The New Adventures by Virgin Books — more commonly known as the Virgin New Adventures or simply the VNAs — were a series of Doctor Who novels from published from 1991 to 1999. Nearly 30 years after the show began, they were the first series of original novels to feature the Doctor. The first 60 novels feature the Seventh Doctor, one sees the Eighth Doctor, and the last 23 novels see companion Bernice Summerfield take over as the protagonist.
What do I need to know before reading these books?
Depends. If you’re a Classic Who fan or at least have a general knowledge of Classic Who, you’re probably good. If you’re a Revival Who fan, it would be good to brush up the classic series, especially seasons 25 and 26 to know the Seventh Doctor and Ace.
These novels were originally billed as “stories too broad and too deep for the small screen” on the blurb of the back cover, and that was generally interpreted by the authors as swearing, drugs, violence, nudity, and sex. (I choose to believe these books siphoned off Mary Whitehouse’s life force.) The 2edgy4me attitude of novels based on what was once a kids show is one of their most sigh-inducing and yet endearing traits of these novels. And somehow some of them actually make it work.
These books also involve the “Cartmel Masterplan,” a fan term used to describe the ideas of script editor Andrew Cartmel and writers Ben Aaronovitch and Marc Platt to inject some mystery into the Doctor’s character in season 25 and 26. Subtle ideas that the Doctor has a hidden secret tied to the beginning of Time Lord civilization were sprinkled into the final two seasons. Did the Doctor know Omega and Rassilon? Was William Hartnell truly the first Doctor? Is Susan really his granddaughter? The cancelation of the show ended any prospects that these ideas would manifest on screen, but they continued to crop up in these novels and culminated into Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow.
Are they canon?
Doctor Who has never had an official canon and with a flexible universe of time being rewritten so it doesn’t particularly need one. Canon is one of the contentious issues with these novels. They were the de facto continuation of the show and yet they were largely ignored by the 2005 revival. It’s up to you to decide how these stories fit together (or if they need to). At the end of the
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Truthfully, I'm actually just past Love and War in my NA reading, but I do have reviews written up elsewhere for all of them so far and people wanted to follow my journey in full. So gonna post reviews biweekly as a catch up then I'll start reviewing as I go. As a small bit of context Genesys is the only review that wasn't written within a day of finishing reading and as a result is a bit more thin than the others, (but that's alright it's pretty thin as far as being a book worth talking about anyway).
Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel
Given the consensus I've generally seen towards this book I wasn't going in with terribly high expectations, but still went in with an open mind. As the book starts off and characters are being introduced I thought the book might have been the Doctor and Ace teaming up with what is basically Conan under a different name which regardless of the books overall quality I'd get a shallow enjoyment out of it for that at least. Unfortunately that wasn't quite how the book turned out.
After the scene setting that had me interested in the story's potential, the book jumps straight into what is a somewhat awkward attempt to introduce any new readers who may be unfamiliar with the central characters of The Doctor and Ace, by having Ace lose her memories in an accident of the Doctor's making. Then the Doctor dictates to her much of who both he and Ace herself are before restoring her memories. I understand as the beginning of a new range of books they hope to bring in as large a readership as possible and this was likely done with the intention of helping accessibility, but I do question what readership they were expecting to get that they had intended this for. The show had only been gone a year and a half at the time the book was releasing, and while you can argue with the declining ratings of the show they may pick up some old fans who hadn't watched since the 70s, I doubt they were going to get many readers completely uninitiated in Doctor Who that will need everything laid out for them at the start. If the intent had been as I've assumed for accessibility I do like the irony that it will almost certainly have had the opposite effect for a reader in that position. I tend to find info dumps for previous continuity such as this unnecessary for anything I'm versed in, and for things I'm not a complete wall that will just bore me as it feels like it's taking me away from the story to give me information I have no context with whic
... keep reading on reddit ➡Want to know what I thought of the Big Finish adaptation? Check out my review thread here.
So when I started posting these reviews this is where I actually was in the books, so it's nice to finally get here. But in the time it took to post up to here I've pulled another 3 books ahead, so still a little more till reviews sync to my current reading.
Love and War by Paul Cornell
So this is one of those books that you have to really try to lower expectations for because you know it's a really big deal. It's one of 3 NAs that seem to come up in my exposure as those massively significant books alongside Human Nature and Lungbarrow and having read it I can definitely see why. It's a very different book from Revelation which caught me off guard at first. We're definitely not all systems go from page 1 here and what we have is a slower story methodically building up to a big punchline. While I'm making a direct comparison, I'd also say it feels like a more confident story. I love Revelation but it does feel as if it's trying too hard at times to be taken as literature and not tie in fiction, Love and War on the other hand seems confident and content to tell the story its telling and doesn't worry how it's viewed.
Ace has in the NAs been quite prone to very quickly forming crushes and at times full romantic interests with very little reason. I do actually wonder if it was a mandate or it just made sense to most of the writers to take that direction with a young teenage girl no longer bound by appealing to an audience of children. Though regardless of reasons it didn't sit terribly well with the Ace of the show, who certainly had a prominent romantic interest in one of the TV stories, but was far from swooning over someone every episode (her name isn't Rose Tyler). Love and War seems to take that fully on board though, both offering an explanation as to it being a result of living such a transient peril filled lifestyle while also fully exploring a romantic interest for Ace instead of just tacking it on to the story as most others have.
Both Ace's characterisation and the exploration of her character are probably the strongest in Love and War they've ever been. While Revelation was a book that explored Ace's past, Love and War explores her relationships. We get to explore Ace's first love, her strained relationship with her mother, her first real r
... keep reading on reddit ➡This'll be the last DWM post for a while. After this there's only 4 strips left and they're in 3 groups each 4 or more books apart. There's also the 10th anniversary strip The Last Word, but I'll leave that till the end since I have no idea where it's placed within the continuity and thematically it's probably best to read it as a coda to the NA range in general than where-ever it takes place anyway.
Pureblood
Another Dan Abnett contribution, this time a 4 part comic focusing on the Sontarans. Probably more than any other major Doctor Who monster the Sontarans get pulled in a few directions. At times strong invading forces to be feared, but equally often played for outright comedy or somewhere in between. It's not often a Sontaran story aims to make them feel genuinely sympathetic though, which is a big part of Purebood. Here we have the Sontarans on the brink of extinction "Sontara" has been wiped out and they're scrambling to ensure their Racepool is restored so they can carry on with their self cloning. There's a real sense of desperation and sadness to the Sontarans here and I do genuinely find myself feeling bad for them.
Abnett plays about a bit with ideas of the Sontarans, how they contrast with the Rutans and even introducing some original pre-cloning Sontarans. The pureblooded Sontarans are a nice idea, even if they contradict with the later originally intened origin BF would adapt. There's a small amount of clashing of era values and I supect a degree of TNG Klingon influence with the angle of modern Sontaran honour having lost its way a little from the older set of values.
This is also the first comic strip outing for Benny, but similarly to Transit, Abnett probably wasn't entirely sure how to approach her and she isn't a big factor in the story. She gets of some catchy flippant lines and asks the Doctor where his morality in this situation lies, but that's about the extent of her here as a character. The Doctor himself is quite sympathetic to the Sontaran cause, with some nice subtle continuity callbacks to Genesis once again faced with the opportunity to enable/facilitate genocide on a long running foe. Though while chosing to help the Sontarans he does after all get in a good bit of manipulation to serve his own agenda too.
The art by Colin Andrew really fits the piece well too. He's great at all the sci-fi ships and tech and really manages to create a lot of emotion in the face of jacket potatoes. Overall I really like the strip, no
... keep reading on reddit ➡Last time on ZERO reads.
A little context for this review. Cat's Cradle was a real slog for me, the biggest one in the range so far. This review might be a bit contversial because I know some people really loved this book, but it never came together for me at all. I originally put the book down halfway through and didn't pick it up again for another 6 months. By which point my book mark had fallen out and I was so hazzy I restarted anyway. The restart wasn't all that necessary my memory of "nothing's happened" in the first half was pretty accurate but I got through it within a decent time on second attempt.
Also there are things at the time of writing this review I addressed but give a pass because I believed they were going to be explained by other books in the Cat's Cradle "arc". With hindsight I know they actually meant bugger all and I think even less of Time's Crucible for them. But I left the review as it was for the sake of representing my feelings at the time.
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible by Marc Platt
I've never been in an abusive relationship, but now having read through Time's Crucible I think I have something akin to an understanding of what that must be like. Reading this book just made me feel completely and utterly beat down by the unending monotony of it all, it felt like a punishment for something I didn't know I had done. But despite that, and the track record it never broke from no matter how far I pressed on, I would continue to believe that the book would get better. Every few chapters a cliffhanger would present that would utterly convince me "Ah, this is where the book begins to move." Only to begin the next chapter and find out that cliffhanger was a bait and switch every time and the book shall continue to spin its wheels for another 20 pages.
The book opens with a promising prologue. We get a strong representation of The Doctor, hearing his concerned thoughts about a fault in the TARDIS he'd never got around to fixing and had grown accustomed to now vanishing. It works well as both a character point for the Doctor and foreshadowing for the book itself, even adds in a nice side point of the Doctor forgetting about and burning his toast during it that reflects the idea of the Doctor absent-mindedly leaving a problem until it's too late. It's both a small well done character moment and subtle foreshadowing. I feel it
... keep reading on reddit ➡Last time on ZERO reads.
A bit of a sidetrack from the NA books themselves I've also been reading the DWM NA comics alongside my book journey.
In the 90s Doctor Who Magazine had continued to carry on without the show and its comic in each issue was the only place for new Doctor Who fiction. Then in 1991 a couple of years after the show's cancellation Virgin come along with their own continuation of Doctor Who. Unlike today when we have the show to provide a unifying direction any comics, books and audios need to get in line with; the Wilderness Years didn't have any figurehead leaving DWM and Virgin under no obligation to each other. Despite this the 7th Doctor's half of the WY was very different from the 8th Doctor's in that for most of it DWM and Virgin kept more or less in sync with the DWM comic taking its cues from the NAs and the NAs in return occasionally using some small parts of DWM continuity. Near the end of the 7th Doctor's era DWM decided to make a very hard split from this but in the time they built up to doing it we got a new Doctor anyway and the 8th Doctor's WY were the most fractured the brand had ever been both narratively and the fandom itself, but that's another topic.
I'm not gonna go as in depth on the comic reviews so there's no scores, just a general sum up of my thoughts. This thread I'm reviewing all the stories that narratively are set between the Timewyrm arc and the upcoming Cat's Cradle "arc". Most of these were actually written and published before the NAs were a thing, but DWM gave their own official placement of the stories so we're following that. Future comic posts will be considerably shorter as there's never more than 3 strips between later books and usually just 1 or 2.
Fellow Travellers
First of the NA strips, though it's actually older than the NA themselves by nearly a whole year. I'll assume this was the chosen starting point purely based on it being Ace's debut in a DWM strip afer 16 preceeding 7th Doctor stories without her; some of which still hold impact on the stories to come which only adds to the likelihood the decision was all based on Ace. It definitely helps set the tone kicking things off with Andrew Cartmel (cor, guy gets around doesn't he?).
Cartmell is well known for his interest in comics (well for Alan Moore comics) so it's not too surprising to learn he's adept at putting togethe
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Another review and this time the amazing conclusion to the Timewyrm story that's more than it deserved. Positive reviews, as people often comment, are a lot harder than negative reviews. This review is honestly a bit rambly and it's the one that on a re-read I'm the least happy with of all my reviews. But I'd need to re-read the book to properly do a new and improved review and I'd kinda like to read the whole series sometime within my lifetime so backtracking barely 10 books in wouldn't be the best decision. So I'll live with it as is and resolve to try to do better with future positive reviews.
Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell
Wow. This is definitely the point the NAs take that step forward into being something more than just tie in fiction.
Of the first 3 books only Exodus had really been enjoyable, and while it was a really great Doctor Who romp, it didn't really push beyond feeling like a good tie in that captured the show. Revelation on the other hand really branches out, finding new things to do with Doctor Who while also at the same time stepping into feeling like an actual novel of its own. Similar to some other wilderness years stories, I feel like I need to take a step back and force myself to see the story in context of the time because much of what it does would go on to become very interwoven with the franchise much later.
First of all I want to comment on how much Cornell's writing really caught me off guard. I am no stranger to Cornell as a writer, with him having done 2 of my favourite nuWho stories and some of my favourite runs in super hero comics. So in part because of expectations based on familiarity I was surprised by how much of this novel was very abstract, ethereal and unreal, with much of the book describing impossible imagery and attempting to visualise concepts like being within another's consciousness. For the first half of the book it had what felt like an almost Neil Gaiman-like prose in some of the ethereal aspects or at times even its contemplative nature where the book would pause to talk about unreal character's perspectives and the almost consciousness they'd develop.
So where to really begin? This book honestly is mad, and I mean that in the best of ways. The cover is the absolute perfect representation for the first half of the book, and it really stood out to me in a way no o
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Okay, so I saw this movie when I was a kid in the 1980s on late night TV in Australia. I DON'T think it's an Australian movie, but that's always a possibility. I remember it being very cheap, very sleazy. Pure exploitation trash.
I'll try to be as specific with the details as I can here, but remember that I saw this movie like 30 years ago and haven't seen hide nor hair of it since so I have no idea if any of these details are remembered correctly.
The plot was a guy bringing back women to have sex with so he wouldn't be a virgin any more, but every time it gets interrupted.
I don't remember any of the interruptions specifically except for one. He brings a woman in who is really ready to have sex and he touches her leg, just like a single touch and she instantly orgasms.
I think the protagonist's mother is somehow involved, and she might be an over-the-top caricature that is part of the series of whacky events that stops him having sex. LIke he's super embarassed about his mother finding out or something?
He had a neighbour or landlord who was really interested in his sexual exploits. I think that guy had a moustache. He starts spying on the guy in increasingly more elaborate ways, and mis-inteprets him as being a super perverted sex fiend through his spying.
I think that's all I have.
--Jhiaxus
I’ve recently started a group of friends through the Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure from the D&D Essentials Kit. I’ve been rewatching Running the Game and Story Vs. Adventure peaked my interest. My players are either brand new or have only played a little outside of this game, all of which was with me. Running a module means that the content is what it is, even if I change things around more to my liking in the adventure. The players either don’t have backstories or have backstories that are disconnected because they are new. I’m wondering how I ensure they have freedom of choice with the adventures that are set up in the module when the only real choices are which quest to complete first
So i live in France and i was wondering why this studio just stopped working on Absolver, Few googles searches later i found out they were actually recruiting developpers for their new game there is at least 4 job offers to work in their studios for a game that is mainly focused on design of characters movements and animations using Unreal engine , keyframe and motion capture They are looking for :
Lightnig Artist Confirmed 3D animator Junior 3D animator Freelance cutscenes animator
Source :
https://emploi.afjv.com/annonces-societes/1024
so people listen :
a new game is coming that is a fact but not sure if its an Absolversequel but i found antoher source where there was this french developper Kevin Roger who worked on Absolver saying they were working on a realistic action adventure game and trying to pay homage to old kung fu movies.
Source :
https://www.google.fr/amp/s/66news.fr/originaire-de-perpignan-il-cartonne-dans-les-cartoons/amp/
here are the links tell me your thoughts on this
Im just happy that this is confirmed
Sorry i did not translate every job offer or article but i gave you the biggest lines
I say we make u/justinlefleur mod
I’ve made a few posts about me playing dnd 5e where I’ve been venting and asking for some advice. Today I am asking as a player looking to dm starting with some adventure modules. I currently own Rime of The Frost Maiden and after March 3rd I’ll have either the monster manual or the dm guide and another adventure book.
I am looking for some suggestions for 5e modules that would be good to run for a beginner dm, as well as some places to get things like art and clear maps to use for the people I’d be playing with via discord.
I’m open to suggestions and anything really, thank you so much in advance.
He's been lightly gifted and has the ugly dirt starter home bc he was my first lazy (I still don't know if it transfers when moving..)
I wasn't happy at all when Broccolo first moved in, but he quickly grew on me and became the islands baby! I couldn't stand seeing him get voided, so i'd love if someone would give him a wonderful new home.
Please don't mind the mess on my island, also feel free to take any of the DIYs on the beach or talk to Sahara if you spot her!
What do you think of them? What novel is your favorite?
Another short thread for 2 strips that come just before Nightshade.
Metamorphosis
Another contribution by Paul Cornell and drawn by Lee Sullivan. A decent enough short 2 parter for a yearbook. The first half plays out as a mystery investigation aboard a space ship delivering embryos. The Doctor and embryos are being caused to mutate and for some reason "eggs! stir!" is becoming a recurring phrase. I did get quite the chuckle at the final page reveal showing it'd been the Daleks all along "egg-stir-minate" indeed.
So part two we have a Dalek invasion with their cunning plan to mutate human embryos into Dalek hybrids. Cornell, not missing a chance to give a good call back, has the Doctor offhandedly comment on something similar happening before and the Daleks get in a "Ka Farag Gatri" as established in Cornell's own Timewyrm: Revelation as the Dalek name for the Doctor. Ace gets to play at being an action hero slightly in the comic, which is nice to have an Ace I can believe went through Warhead after how she was written in Witch Mark. (Though given her attire Sullivan seems to be drawing her as the later changed New Ace. But Warhead works just well enough to explain her weapon proficiency and DWM did place it here in their order shrugs). Then the Doctor saves the day with a cunning plan that uses the Daleks own scheme against them.
Overall a decent bit of a fun for a light yearbook strip and Sullivan does always draw a very good Dalek, though there's definitely nothing deep or memorable going on here.
Memorial
In the time between me starting these 7th Doctor NA stirps and now I've jumped ahead to resume after the NA strips and raced ahead up to the 10th Doctor. In which time I've become very fond of Scott Gray and his 8th Doctor run. (Seriously it's very good, RTD himself liked it enough to steal from it every time he had a finale to write =P). Memorial is significant in that it's a first outing for Scott Gray (known as Warwick Gray in this early strip). It's a contemplative tale about war. The Doctor is visiting a war memorial in 1995 and debates the value and necessity of war with a now old man who'd lost his brother to World War II as a child. Then the Doctor gives us a story of an alien race's war tragedy before we discover the Doctor and Ace (back in her familiar bomber jacket) are visiting to see the flourishing of that alien races own "memorial". It's dialogued very well, has some nice ideas and is a little touching but unsurpr
... keep reading on reddit ➡I've decided to get into this series, since I'm a really big fan of McCoy's portrayal of the Doctor. I've actually just started reading Sky Pirates, which I'm liking so far, and I'm wondering which ones I should prioritize if I keep reading.
Which ones do you like best?
Want to know what I thought of the Big Finish adaptation? Check out my review thread here.
Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
So full disclosure I genuinely think Mark Gatiss gets an unfair amount of flack for his TV episodes. I usually find him reliably enjoyable around the 6/10 or 7/10 mark but rarely impressive. I'd definitely much rather see a yearly Gatiss in the show than a yearly Stephen Thompson or a Frank Cottrell-Boyce. But as I've already said, he does rarely impress and he's a very familiar face, so I sort of understand. That in mind I'd probably have been coming into this book hoping to be positive anyway but luckily for me it was apparently one of Gatiss' best works anyway.
Nightshade is Gatiss' first contribution to Who and I think it's pretty strong but flawed contribution. Sitting two small town community books back to back in release is a bit of a questionable decision on the part of the editor I feel, but my experience with Witch Mark thankfully didn't harm my enthusiasm for Nightshade. It was a very absorbing book, I continually found the characters to be endearing for some reason or another and Gatiss paints a very believable period atmosphere that captures some of what I'd imagine small town living can be like.
The book opens on a prologue that seems quite disconnected from the rest of the book, I'm not really sure if it's going to play into a larger framework within the range or just scene setting. At the moment, I'm presuming it was depicting the Doctor stealing his TARDIS to leave Gallifrey and that could fit in with some aspects of the main story, but it was also just ambiguous enough to later turn out to have been something else. Then we kick into the book proper and our introduction represents much of what to expect from the rest of the story. We snap shot around different residents of Crook Marsham getting to know them and their past glory days they like to reminisce on which are less troubled or more inviting than the reality of their now. It's very easy to get caught up in the characters' wistful looks back which is good because it turns out to be a major theme of the book. The past is a nice place to remember, but letting yourself get stuck there might get you killed. Which as it turns out it gets an awful lot of people killed.
The main plot of the book is very light. There's some sort of mysterious bogeyman creatu
... keep reading on reddit ➡This'll be the last DWM post for a while. After this there's only 4 strips left and they're in 3 groups each 4 or more books apart. There's also the 10th anniversary strip The Last Word, but I'll leave that till the end since I have no idea where it's placed within the continuity and thematically it's probably best to read it as a coda to the NA range in general than where-ever it takes place anyway.
Pureblood
Another Dan Abnett contribution, this time a 4 part comic focusing on the Sontarans. Probably more than any other major Doctor Who monster the Sontarans get pulled in a few directions. At times strong invading forces to be feared, but equally often played for outright comedy or somewhere in between. It's not often a Sontaran story aims to make them feel genuinely sympathetic though, which is a big part of Purebood. Here we have the Sontarans on the brink of extinction "Sontara" has been wiped out and they're scrambling to ensure their Racepool is restored so they can carry on with their self cloning. There's a real sense of desperation and sadness to the Sontarans here and I do genuinely find myself feeling bad for them.
Abnett plays about a bit with ideas of the Sontarans, how they contrast with the Rutans and even introducing some original pre-cloning Sontarans. The pureblooded Sontarans are a nice idea, even if they contradict with the later originally intened origin BF would adapt. There's a small amount of clashing of era values and I supect a degree of TNG Klingon influence with the angle of modern Sontaran honour having lost its way a little from the older set of values.
This is also the first comic strip outing for Benny, but similarly to Transit, Abnett probably wasn't entirely sure how to approach her and she isn't a big factor in the story. She gets of some catchy flippant lines and asks the Doctor where his morality in this situation lies, but that's about the extent of her here as a character. The Doctor himself is quite sympathetic to the Sontaran cause, with some nice subtle continuity callbacks to Genesis once again faced with the opportunity to enable/facilitate genocide on a long running foe. Though while chosing to help the Sontarans he does after all get in a good bit of manipulation to serve his own agenda too.
The art by Colin Andrew really fits the piece well too. He's great at all the sci-fi ships and tech and really manages to create a lot of emotion in the face of jacket potatoes. Overall I really like the strip, no
... keep reading on reddit ➡Last time on ZERO reads.
A little context for this review. Cat's Cradle was a real slog for me, the biggest one in the range so far. This review might be a bit contversial because I know some people really loved this book, but it never came together for me at all. I originally put the book down halfway through and didn't pick it up again for another 6 months. By which point my book mark had fallen out and I was so hazzy I restarted anyway. The restart wasn't all that necessary my memory of "nothing's happened" in the first half was pretty accurate but I got through it within a decent time on second attempt.
Also there are things at the time of writing this review I addressed but give a pass because I believed they were going to be explained by other books in the Cat's Cradle "arc". With hindsight I know they actually meant bugger all and I think even less of Time's Crucible for them. But I left the review as it was for the sake of representing my feelings at the time.
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible by Marc Platt
I've never been in an abusive relationship, but now having read through Time's Crucible I think I have something akin to an understanding of what that must be like. Reading this book just made me feel completely and utterly beat down by the unending monotony of it all, it felt like a punishment for something I didn't know I had done. But despite that, and the track record it never broke from no matter how far I pressed on, I would continue to believe that the book would get better. Every few chapters a cliffhanger would present that would utterly convince me "Ah, this is where the book begins to move." Only to begin the next chapter and find out that cliffhanger was a bait and switch every time and the book shall continue to spin its wheels for another 20 pages.
The book opens with a promising prologue. We get a strong representation of The Doctor, hearing his concerned thoughts about a fault in the TARDIS he'd never got around to fixing and had grown accustomed to now vanishing. It works well as both a character point for the Doctor and foreshadowing for the book itself, even adds in a nice side point of the Doctor forgetting about and burning his toast during it that reflects the idea of the Doctor absent-mindedly leaving a problem until it's too late. It's both a small well done character moment and subtle foreshadowing. I feel it
... keep reading on reddit ➡Truthfully, I'm actually just past Love and War in my NA reading, but I do have reviews written up elsewhere for all of them so far and people wanted to follow my journey in full. So gonna post reviews biweekly as a catch up then I'll start reviewing as I go. As a small bit of context Genesys is the only review that wasn't written within a day of finishing reading and as a result is a bit more thin than the others, (but that's alright it's pretty thin as far as being a book worth talking about anyway).
Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel
Given the consensus I've generally seen towards this book I wasn't going in with terribly high expectations, but still went in with an open mind. As the book starts off and characters are being introduced I thought the book might have been the Doctor and Ace teaming up with what is basically Conan under a different name which regardless of the books overall quality I'd get a shallow enjoyment out of it for that at least. Unfortunately that wasn't quite how the book turned out.
After the scene setting that had me interested in the story's potential, the book jumps straight into what is a somewhat awkward attempt to introduce any new readers who may be unfamiliar with the central characters of The Doctor and Ace, by having Ace lose her memories in an accident of the Doctor's making. Then the Doctor dictates to her much of who both he and Ace herself are before restoring her memories. I understand as the beginning of a new range of books they hope to bring in as large a readership as possible and this was likely done with the intention of helping accessibility, but I do question what readership they were expecting to get that they had intended this for. The show had only been gone a year and a half at the time the book was releasing, and while you can argue with the declining ratings of the show they may pick up some old fans who hadn't watched since the 70s, I doubt they were going to get many readers completely uninitiated in Doctor Who that will need everything laid out for them at the start. If the intent had been as I've assumed for accessibility I do like the irony that it will almost certainly have had the opposite effect for a reader in that position. I tend to find info dumps for previous continuity such as this unnecessary for anything I'm versed in, and for things I'm not a complete wall that will just bore me as it feels like it's taking me away from the story to give me information I have no context with whic
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A bit of a sidetrack from the NA books themselves I've also been reading the DWM NA comics alongside my book journey.
In the 90s Doctor Who Magazine had continued to carry on without the show and its comic in each issue was the only place for new Doctor Who fiction. Then in 1991 a couple of years after the show's cancellation Virgin come along with their own continuation of Doctor Who. Unlike today when we have the show to provide a unifying direction any comics, books and audios need to get in line with; the Wilderness Years didn't have any figurehead leaving DWM and Virgin under no obligation to each other. Despite this the 7th Doctor's half of the WY was very different from the 8th Doctor's in that for most of it DWM and Virgin kept more or less in sync with the DWM comic taking its cues from the NAs and the NAs in return occasionally using some small parts of DWM continuity. Near the end of the 7th Doctor's era DWM decided to make a very hard split from this but in the time they built up to doing it we got a new Doctor anyway and the 8th Doctor's WY were the most fractured the brand had ever been both narratively and the fandom itself, but that's another topic.
I'm not gonna go as in depth on the comic reviews so there's no scores, just a general sum up of my thoughts. This thread I'm reviewing all the stories that narratively are set between the Timewyrm arc and the upcoming Cat's Cradle "arc". Most of these were actually written and published before the NAs were a thing, but DWM gave their own official placement of the stories so we're following that. Future comic posts will be considerably shorter as there's never more than 3 strips between later books and usually just 1 or 2.
Fellow Travellers
First of the NA strips, though it's actually older than the NA themselves by nearly a whole year. I'll assume this was the chosen starting point purely based on it being Ace's debut in a DWM strip afer 16 preceeding 7th Doctor stories without her; some of which still hold impact on the stories to come which only adds to the likelihood the decision was all based on Ace. It definitely helps set the tone kicking things off with Andrew Cartmel (cor, guy gets around doesn't he?).
Cartmell is well known for his interest in comics (well for Alan Moore comics) so it's not too surprising to learn he's adept at putting togethe
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