STORY PLACEMENT

 THIS STORTAKES

 PLACE BETWEEN THE

 AUDIO BOOK "THE

 NEMONITE INVASION"
 AND THE COMIC STRIP

 "COLD-BLOODED WAR."

 

 WRITTEN BY

 JOHN OSTRANDER

 

 ILLUSTRATED BY

 KELLY YATES

 

 RECOMMENDED 

 PURCHASE

 IDW GRAPHIC NOVEL

 RELEASED IN JUNE 2009

 (NORTH AMERICA ONLY).

 

CLICK TO ENLARGE

 

 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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© IDW Publishing 2009. No copyright infringement is intended.

 

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.

 

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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