City of the Damned [COMIC/1979.12.6 ~ 1980.1.24]

★★★★☆

  What I love about these very early Marvel Comics run of Doctor Who is their willingness to surpass every roadblock the TV show has had over the years due to budget, presenting the most insane scale and the most ambitious narratives. This willingness was apparent in Doctor Who and the Iron Legion, with its giant robo-Roman invasions and alien arenas, and it's still going strong in City of the Damned. 

  This comic has just the kind of humor its synopsis needed: tongue-in-cheek leaning on pure absurdity, with more than one or two whiffs of Douglas Adams. I mean, a city that illegalizes all emotions and systematically removes the capacity for emotion from its citizens? A ragtag bunch of emotion-loving resistance fighters who can only express a specific emotion (and have names specific to said emotion, such as Big Hate, Half Daft, and the Angry brothers... Very, Fairly and Slightly) and fly around in artificial arm gliders? Dangerously hungry slugs that can only suck the life out of people without adrenaline in their blood? Come on, the story practically writes itself with these creative ideas floating about. Dave Gibbons continues to impress with illustrations, providing the panels a sense of boundless energy and excitement as well as peerless detail. There's just something about how Gibbons draws the Fourth Doctor's face, you know? Something about it just feels right; you see the silliness, the dangerously sharp mind and the timeless age on every close-up panel, and Tom Baker's expressive facial qualities are brought to life remarkably.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  It's impressive how, with a little bit of imagination and sense of humor, an admittedly cliched science fiction trope (humans having emotions removed from them) becomes the most exciting thing ever put into a comic strip. The Doctor glides across the skies of an emotionally desolate city, stopping massacres and showing people how to have fun at the same time. City of the Damned — well, I'll be damned, it's a smashing adventure.