The Fourth Wall

Sometimes the word 'gimmick' is thrown around too often as a negative thing. 'Oh, it's just a gimmick', people say. 'It doesn't matter'. Personally, I don't mind gimmicks. Gimmicks are fun - and what's wrong with that? You don't hear people complain about watching films or television shows because they're 'fun' so why should a gimmick be seen as a bad thing? You may wonder how this relates to the review I am writing. Well, the  Twelfth Doctor strip The Fourth Wall is one of those gimmicks.

The Fourth Wall sees the Doctor and Clara arrive at a comic book shop, to find that customers to the comic store have been trapped in the very comics they have been reading. The Doctor's attention is drawn towards a comic book series baring remarkable similarities to his adventures - 'Time Surgeon' - and starts to skip through the pages when he is trapped inside the book. It's up to Clara and one of the comic store staff to team up to save the Doctor and the customers who have been trapped in the comic books.

The gimmick I refer to here is the Doctor's interactions with the comic strip environment. Not only does he communicate with the reader through the panels of the strip but he also interacts with the white bars that separate the panels. The way the narrative plays with the comic strip and the interaction with the environment is extremely clever and helps to enhance the story; at one point, for example, the Doctor breaks one of the white bars with his Sonic Screwdriver in order to escape a comic panel. It's fun to see a comic book story have its characters interact with the comic strip and display a Deadpool-esque awareness that they are inside one. I wouldn't want to see this done with every Doctor Who strip but as a one-off it shows real imagination and innovation from the writers.

The notion of people trapped inside comic books is also something that feels appropriately like a Steven Moffat story. Writer Robbie Morrison does a great job of taking an everyday object like a comic book and turning it into a credible threat. He also shows a clear love and dedication for the comic strip medium; at its most basic, the story is a love letter to comic books told by somebody who is clearly a comic book fan. This is the kind of story that I wouldn't just recommend to Whovians but also those who love the comic book medium.

You can also tell Robbie Morrison is a keen watcher of the show. The characterisations of the Doctor and Clara are perfect. I heard Jenna Coleman's voice when reading Clara's speech bubbles more than I did when reading any other Titan Comics Doctor Who strip and the twelfth Doctor feels like he was actually written by one of Doctor Who's current writers. The Fourth Wall is a comic that you could easily imagine being told on-screen; I don't know if it would have worked as well as a television episode but it does seem like an adventure that fits into the current era of the show.

The Fourth Wall also contains some of the best comic book art of the Twelfth Doctor series. Some of the panels are extremely vibrant and really bump off the page, especially the comic panel where the Doctor and his new friend Natalie have broken from the comic panels and travelling through dimensions of comic history (featuring some nice floating panels of the previous twelfth Doctor year two story). It's visually pleasing to look at and captures nice likenesses of the Doctor and Clara.

If I had one complaint of The Fourth Wall, it's the decision to make the monsters of the strip be the Boneless. Whilst the Boneless make sense as monsters yet again breaking out of the two dimension plane of comic book pages and in turn trapping readers within the panels, it just feels too soon for a returning monster after the Sea Devils returned only a monster before. I would have liked to have seen a new monster for a change or perhaps this story later in the run, with new twelfth Doctor and Clara stories between Clara Oswald and the School of Death and The Fourth Wall. I hope the twelfth Doctor comics don't start to make a habit of bringing back returning monsters as whilst it is nice to see them in the comics medium if they do it too often it will become expected rather than a good surprise.

Overall, The Fourth Wall is a fantastic comic book story that uses the medium to its full advantage. The way the Doctor interacts with the comic strip environment is clever and well thought-out by writer Robbie Morrison and the story feels like it belongs in the Moffat era of the show. The Fourth Wall does what the best Doctor Who stories do: it takes an everyday object like comic books and turns them into a credible threat. The characterisations and likenesses of the twelfth Doctor and Clara are at their best here; you won't find a more accurate version of the twelfth Doctor and Clara's adventures together in the Titan Comics range than this one. My only complaint is that the story features yet another returning monster so soon after the Sea Devils in Clara Oswald and the School of Death but it doesn't stop The Fourth Wall from being one of the twelfth Doctor's greatest comic adventures so far.

This comic has quite a cool and relatively unique concept. However, I don't think the plot entirely works cohesively and I still have many questions that I'd like answered about the internal logic of this strip. As always, the art and the characters are brilliant.