📝8/10

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

MY SCATTERED AND TOTALLY IRRELEVANT NOTES:

It's been a long time since we last caught up with Gabby's family, so this story provides a great opportunity to revisit them. Meanwhile, Cindy is still grappling with the loss of her love interest, but I found it hard to feel invested in this subplot since their relationship was so brief and underdeveloped. However, I did enjoy the way Gabby and Cindy explore the consequences of time travel and forming relationships, adding depth to their dynamic.

This story also revisits the Osirian storyline from earlier, reintroducing Anubis, who tasks the Doctor with a mission to the primordial universe. Cindy accompanies him, giving her some much-needed character development. While the first issue starts off slow, the second—set on ancient Gallifrey with the Untempered Schism and Time Sentinels—is a lot of fun and uses Cindy’s character effectively. The cliffhanger, revealing Sutekh's return, is intriguing and serves as a strong conclusion to Volume 6 of the collection.

The story's second half, unfolding in Volume 7, shifts the focus to Sutekh's return. It’s packed with characters and carries the epic, dramatic energy of a Russell T. Davies-era finale. Sutekh is wonderfully characterized—I could practically hear Gabriel Woolf’s voice while reading. The narrative builds on The Pyramids of Mars and cleverly explains Sutekh’s return, giving a different explanation than what would later appear in The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death. It’s also satisfying to see nods to other instances where the Doctor has defeated chaotic, destructive beings, tying them to Sutekh’s realm.

Once Sutekh is unleashed, he dominates the story, with the Doctor, Gabby, Cindy, and others feeling more like supporting characters in his grand spectacle. Anubis is left powerless in the face of Sutekh’s might, and Cindy finds herself in a dangerous predicament. There’s also attention given to the Cindy/Gabby relationship, which adds emotional weight. Dorothy’s role is pivotal, and her sacrifice to stop Sutekh is touching.

I’m a bit uncertain about the ending—it leaves some threads unresolved—but it does introduce the new form of Anubis, appropriately named "Newbis," which is a fascinating development. Overall, this story successfully blends character moments, high-stakes drama, and rich lore, making it a memorable continuation of the series.

A really cool comic I am glad I happened to read after watching Empire of Death.  Overall, Old Girl, in spite of just being a comic book story by a pretty small company, with just a single writer and a few people on the art team, manages to tell a story much more satisfying as a return for Sutekh.  This comic story does have some problems.  Things get resolved a little too quickly.  Some of the dialogue feels awkward, out of character, or too silly for my tastes.  The last issue has a lot of characters spending a lot of time talking about their feelings at moments of critical urgency, and it can be frustrating.

Yet around these moments of weaknesses are a whole bunch of strengths that really make this comic story something special.  All of the characters are really cool, and there are a lot of characters.  Major players like the Doctor, Gabby, Cindy, Anubis, Dorothy, and Sutekh all get a lot of moments that are well done and memorable.  Sutekh really gets to feel at the full limit of his potential power, and, at least for a moment, is this cosmic entity on the brink of wiping away all of reality just as he is original presented in the original show.  And the art really gets to show that off with these amazingly creative scenes and imagery.  Ancient Gallifrey was very cool and had a lot of subtle little changes that place it at a very specific point in time.  Anubis' ship is beautiful, and their are some really cool sequences in space.  Some panels have washed out light rather than any sort of background to them, and moments like those kind of show a limited budget of time and resources behind the scenes, but given that information, these comics are more impressive in what they manage to do rather than what they don't quite pull off.

It helps that I really like Gabby and Cindy.  It's a shame that I recently learned the fate of the characters is kind of open-ended and left on a cliffhanger at the moment.

Old Girl - 8/10

Old Girl is really fun if you read it just completely without the context of Empire of Death, in that context it brings up some funky continuity issues, but yeah, without, it's really fun.

I loved how well they show Sutekh's power here, the two Sutekhs from different points in his life, the earlier controlling Anubis, is a great way of showing the characterisation, and the ease with which he destroys antagonists from earlier in the run shows his power extremely effectively.

The moment where he destroys the King Noctune is great for both showing his power, taking down an enemy that's repeatedly caused trouble for The Doctor a couple of times, and doing so with a moment that shows the character really well, talking about how he hates music as it's full of life. And then fairly easily taking down a Death Lord (which to be fair we don't know much about), a God of Ragnarok, and imprisoning The Destroyer to stop his return to the vortex is also a great show, the line in the fight about them being gods and still no match was great.

There's some really fun character stuff generally here too, and seeing the alternate(?) early Gallifrey is really interesting (especially the robots), hoping that comes back. I like that Cindy gets a lot more to do here, I like the moments of her doubting her place on the team and then feeling a bit better as she's listed as a companion, I like her confession to Gabby. That stuff's just great.

On the one hand it does almost feel Sutekh is taken down too easily at the end, but on the other, there's established reason for it working the way it does, and it comes at the cost of a character sacrificing herself to do it in a way only she could, plus the events of the story effectively kill Anubis, sure Newbis is there, but he doesn't remember anything at all.

Overall, a much stronger end to this year of comics than the previous