Doctor Who: Once Upon a Time Lord lands this week, bringing lifelong Doctor fan Dan Slott into the franchise that so clearly influenced his brilliant 2014 run on Silver Surfer.
In that book – as in a majority of Doctor Who stories across many mediums – a near-immortal, unknowable alien force takes on a human companion to provide the audience with a more familiar POV. The companion is allowed to ask questions about the massive forces with which the alien is forever struggling, which has the effect of raising the heroic alien to a sort of idol in the eyes of both character and audience.
The first story in Once Upon a Time Lord, “Firelight”, begins with a sort of companions-on-parade two-page splash (by artist Christopher Jones), providing the narrative introduction for the issue’s main baddies, the Pyromeths. It’s a quick delight, showcasing each of the first ten Doctors and a handful of their famous companions, before dropping us into the main narrative.
The Pyromeths are an ancient race of beings that feed on stories, and they’ve spirited Martha Jones to some hidden place so that she tell them stories until her demise. She, of course, begins to tell them a story of the Doctor. With this story within a story, the issue provides a somewhat prototypical example of the role of the Doctor’s companions; Martha’s story has no choice but to frame the Doctor as an epic adventurer, a hero capable of dazzling intellect undergoing endless, unimaginable adventures. That Martha is telling the story to save her own life is by no means an accident.
The characters – Martha and the Tenth Doctor here, Rose Tyler and the Ninth Doctor in the issue’s backup, “Rhyme or Reason” – are captured rather by Slott, who understands each Doctor’s unique sensibility and voice; Jones and the book’s other two artists, Matthew Dow Smith and Mike Collins, do a rather remarkable job of capturing the original actors with incredible accuracy, right down to facial expressions.
Once Upon a Time Lord has been a long time coming. Slott – who seemed almost fated to write the Doctor – was announced back in 2021, and the book was repeatedly pushed back after an initial April 2022 solicitation.
While it would be nice to say that the book is well worth the wait, the truth of the matter is that neither story in Once Upon a Time Lord even measures up to Slott’s better Doctor Who-styled Silver Surfer stories from a decade ago. They have a ‘kitchen sink’ feel, tossing in every single Who monster and villain possible, as if Slott was afraid he wouldn’t get another chance at playing with them.
The overwhelming $17.99 price tag likewise feels unconscionable. At 64 pages, the issue fails even to hit the length of old Marvel Annuals or DC 80-Page Giants (or the latter’s similarly-formatted Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun, released last month at $9.99). The decision to bind it in hardcover – despite its single-issue size – seems somehow ludicrous, no matter how beautiful the artwork and binding happen to be.
All in all, Once Upon a Time Lord is a loving snapshot of what Slott could be doing with the character, even though it feels somehow too little. With the fantastic art and Slott’s perfect understanding of the characters, it only begs for a better-managed, more substantial effort somewhere else in (space and) time.
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