Evening's Empire

"This is my world and I decide who I share it with."

Writer: Andrew Cartmel
Format: Comic Strip
Released: October 1991/September 1993
Printed in: DWM 180/DWCC Autumn Holiday Special

Featuring: Seventh Doctor, Ace

Synopsis

Arriving in Middlesbrough, the Doctor, Ace aid Colonel Muriel Frost in an investigation into a plane crash during World War Two.

Meanwhile, women are being kidnapped, and UNIT is trapped on a strange world of contemporary Earth consisting of building, primitive human bows and arrows and two suns in the sky.

How are these events connected? The Doctor and Ace will soon find out.

Verdict

Evening's Empire was a superb comic strip adventure! I can clearly see why this gets the title of the graphic novel as it was simply a masterpiece from Andrew Cartmel. I adored it from start to finish and I just loved its enigmatic atmosphere. The character of Alex Evening was brilliant with his disturbed nature and I have to say, the feel of the story was so perfectly reminiscent of the Seventh Doctor's era. The writing was just outstanding and I loved how little the Doctor actually did. That's not too unfamiliar for the seventh incarnation and he just stood back, watched things play out, and then came in once he'd worked out how to fix things. It was incredibly good. I really liked the relationship between the Doctor and Ace and he acknowledged that she had gone through a lot in Alex's reality but didn't want to dwell on it. Ace joining the other girls who had been drugged and captured was quite interesting but things soon got stressful and ambiguous surrounding what their fate actually was. They hated it when they did the thing with the head and the imagery of that was very distressing. The warriors that Alex had created were barbaric and very Roman-like and the prospect of them doing battle with UNIT troops was very exciting. I thought the artwork for this story was absolutely tremendous and the switching between panels and merging pages was divine and it just added to the enigmatic feel of the story. Everything just clicked which was hugely impressive. Colonel Frost was a very good character and I liked that UNIT had a female in charge. Her relationship at home with Nick was quite fragmented and it seemed he was only staying with her for sex, even though he made it abundantly clear he was imagining somebody else each time they engaged in physical activity. I found it quite surprising for something like that to make it into a Doctor Who comic strip but it made things very real which was good. Ives was a great character and her fate was very sad though. She died simply because she was 'fat and ugly' which was horrific. The Doctor's reaction was calm but sorry and now he would fix things. Finding the spaceship that had crashed during World War Two being so small was good and the Q'Dhite sounded like a very intriguing race. They weren't evil, but Alex Evening's mind was and he'd used them for twisted purposes. The Doctor brought Alex's mum to his reality though and that shattered everything. His secret was revealed and she wasn't happy. The link with the Bible and how he was raised was good and I liked how Ace was still shaken up. She was going to be okay, and now Alex's warped reality had been stopped. I loved how his imagination had literally been captured but the Doctor saw that it ended. Overall, a simply superb comic strip story! It's a great shame that it didn't get a full release in DWM but at least it was completed in the end. It's fantastic.

Rating: 10/10