My real knowledge of Doctor Who begins with Christoper Eccleston. I know the names of Tom Baker and… well, I know that there have been a lot of actors who have been Doctor Who in the last 40 years but my familiarity with the good Doctor right now starts with Eccleston and ends with Tennant. As a kid, I could never get past the cheesy special effects or cheaply made sets. Thanks to the last four seasons of the show, I’ve been able to catch up a bit as they’ve tried to explain concepts and villains from the long history of the show. That’s not to say that I haven’t wanted more of an education into the past of the Doctor but have you seen how much the BBC charges for those old DVDS and I no longer have a Netflix account. There seemed to be no way for me to find out more other than checking wikipedia and using that as my history lesson.
Doctor Who: The Forgotten #1 may be the beginning of the history lesson I’ve been searching for. The lastest Doctor and his companion Martha wake up in a museum that feels familiar to the Doctor. Wandering around the museum’s hallways, he finds artifacts that could only have been collected by a time traveler. It’s filled with relics from civilizations that no longer exist, relics that could only have been collected by a Time Lord. And then the Doctor finds the hall dedicated to him, containing the signature outfits that he’d worn in each of his nine earlier incarnations. And then, with a flick of a switch by an unseen enemy, the Doctor begins to forget the many lives he lived before waking up in the Tardis in his current incarnation. Packed in between the plotpoints of the tenth Doctor’s story, writer Tony Lee works in a story about the very first Doctor, that Doctor’s companions and an adventure they once took to ancient Egypt. In some ways, the only things that connect the two Doctor’s is a sense of adventure, the Tardis and the very human need for their Companions.
Tony Lee’s story captures the loneliness of the Doctor’s existence. In the museum, there’s only the Doctor and Martha, two people amid all of the relics and past lives. Tony Lee’s script and Pia Guerra’s artwork create the feeling that those two characters are walking down hallways that no person has walked down for years or centuries. There’s a pristine feeling to everything, a purity only achieved through the total isolation of the artifacts.
That isolation is further reinforced through the story of the first Doctor, who traveled with 3 companions. In that story, we see the Doctor surrounded by people, both friends and foes, in ancient Egypt. There’s an explosion of people that’s suddenly constricted when the story becomes about the Doctor and Martha again.
Pia Guerra’s artwork, fresh from Y The Last Man, is looser here, more cartoony. Like Georges Jeanty on Dark Horse’s Buffy series, Guerra captures the likeness of the actors but avoids getting bogged down in creatng those likenesses. The characters are recognizable as the actors but the likenesses don’t overwhelm her artwork. Her artwork here is more open and expressive than it was allowed to be on Y The Last Man.
Like the best comic book adaptations, Lee and Guerra’s story use the televison show as a beginning point for their comic work. The Forgotten #1 could be an excellent episode of the television series but it avoids just being a television script adapted into a comic book. This isn’t Lee and Guerra trying out for a shot at the big leagues and television. It’s them creating a fun comic book featuring popular television characters and concept. And for anyone curious about the background of the Doctor, Doctor Who: The Forgotten #1 offers insight into the long and varied history of the first and of the tenth Doctor.
Doctor Who: The Forgotten #1
“Part One: Amputation”
Written by: Tony Lee
Drawn by: Pia Guerra
Ink Assists by: Kent Archer and Shaynne Corbett
Colored by: Charlie Kirchoff
Lettered by: Neil Uyetake
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Tags: Doctor Who, Pia Guerra, The Doctor, Tony Lee
