The Fountains of Forever Part 2

"Everything has its time..."

Writer: Nick Abadzis 

Format: Comic Strip

Released: 14th January 2016

Printed in: DWC: Tales from the TARDIS 02

Featuring: Tenth Doctor, Gabby

Synopsis 

As the Doctor suffers the effects of retro-regenerating, Cindy is still nagging Gabby about the ridiculousness of her apparent adventures through time and space. But with the Doctor weakened, it's up to Gabby to try and discover just why there's so much psychic activity in New York, and why people will go to such extremes for rejuvenation...

Verdict 

The Fountains of Forever continued along very strongly after a fantastic first part. I think it definitely helps reading the second part immediately after the first and had the story been released in single parts, as was the case at the start of the range, then I would have obviously reread part one to familiarise myself with the story once again as it's usually around a month between blogging separate parts of the whole story. I'm just so glad that this magnificent Tales from the TARDIS sister comic to DWC is being filled with content and at just £3.99 for four parts of stories, it surely will sell! I know that the next issue is also a 100 pages special and I would expect the price to increase by a pound but I am hopeful they keep it at the steady price that it currently is. I'll have no qualms about purchasing in the future that is for sure as I'm just loving the run of stories and now I get to do a trio or quartet every fortnight with there now being two magazines! Do I dare suggest that there will soon be a third with the addition of the Fourth and Eighth Doctor titles from Titan Comics to the UK? That would be astounding! Anyway, back to the story itself and after the incredible conclusion to part one with the Tenth Doctor reverting back to the Ninth Doctor, I was slightly disappointed that we didn't get longer with the previous incarnation but the moments we did were just magical. The image just looked so entirely wrong seeing Christopher Eccleston's Doctor in the attire of his successor David Tennant! I think that just highlights how brilliant these comics are and also illustrates that this format can do just about anything. Just when you think you've seen it all, they go and do a retro-regeneration! I loved the ambiguity behind the Doctor wondering if he reverted back one regeneration or two with an obvious reference there to The Stolen Earth/Journey's End. The Tenth Doctor really is a bit of an anomaly when it comes to regeneration as he used up two regenerations and didn't change his appearance! The cheeky man. I loved the foreshadowing of The End of Time as well with Vivian asking the Doctor if he'd want to go when it was his time. I thought that was extremely clever. I like that not printing stories at the time the incarnation is current allows for things like that and they really do add a nice extra spice to stories. It always puts a smile on my face and this story was no different. Have I mentioned before that I just love Gabby? She's the highlight of this entire comic, both titles, in my opinion. As a companion, she really is just fantastic and it's wonderful to see what a positive effect the Doctor has had on her life. Cindy was continuing to disbelieve her best friend about travelling the universe in a wooden box and Gabby didn't really seem to care now. She was intent on finding the Doctor after some strange messages on the psychic paper. I loved how she just knew she'd find the Doctor and didn't even need to ask any questions. When she'd found him, things started to get very interesting. I'm really not sure what the entity that merged with Dorothy is going to turn out to be but with a quire serious and lengthy build, I do hope it's good! This range hasn't let me down yet so I hope that continues. I'm confident that it will. I liked the reference to Revolutions of Terror and I think Gabby mentioning the Cerebravores every time she comes home shows that this story isn't all that far removed from her debut comic. I would say that's a positive as we can still relate to her well. It was good to learn more about Cleo and it was a pretty safe bet that she wasn't working alone as we soon got introduced to Erik who had done some extensive research, involving Torchwood and UNIT's Black Archive, to learn about the age-regression gun. Hanif also seems like an enigmatic character. The rejuvenation of Dorothy was not dissimilar to regeneration and with her having a connection with something in space that was headed for Earth, I look forward to seeing what plays out in the next part! For now, another fantastic part and I do hope the rating in the blog of the final part will be a high one. It's looking good.