 is just fantastic.

I also love seeing more time war tech here, the idea of a bomb that rewrites your history to make another universe possible is great, and I love the glimpses it gives up into these possible realities where our doctors failed, all of them in such different ways (especially 11 and 12). The Voord 12 is a really fun villain, harkening back to classic who which feels right for something like this, while at the same time being and feeling like a big enough threat as well.

The character stuff is a treat, the companions interacting with each other is great, and I love all the moments of the three doctors saying 'We need to…" (or something to that effect) in unison, before all shouting different ideas.

If I had any complaints it would be with the art, I think some characters look a bit off at times, mostly Cindy and Clara can be a little hard to tell apart in some shots, Cindy looks a bit off a lot actually, but still really fun.

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.