‘Doctor Who: Arena of Fear’ – Abadzis, Casagrande, Carlini, Zanfardino, Florean, Fernandes (Titan Comics)


I’ve seen a fair bit of ‘Doctor Who’ in my time and I pretty much grew up on the Target novelisations, as a kid, but I’ve never really tapped the comic book side of things (I read ‘The Only Good Dalek’ and ‘The Dalek Project’ years ago now but nothing else) so when I saw a couple of ‘Doctor Who’ comic books for sale, at the Hilly Fields Fair the other week, I snapped them right up. I had to really, they were only a quid each and it’s always fun to find out what happens, to the Doctor and his friends, in between what we see on TV. The only ‘slight’ problem with my ‘trying to save a little money’ approach is that you never know quite what you’re going to end up until you’re reading it. This time round, I jumped into the adventures of the Tenth Doctor at Volume 5…

Trapped in the Arena of Fear, and with their memories wiped, the Tenth Doctor and Gabriella Gonzalez, along with their friends Cindy, Cleo, and even Captain Jack Harkness are forced to battle against one another – to the death! Worse – those who escape the madness risk losing everything they are – at the hands of the Wishing Well Witch!

So absolutely no-one’s fault at all then but the ‘Arena of Fear’ story straddles two volumes and I came in at exactly the wrong time if I’d wanted the story to make any sense at all. Which I did, and it didn’t. I’m not going to comment on the story then (as it doesn’t really seem fair to) but I will say that I found the artwork very engaging and dynamic. The aliens are a little underdrawn but the rest of it has so much going on that it’s really easy to get lost in it all for bit. When payday comes around again, I might just have to treat myself to Volume 3 and see what the story is actually about.

The rest of the book is basically the other big story with a couple of small interludes, one of which has that feel of ‘hearkening back to a previous plot while gearing up to the next big plot’, a very effective bridging story then that also concentrates on Cindy Wu and her attempts to find her place in the TARDIS. The Doctor is cool but one of the things that I don’t like about him is how he plays favourites without even realising. That’s very much happening here and Cindy is bearing the brunt of it but her adventures open up parts of the TARDIS that I’ve never seen before so that’s something. And it looks like the Osirans are back, as someone who enjoyed ‘Pyramids of Mars’ (although, didn’t everybody enjoy ‘Pyramids of Mars’?) I’ll take that. It looks like I may need to buy the next volume along with the last.

So the ‘Wishing Well Witch’ story was the only full one that I got to read but it was worth it. Not only did it have all the best bits of ‘Doctor Who’ in it (an intriguing mystery, the Doctor gets to show a little empathy, there’s more going on here than just one story, and his companions get themselves into trouble, it’s all there) but the artwork was just brilliant, engaging without overshadowing the plot itself. It’s a shame that I couldn’t tell who was responsible for which bits of artwork, there’s a lot of amazing work going on here and it would have been good for credit to have gone where credit’s due. Oh well…

If you jump into a series, several books in, then you get what you deserve really but the leadup to the next volume makes ‘Arena of Fear’ a book that worked very well for me. Don’t be too surprised if you see me ‘filling in the gaps’ at a later date.

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