The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop

"It can travel into the pages of any book ever written! We could be in any story, anywhere in the universe of imagination!"

Writer: Jonathan Morris

Format: Audio

Released: 16th December 2010

Printed in: DWM 429

Featuring: Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory

Synopsis 

The Doctor and Amy present C.S. Lewis with a book, The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop, not unlike a piece of his future works..

Verdict 

The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop was a massively fun and intriguing comic strip! Full of irony, hints and references it really was entertaining! Even in the comic strips, just how good is the Eleventh Doctor?! Staggeringly wonderful. Quirkiness, seriousness and intelligence in abundance. Do you need more from our Time Lord hero? I loved how this story was released a full year before the TV story The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe and although based on the same classic story, both were completely different! The irony of this comic strip was magnificent and I like to think that the Doctor of a parallel universe is like the one we saw here. Instead of a police box, the Doctor's TARDIS was a bookshop. But not just any old library of books. Any page you opened from any book would be the destination. A quite wonderful concept! The play on the TARDIS housing books of lost or incomplete Doctor Who stories was really terrific with Shada notably standing out as the destination. The White Queen was a wonderful villain and I do like to think that she was the Rani in disguise - there certainly was a resemblance in looks! The Gallifreyan link was particularly pleasing as we haven't had that much in the revived who with the exception of The End of Time and The Time of the Doctor. The visuals of what would be Shada were really frightening. A dead planet. A tremendous description of Douglas Adams' long and incomplete serial. I really liked the idea of the Doctor having an adventure with the young Amelia and Rory, and although I've never read the comic strip, it reminded me of The Klepton Parasites with the Doctor having children as his companions. I really liked the simplicity and unoriginal idea of what is written down occurs. It's been used tiresomely in hundreds of stories in a whole range of genres and now it's found its way into Doctor Who and resurrected the Doctor himself! Young Amelia was magnificent and I thought the humour of young Rory was excellent, he so obviously fancied her even at a young age! Overall, a fantastic comic strip! The bookshop TARDIS interior was very clever and the revelation at the end that the comic strip was just the visual of a story written by C.S. Lewis was brilliant as the story could never be considered canonical, but now it can! Could the enemy be a cross between the Rani and a Weeping Angel? And would the Doctor openly call himself the Professor? I can't see it! But it certainly made for lovely reading. 

Rating: 9/10