Doctor Who fans it's been a long time since i've made a post talking about the show and even longer since I last made a post about comics. Well now i;m scratching both of those itches by giving you my thoughts on the first issue of The Thirteenth Doctor Holiday Special and why they chose to make this a multi-part story is beyond me since they could have made a longer comic boom but any here we go with my thoughts on the first issue of this special.
The plot seems to be that The Doctor , Ryan , Graham and Yaz have lost their memories and even more odd is the fact that there's record of where they went stored in the TARDIS and so the whole crew have to figure out why there memories were wiped in the first place and for what reason. I'm not going to lie I thought that this was a one off special but nope it's going to last at least two issues and so I can't really get into to much detail about the plot but I do like where the story seems to be heading thus far.
The special is being drawn by Roberta Ingranata who hasn't really worked on anything having only drawn for two other comic books outside of this book. From what I can tell her art is pretty good all of the characters look like their live action counterparts which is always a good sign and there are times where the art work looks down right stunning heck all you have to do is look at the bottom half of the above picture for proof of that.
Out of this whole issue there was only one mistake that I noticed and honestly i'm not quite sure who's to blame since it's a pretty obvious mistake and that this for some reason The Doctor refers to Gramham as Ryan. Now for those that don't know there's no way you can confuse the two since Ryan looks to be in his twenties and Graham looks like he's in his sixties and Ryan is African American so there's really no excuse for this mistake what so ever and to make sure I was right in thinking that this was indeed a mistake I read the next part just to see if The Doctor confused the two on the purpose but nope there was no such scene.
The writer for this special is Thirteenth Doctor Comics writer Jody Houser and if you've read any of the previous Thirteenth Doctor comic books then you know what to expect from this issue. The writing is honestly really strong at least in this issue it is gut of course only time will tell if the writing remains this good for the rest of this I guess miniseries but I do wish that more effort was given into creating memorable side characters tho since so far that's the only weak point in terms of writing.
Now what is something I found to be interesting is that we find out that the TARDIS stores memories of everywhere the crew has been. That right there is such a cool idea and it's something that I don;t think has been talked about in the actual show yet and I can't see why because by adding in that idea it now also means that when something is taken from those memory banks it's a huge deal like it is here.
As is per the course tho at this point the character of Yaz so far isn't given that much time heck I think in the whole first issue she barely has a paragraph. As any Doctor Who fan will tell you this is something that is also an issue with the last series of the show since alot of the time went to Ryan and Graham it got to the point where the comic actually gave you more details about her character in one of the front pages then the show it's based on did and so i'm hoping that she gets more time in the next issue and in the next series altho given the track record i'm not counting on it.
POSSIBLE SPOILER STARTS HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So yeah Santa is in this or at least someone who's dressed up like him and I have to admit when I first saw him I was a little bit disappointed that he didn't look like Nick Frost. However tho as we soon find out he's not the real Santa so Nick Frost Santa is still out there being awesome in every way possible but I will admit having Santa in this issue would have been great since it would have tied in with the whole holiday theme that they have going on.
SPOILER ENDS HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Even tho Jodie didn't get an epic speech in her first series she actually gets one in her first comic book special. It's a speech about how believing in things even impossible things isn't a bad thing and it was something that I honestly really did like and in my opinion while this speech doesn't cement her as The Doctor it tells me that this version of The Doctor is willing to believe in anything and just like Alice from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland it's possible that this Doctor will try and believe in six impossible things before breakfast.
Overall this wasn't a bad first issue but I don't really get why this has to be split up into god knows how many issues when it doesn't really have that much story for it. If anything this should have been a single story and nothing more but hey it gives us something else to talk about while we wait for New Years Day to comes around and yes I will be reviewing the second issue which will also double as my review for this adventure as well and with that in mind and with the second issue due out soon i'm not going to give this issue a ranking since it's the start of the story.