REVIEW - Out Today - Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor Issue #2.1 From Titan Comics



Titan Comics launches the second year of ongoing adventures with the Tenth Doctor with the release of Issue #2.1, available in comic stores and online from today. The new story arc offers the ideal jumping on point for new readers and this year Titan promise 14 issues a year, including one double issue special, appearing every four weeks.  


Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor - Year 2
Issue #2.1 - ‘The Singer Not The Song', Part 1
A fresh new start to an all-new Year Two, as the Tenth Doctor ongoing series takes to the stars!
Looking for rest and relaxation, the Tenth Doctor and companion Gabriella Gonzalez take a trip to Earth Station Presley, a mining platform around an enormous gas giant – and home to one of the most spectacular sensory experiences in the universe!
The gas giant is a perfect example of human colonists living in harmony with indigenous life – in this case, the Shan’tee: conceptual beings perceived by humans as hauntingly beautiful music!
But the Doctor and Gabby are walking straight into a war.
Something has corrupted the song of the Shan’tee – a mysterious signal of unknown origin – and now the human colonists are trapped in a fight for their lives!
Can the Doctor, Gabby, and a synesthetic scientist uncover the truth and bring the war to an end without further bloodshed… or will the song consume them all?
And… why does Gabby feel like the alien foes she’s been facing are starting to rhyme...? Is there something less random and more sinister at work…?

Alternating art team Elena Casagrande and Eleonora Carlini continue their stratospheric rise, while writer Nick Abadzis plots an epic arc for the ages!



Review
Following the time-warping, multi-Doctor event, the Tenth Doctor and his companion Gabby are back in the TARDIS for a second year of brand new adventures. It’s business as usual: another deep space settlement, another mutating alien plague threatening to wipe out all life as we know it. Perhaps the Doctor needs to steer clear of scientific bases named after terrestrial rock gods – last time it was Bowie Base, now it’s the Presley Foundation that is the root of the trouble as an unknown menace threatens to rip a formerly peaceful colony asunder.

The Doctor has promised Gabby a holiday. It’s guaranteed, then, that rest and recuperation is the last thing that she’s going to get, though at first it seems the new world on which they find themselves isn’t so dangerous after all. Gabby is enthralled with the beauty of this gas dwarf upon which humans and native species have been living harmoniously. But now a virus, apparently sent from Earth via the human colonists, is threatening to wipe out the ethereal Shan’tee and the Bovodrine tree cows and to destroy this breathtaking planet whose splendour almost overwhelms the senses. The latest Nick Abadzis adventure unfurls almost immediately into a twofold mystery – who is behind the attack and what do they hope to gain from the destruction of this harmless world?

In this new adventure Abadzis introduces the Shan’tee, beings who exist only as a sensory concept, perceived by humans as music. Such a brief can’t have been an easy one for an artist to realise; however, Eleanora Carlini rises to the occasion, illustrating the flowing, spiritual aliens as wraithlike figures with shades of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in their concept. The whole world of Wupatki is rendered with a light touch where the pastel coloured floating city and the translucent Bovodrine all have an almost dreamlike quality. Everything is in movement, even the characters’ clothing has a dynamic of its own, hanging and swirling like classical drapery.  This then is in very stark contrast to the monstrous monochrome nightmare of the plague victim, and the swirls and lightness of the peaceful world are replaced by incongruous jagged edges and sound effects where the attack starts to impact upon the perfect world.

Once again companion Gabby is the reader’s narrative point in the story as she continues to catalogue her adventures for her earthbound friend Cindy. Meanwhile, the Doctor is David Tennant’s Time Lord as we best know him, the clever, respectful alien, who values and protects all deserving life forms and whom an attacker would be ill-advised to get on the wrong side of. But with the Doctor off doing what the Doctor does best – sticking up for the underdog – has he left Gabby vulnerable to a fast-escalating threat?  


Click here to order your copy online or visit your local comic store today.

Don't miss the all-new chapter in the lives of the Tenth Doctor, Gabby and Cindy!



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