By Pat Mills, John Wagner, Dave Gibbons and Others
Since its launch in 1979, Doctor Who Magazine (then known as Doctor Who Weekly) has regularly included a serialized comic strip featuring the current Doctor, which at the time was Tom Baker. As the title suggests, this anthology collects together all of the stories featuring Tommy B's bonkers Fourth Doctor. Originally produced by Marvel's UK branch, the first few stories were written by Mills and Wagner, with later stories by other writers, and featured Gibbons as lead artist. His artwork is fantastic throughout (and mercifully free of the dodgy re-colouring that plagued many later reprints), but the stories are a mixed bag. The Mills and Wagner ones (which includes 'The Star Beast') are the strongest, but do suffer somewhat from the Doctor being mostly companion-less.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Alan Davis and Others
This book collects Excalibur Vol. 1 #35-67 (as well as specials and other material) and features the return of co-creator Alan Davis to the title as writer and artist. Alas, it also features a lot of fill-in issues by Scott Lobdell that are just...oh boy. Reading them really hammered home how Excalibur, and the whole Captain Britain mythos, is really just nothing without Alan Davis. He's the one that held it all together and made the whole damn thing work. His entire solo run is collected here and it is undeniably the best Excalibur had ever been, but it's not something that you can really jump right into since much of it involved clearing up a lot of dangling plot threads left over from Chris Claremont's run (which Davis does masterfully).
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Chris Condon and Alessandro Cappuccio
If you were disappointed that Ultimate X-Men didn't feature many famous X-Men then this is the title for you. So long as you like to see those famous X-Men get killed by Winter Soldier Wolverine. I'm three issues into this series and it is certainly the weakest of the Ultimate line. Despite good art by Cappuccio, it just feels like a run of the mill Wolverine story about him losing his memories and being used as a weapon, but in a slightly different setting that allows for more brutality and less plot armour. Not to mention some really weird pairings. Gambit and Shadowcat? I couldn't done without seeing that.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
By Deniz Camp and Stipan Morian
I do enjoy a good alternative history tale. This one reimagines the Soviet–Afghan War only this time with the Americans directly involved in the fighting and both sides using inhuman super soldiers against each other. This is a savage satirical attack on the hubris and warmongering of the two superpowers that never relents, but does suffer from not having a prominent Afghan POV from the start and being way too short. Really could've done with a few extra issues to give some elements more room to breathe and flesh out some of the characters.
Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Fabien Nury and John Cassaday
Took me over 20 years to finish this series. Originally published in France by Humanoïdes, I read the English translation of first volume in 2004, mostly because I was such a fan of John Cassaday's work on Astonishing X-Men and Planetary. However, the rest of the series wasn't published until years later and by that point I'd moved. It was only after Cassaday's sudden death last year that I was finally motivated to go back and finish it off. During the Second World War, a high ranking Nazi officer discovers a vampire possessing a young girl and tries to turn her into a weapon for the war effort. Meanwhile, a detective in London tries to solve the mysterious death of a millionaire whose body was found completely drained of blood. This is an engrossing supernatural thriller with typical great artwork by Cassaday, but what ultimately lets it down are the characters. They just never really become anything more than familiar archetypes.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
By Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, and Others
I don't think there has ever been a more unlikely collaboration in the world of comics than Alan Moore and Rob Liefeld. Moore was a writer who pushed the medium forward and got a lot of critics to sit up and finally start taking them seriously. Liefeld was the exact opposite, famous for shallow, splashy comics with bad art, terrible stories, and generic characters. Two very different creators with very different methods and goals, and yet in the mid-90s they came together to produce one of the most unsung (mainly due to it being long out of print) comics of that decade when Liefeld hired Moore to write Supreme. Liefeld no doubt expected something similar to Watchmen or Miracleman, a dark deconstructionist fable with graphic sex and violence, but that was the last thing Moore wanted to do. He knew all too well that his previous work had ushered in the grim and gritty era of comics and many of those that came after him, like Liefeld, learnt all the wrong lessons from it. So instead Moore turned Liefeld's violent Superman knock-off into a loving tribute to the classic Silver Age stories of the 50s and 60s and used it to explore the ever-evolving world of comics. It remains one of his most meta works as he completely revised this character and made them aware they were being revised. Since it was produced by Liefeld's studio it was unfortunately lumbered with the garish style that was typical of the time, which was at least balanced out by great flashback artwork by Rick Veitch.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
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