Doctor Who: The Ripper, by Tony Lee. Art by Tim Hamilton, Andrew Currie, and others. Graphic novel collection.IDW Publishing continues to produce excellent Doctor Who comics, most if not all written by Tony Lee. I reviewed a collection of his stories featuring the 10th Doctor, and this graphic novel collects his first four issues featuring the 11th Doctor.
The collection starts with a light-hearted tale, "Spam Filtered," in which holographic spam infests the Tardis -- this is Amy and Rory's fault. In this story, Lee captures the feel of the Doctor's wackier stories, and is perfect for a one-off story, especially one that starts a series with a new Doctor. Humorous stories are notoriously hard to end, but Lee ends this story in a humorous way that even makes sense in the logic of the story.
The core of this collection is the 3-issue "Ripper" arc, in which case the Doctor and the Ponds arrive in 1888, right in the middle of the Ripper killings. A trail of Kryon radiation leads the Doctor to recognize that something distinctly non-Earthly may be happening in Whitechapel, both in terms of the villain and the lead detective.
Amy asks the common question of why they can't stop the killings. When the Doctor explains that he can't change the timeline, Rory quite accurately points out that he does just that ALL THE TIME! Another excuse is given, which makes some wibbly-wobbly sense, but Rory's follow-up question was one of the highlights of the collection.
There are a range of artists whose work went into these stories, and generally speaking, they do a workable job. There are times when Rory is nonrecognizable, but the likenesses of both Amy and the Doctor tend to be consistently on-model. But overall, these four issues make for a very good read.
source: public library
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