The Tenth Doctor: Year Three #1 Review

The Tenth Doctor: Breakfast at Tyranny’s #1

Written by Nick Abadzis
Art by Valeria Favoccia & Giorgia Sposito
Colours by Hi-Fi & Arianna Florean
Letters by Richard Starkings & Comicraft

Review by Billy Seguire

The smartest thing Titan Comics has done since the launch of their Doctor Who line in 2014 is to separate each arc of the comic into distinct seasons. Having told myself for a while that I would get into the Tenth Doctor comics, the new Breakfast at Tyranny’s arc of The Tenth Doctor: Year Three #1  is one of the easiest introductions I’ve had to an ongoing story, and reading through feels like the start of a new season. Throw in the fact that I can’t get enough of a good title pun and you have yourself a book I’m into reading.

By design, there’s little the reader needs to know to fully enjoy this story going in. The introductory page explains the Tenth Doctor has just finished an adventure opposite Sutek, an Osirian God first encountered in the Fourth Doctor serial Pyramids of Mars, but little from that adventure is carried over apart from what is explained in-story. The Doctor himself awakes as an amnesiac in the opening pages of Breakfast at Tyranny’s and much of the book is spent exploring exactly what’s happened to bring them to this point. Removing the Tenth Doctor’s memory brings about hints of Human Nature as he pieces together who he is with the help of an amiable homeless man, but the moral heart of the Doctor and his imperative to endlessly fight injustice shines through to keep him far more relatable than in that story.

Gabby’s storyline is essentially reset to where we found her at the beginning of her story way back in Year One. This is lost on a new reader, but works both to reaffirm those origins and add a new element for longtime fans to notice and speculate exactly why this version of reality seems off. When Gabby herself begins to notice what’s going on, it’s a great moment of character that harkens back to her past history with the Doctor without relying on it to tell the story. You can really tell how much more of a character she’s become over the past two and a half years compared to when she was first introduced.

What’s going on beneath this story is what really drew me in. While wholly unexplained in this issue, it’s hinted at in ways that had me falling in love with the new direction Abadzis seems to taking the comic. A full page spread near the end of the comic of Cindy emerging back into the real world offers readers an exceedingly troubling image that’s as delightful in its implications as an episode of The Twilight Zone and left me returning to the page after I’d finished the story to soak in all the gruesome details. It’s something that would feel much more at home in a the classic era of Doctor Who than the squeaky clean reboot, and that’s by no means a bad thing in my mind.

The art of The Tenth Doctor: Year Three #1 is well up to the Titan standard and presents a story that’s clean, bold, and colourful. The underworld of Brooklyn that the Doctor spends his time in, with its green noxious gasses and rooftop sanctuaries, is beautiful in its dystopian grunge. David Tennant looks damn good in stubble, and both Favoccia and Sposito produce character art for him with a focus on the character beyond the actor, which is a trait I continually appreciate in licensed works. That trenchcoat has never looked more appropriate than when the dishevelled Doctor is running across rooftops with his down-and-out temporary companion.

My only concern with the art of the comic is that the particular monsters of the story, the wraith hounds, feel generic, as if there was too much freedom given to a design that would never get a chance to work on screen. Like many Doctor Who works, however, there’s a twist at the end of this first issues that presents a new dimension to the story and I’m interested to see how the second issue follows through on the promise of one of my favourite classic monsters returning to Doctor Who after a tragic absence throughout the Tenth Doctor’s original era.

The Verdict

Buy It! If you’re interested in checking out Titan’s Doctor Who comics, there’s no better time to start reading The Tenth Doctor than at the start of an arc. No catching up is necessary and you’ll be rewarded with an intriguing story that isn’t afraid to mix Doctor Who with gruesome imagery to tell a story that feels appropriate to the series. David Tennant has stubble. Need I say more?