📝6/10 → ACCEPTABLE!

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

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: “THE JAZZ MONSTER”

This story takes us back to New Orleans in the Jazz Age. Titan previously visited the era in their 11th Doctor comics. Is this coincidental or deliberate?

I like the connections to the earlier adventure in Wupatki and its living music; how the alien force uses music as its weapon. And we get to see more of Gabby's new mysterious powers, revealed in the previous collection.

The supporting characters are forgettable. Cindy isn't given anything proper to do, and I still haven't warmed up to her.

It's interesting to have another music-based adventure, even if the idea is beginning to feel overused and the story itself is quite traditional. The dialogue gets very technical as well, which drags things down a notch.

The back half of the story moves to Chicago, where Ten and Gabby have to prevent the Nocturnes from invading by inhabiting music records—this part flies by with no real impact.

The last few pages left me somewhat confused as to whether or not there was a timey-wimey element involved.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

• The Doctor takes on the moniker of Doctor Venkman. Love a Ghostbusters reference!

A bit of a hard break in the story after so much action, I think this would potentially be better if you were reading month to month or binging it all, but having taken a break just before this it doesn't work quite as well.

Also yet again, Cindy hasn't really gotten the chance to do all that much since joining the TARDIS. Here she falls in love with a guy, but that's kind of all she gets to do in this story which is a real shame.

The callbacks to The Singer Not the Song were appreciated though, it's always nice to see stories lead from one to the other, here in a weird out of order sort of way.

It's probably the weakest music/sound based story from the 10th doctor comics so far, a low 6, but still a 6.

I’m not sure what I think about the output of Titan. There are definitely some good comic stories within their work but I think, overall, I prefer what IDW put out before Titan took over the comic licence. There is a lot of Titan’s output that is, how shall we say, ‘out there’. There are a lot of very odd concepts, weird characters and huge storylines. The 11th Doctor arc which ends up involving the War Doctor, a child Master and all manner of weird Time War shenanigans is one which made my brain go all swirly when I tried to read it.

The 10th Doctor stories are a bit more straightfoward – at least to begin with, as there is a very odd arc involving Sutekh and Anubis which I can’t quite get a handle on. One thing the strips do well, though, are the original companions accompanying the Doctor. The 11th Doctor has Alice and the 10th Doctor has Gabby Gonzales. She’s a fun companion to have around with some interesting abilities revolving around block transfer computations. Admittedly, some of the intricacies of her character have passed me by as I haven’t read all her stories (although I’m intrigued enough to go back and read everything in sequence to better understand her storyline).

In this two part adventure she demonstrates her strange abilities and seems to be enjoying life in the 1920s which is clearly where she, the Doctor and their other travelling companion Cindy Wu, have been staying for some time.

Cindy is not a character I have warmed to at all in the comics. She is Gabby’s best friend from New York but only seems to join the Doctor because she misses Gabby too much. Her defining characteristic seems to be ‘angry’. She’s constantly sniping at the Doctor and is a harsher version of Tegan in a way. The stories I’ve read featuring her never give the impression she particularly enjoys travelling time and space which is a stark contrast to Gabby, who seems to love it.

The Jazz Monster and Music Man put Cindy through the wringer and do nothing to improve her general mood. I’m not entirely sure what we’re supposed to think about Cindy as there’s little about her that makes her likeable and her adventures in time and space see her effectively playing third wheel to the Doctor and Gabby.

The story opens with Gabby strolling through the streets of New Orleans during ‘the jazz age’ (a lovely opening image with some nice period details) as she heads off the meet the Doctor. He, apparently, is in a bit of a mood and rarely leaves the TARDIS. Cindy is elsewhere and Gabby intends on taking the Doctor to meet her after they’ve eaten together. Cindy is at a jazz club, the Red Eye. As soon as the Doctor arrives he sense something is wrong and, true enough, it soon transpires that some of the musicians have been possessed by an alien entity. It turns out to be the King Nocturne, an energy being that deals in sound. The Doctor and Gabby have encountered the Nocturne before on an alien planet in the future and know how to defeat them. Unfortunately, Cindy’s new romantic interest, Roscoe is possessed and ultimately dies at the hands of the Nocturne.

Music is at the heart of this adventure, which is a difficult element to depict in comic strip form. I can imagine that this would be brilliant as an audio – although it would likely be headache-inducing as much of the story involves the musicians along with the Doctor, Gabby and Cindy, playing discordant music to weaken the Nocturne. But, it is really tricky to satisfactorily show this through the comic strip art. That said, for Titan comics, it’s a relatively straightforward affair albeit with a tragic ending – along with Roscoe quite a lot of other people die at the hands of the Nocturne. The final frame of a rather impotent-looking Doctor watching a grieving Cindy with Gabby comforting her and all of them surrounded by bodies is quite chilling and a contrast to the ‘angry’ 10th Doctor we got on TV in his final days, or even the ‘cocky’ Doctor we got in before the specials. It brought to mind the final scenes of Warriors of the Deep.

The artwork in Titan’s comics can be a bit hit and miss for me – I found The Weeping Angels of Mons to be a bit ‘scratchy’ and ill-defined. The 11th Doctor strips tend to give me a bit of a headache with their imagery. This strip, though, has good artwork which clearly depicts what’s happening with some nice images such as the Nocturne itself.