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This is the period where the Gary Gillat–envisioned retooling of the comic strip really takes off. We have a new Doctor whose story is primarily being told here; we have a new, strip-only companion for the first time since Olla the Heat Vampire way back in issue #134, almost a decade ago; we have a largely consistent creative team, as Martin Geraghty works on all but one of the twenty-six strips, Robin Smith all but two, and Alan Barnes all but seven; we have ongoing threads between stories for the first time since around The Mark of Mandragora. It's a clear attempt to recreate what made the comic special during the Dave Gibbons era—complete with callbacks to that era in many ways.

Overall, there's a real sense of the comic shifting what its approach is. It's not aping the tv show, it's not aping a series of novels, it's not aping Vertigo Comics. Most often, it's aping itself, in the Mills & Wagner/Dave Gibbons/Steve Parkhouse era. Big, loud stories, with lots of universal danger, epics with ponderous (in a good way) narration but also fun quips. I don't think it always works, but it's fun to read, and it's very noticeable. A different creative team might build up to a dramatic epic every so often... here we arguably get three of them in less than two years! Why not go for broke constantly?

End Game
The eighth Doctor's comic strip debut gives us a new Doctor and a new companion, but also takes things back to the strip's roots with an old friend (Maxwell Edison, previously seen in a single two-part story way back in 1982) and an old setting (Stockbridge, the Doctor's home base in issues #61-83, 1982-83). It's fun to see Max again, though he actually doesn't really do anything here other than stand around—for obvious reasons the strip focuses more on new companion "Izzy S." It's also nice to see Stockbridge again, though End Game made me realize there wasn't really anything to Stockbridge: it's just a generic English village where something can go wrong, without any recurring characters or anything other than Max (though we do get a St. Justinian's mention). On top of all this, we get an old villain, too, though not one who ever featured in the strip before.

More important than the continuity, I suspect, is the style. Barnes and Geraghty are clearly aping both The Iron Legion or The Stockbridge Horror: we start with an ordinary English village, but quickly go cosmic. It has a great energy but I found it somewhat baffling; there are a lot moving parts here for a story made up of just four eight-page installments. The Celestial Toymaker trapping Stockbridge, Knights Templar who have betrayed their oaths, a distorted duplicate of the Doctor. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what was happening, but I enjoyed the ride.

New companion Izzy seems fun but hasn't yet done a ton to distinguish herself. She has potential, but there is a pretty awkward panel where she blurts out her whole backstory and personality to the Doctor, rather than have it be organically unfolded in the story.

The Keep
If we want to continue finding Dave Gibbons–era analogues for this new era (and the creators encourage us to do so in the notes), then this is (as they admit) Stars Fell on Stockbridge, a two-part story that kind of works on its own but is mostly there to set up the next story. There is a lot going on here: it's set in the future era of The Talons of Weng-Chiang (but also the time Earth is evacuated due to solar flares), there are gangs on the surface, there's a living sun, there's a malevolent android. But in all of this, the Doctor and Izzy don't really do anything they just get told what's going on by other people, get out of jams due to luck, then leave. It might ape Stars Fell a bit, but Stars Fell works as a story in way that this does not.

A Life of Matter & Death
This begins what becomes a bit of a trend for the strip, if I recall correctly: the celebratory adventure on a special occasion. (There was a celebratory nostalgia strip before, Party Animals, but not for any particular reason.) Here, the 250th issue of DWM sees the Doctor and Izzy in a weird alien dreamscape where the Doctor is attacked by many of his old foes, and defended by old allies—all ones from the television series. It's not much of a story, and honestly not much of a celebration, either. The old villains get some good jokes (especially Dogbolter), but there's too much time spent on the actual story, which is not up to much. I liked Sean Longcroft's art in The Fangs of Time, but found it hard to distinguish characters here. I do like that whenever the strip celebrates its own past, it gives the impression that the Doctor's past from the comics is more important than that from the television programme. When he dreams up old enemies, he never dreams up the Master!

Fire and Brimstone
This follow-up to The Keep folds in the Daleks and alternate Daleks and the Threshold. It has some great moments—the cliffhanger where the Doctor is exterminated, the appearance of the Threshold—but there was so much going on, that as in End Game, I ended up feeling a bit lost. Stars exploding, wormholes forming, fire elementals, ancient Time Lord secrets. On the one hand, full of energy and verve... on the other, what was this actually about? Felt like that got lost in the cracks somewhere...

By Hook or By Crook
The Doctor and Izzy land on an alien planet, and the Doctor is promptly arrested for murder while trying to buy jam, so it's up to Izzy to get him out. Izzy is always good for a couple good jokes per story, but she's absolutely delightful here. Gray's script is one of the funniest DWM tales I can remember, from the moment Izzy sees the Doctor forlornly looking out the window of the police cruiser, to the clever but perhaps all-too-obvious way she ultimately solves the mystery. My favorite story in the volume.

Tooth and Claw
Well, this one is The Dogs of Doom; like there, one of the cliffhangers is that the Doctor himself has been converted into a monster. There a werewolf, here a vampire. Plus we get the introduction of short-term companion Fey Truscott-Sade. I thought this one was fun... except Martin Geraghty uncharacteristically let the side down on art, as I often had to work hard to figure out which one of the myriad characters was speaking. Like, Izzy or Fey? Fey or seductive woman? Marwood or airplane pilot? Not sure what the issue was (too much crammed into panels?) but it ruined the effect of the story. On GallifreyBase, Martin Geraghty himself materialized to tell me: "I was moving house slap-bang in the middle of pencilling this story and the woman whose house I was moving into suddenly decided she wasn't leaving, forcing me to spend an extended period of time living at my brother's surrounded by boxes and sans drawing board.

"So yes, work done under some degree of pressure..."

The Final Chapter
And this one is, of course, The Tides of Time, down to the return of the Higher Evolutionaries and Shayde and Tubal Cain, though it goes in for much more Gallifrey stuff than Tides of Time actually did. A bit too much, to be honest. It's fine, but a bit bewildering and a bit noisy, and once again, the mechanics of things get a bit amorphous as we move toward the climax.

Wormwood
The Threshold story comes to a climax. This has got some clever stuff in it, some great visuals, and at six parts, the story doesn't feel overstuffed like many of the previous ones have. The regeneration fakeout is excellent and really well done—and as the notes note, really only would work in comics. (Well, the audios actually did something similar recently, but they couldn't commit to it for so long!) The Threshold base on the moon is great, I loved the simplicity of the Threshold plan, the use of the Time Lord translation gift was excellent, Abraham White is a great villain. The characters get the space to breathe here. The reveal of what the Threshold are is dementedly clever. Solid stuff.

Stray Observations:

• Okay, some people say "Endgame" not "End Game." But, 1) look at that spacing between the "D" and "G" scrabble tiles, and 2) the running foot uses "END GAME" as well.
• I like this era of strip collections for including full credits breakdowns on the table of contents. On the other hand, I don't like the way the strips are reordered, to move the ones not part of the main story to the end. I guess this is supposed to provide a more continuous reading experience... but those "bonus" strips are mentioned in the "main" ones so it's actually more jarring!
• One thing I like about the DWM collections is their branding often prioritizes artists; the spine here read "GERAGHTY • BARNES • GRAY • SALMON," giving first billing to an artist, not a writer. But just to the penciller; poor Robin Smith is not so honored!
• I can't exhaustively list who cameos in A Life of Matter & Death, but I noticed Sharon, Gus, Ivan Asimoff, Shayde, the Time Witch, the Free-Fall Warriors, and even the little robot from The Iron Legion. No representation from anything post-John Ridgway that I noticed, though, and not even a Frobisher cameo, surprisingly.
• I guess I don't know where it would actually happen, but I'm surprised we've never gotten one of Fey's pre–Tooth and Claw encounters with the Doctor detailed anywhere. Maybe when the show is cancelled again and DWM resumes rotating past Doctor strips, they can give us that.
• No strip in #261! I think #184 was the last time?
• A member of the Order of the Black Sun appears, yet another reference to the strip in DWM's early days. Only, this comes from (Alan Moore–penned) backups that have yet to be collected, so I haven't read them. Someday, please, DWM?
• Overall, though, there is very much an attempt to create a DWM universe for the first time since Muriel Frost in The Mark of Mandragora. That said, I think nearly every single back-reference that's not just a cameo is to something Steve Parkhouse wrote, so it's a very limited universe.
• Alan Barnes is very much a master of the final page cliffhanger. So many good ones... undermined by the fact that they are usually placed on the right-hand side, so there's not a page-turn reveal. Not sure how they would have looked on original publication.

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