STORY PLACEMENT THIS STORY TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE AUDIO BOOK "THE NEMONITE INVASION" "COLD-BLOODED WAR."
WRITTEN BY JOHN OSTRANDER
ILLUSTRATED BY KELLY YATES
RECOMMENDED PURCHASE IDW GRAPHIC NOVEL RELEASED IN JUNE 2009 (NORTH AMERICA ONLY).
BLURB the Doctor and his companion Donna arrive on a utopian planet where robots do all the manual laboUr. But things aren’t quite what they seem...
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JUNE 2009
IDW Publishing continues its series of regular one-off adventures with Autopia, and, on the strength of previous offerings, I expected something pretty good. Sadly, what I got was a very bland, generic robot story.
It’s all very much by the book here: the Doctor and Donna land on the planet Autopia to find out why the people there have shut their planet off from the rest of the Universe. They find a decadent society dependent on its robotic servants, one of which is on the cusp of self- awareness. Frankly, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done a thousand times before in science fiction, and there’s little in the writing to set Autopia apart from any of its thematic cousins. Granted, the Doctor and Donna are both reasonably well-characterised, but the few subsidiary characters are terribly generic - if the robot (nicknamed Sam by Donna, after her cat) is supposed to be developing a per-sonality, at least Ostrander could have written him with one.
The artwork, too, has little to mark this story out. Kelly Yates is quite well-regarded in the comics community, but her work here is below par. Depending on the panel, the art varies from pretty good to pretty dreadful, with the latter sadly dominating. I’m afraid to say that this is the first real flunk by IDW’s Doctor Who range.
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Copyright © Daniel Tessier 2010
Daniel Tessier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. |
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