Silver Scream is a 10th Doctor comic strip which was published in 2009 by IDW Publishing. It was the first part of a run which introduced two new companions to the 10th Doctor – Emily Winter and Matthew Finnegan.

Silver Scream sees the Doctor attending a Hollywood party (and using a series of pseudonyms including Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise). There he meets Archie Maplin, who owns a nearby film studio, and stumbles across an alien plot to steal the talent of actors.

I;m going to begin this review by saying I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. I read the two parts a good couple of months apart as I was unmotivated to finish the story, so little impact did it have on me.

Firstly, the artwork was of a style which I found hard to warm to. Ever so slightly scratchy and undefined, it didn’t draw me in and I didn’t really get a sense of time or place – neither the 1920s nor Hollywood ‘scream’ from the page.

Another huge issue is the character of Archie Maplin. Initially this story was supposed to be what the modern series likes to categorise as ‘a celebrity historical’. Maplin was intended to be Charlie Chaplin. Mere days before printing, the team discovered that whilst they could use Chaplin as a character they could not use the ‘Tramp’ likeness as this is a copyrighted image. At short notice, Chaplin became Maplin with a top hat instead of a bowler and a huge handlebar moustache.

However, in countless frames Maplin is drawn in poses which are clearly meant to be Chaplin. As a result, it becomes very distracting and becomes an itch it is hard to scratch. A story where the 10th Doctor teams up with Charlie Chaplin would have been enormous fun. A story where he teams up with a second-rate substitute fails to work. It also doesn’t help that the moustache they use to disguise his Chaplinesque features often looks ridiculous.

I was also not enamoured by new arrivals, Emily Winter or Matthew Finnegan. Admittedly, at this point they are only ‘guest stars’ and their companion status is in the future but neither is particularly striking at the point. I am interested to see where their characters go (as I understand it all gets a little bit complicated).

The villains of the piece are a couple of Terronites. These are basically human in appearance and failed actors from some other planet. One looks a bit like a matinee idol might, the other a rotund, balding ‘agent’ type. There is little feel for their culture, race or planet and as such their modus operandi could just as easily be a couple of failed human actors. In the story, the technology they use to suck the talent from poor unsuspecting humans has been scavenged by them from another race so I’m not really sure why they couldn’t have been a couple of humans who had stumbled across the technology on Earth rather than two human-like aliens who have brought their stolen technology with them.

There were a few sections that were quite enjoyable. The cliffhanger to part one, involves the Doctor being tied to train tracks as a steam train fast approaches. Echoing the silent films produced in the era this is set in is an obvious trope, but one which would seem odd if avoided. This is pushed even further in the second half where the chase involving one of the Terronites is depicted in a series of panels laid out like a silent film – black and white, with no dialogue save for a couple of ‘speech captions’. This bit actually works really well and in a way a shorter comic strip written mainly in this style would have been a lot more entertaining.

A Doctor Who story set in and around this time is a no-brainer but this comic strip doesn’t fulfill that potential. Indeed, the other principal visit to this era, is of course in The Daleks’ Master Plan when the 1st Doctor, Steven and Vicki pitch up on a Hollywood film set and get involved in comedic shenanigans for Doctor Who’s very first Christmas ‘special’. This too played with the conventions of the silent movie and, of all the missing episodes, is probably the one I would love to see the most – so unusual does it sound. But again, it is merely half of an episode. Other novels and audios have visited Hollywood and different points in history and Sylvester McCoy is on record as wanting to do an audio in the style of a silent movie (I would love to see how Big Finish managed that!) but it does seem like this world has not been properly explored by the series.