Holiday Special [COMIC/2019.11.13 ~ 12.18]

★★★☆☆

  There's nothing quite like Doctor Who to get you into the festive spirit, is there? This is where you could do almost anything at any time and get away with it -- and this rule (or rather, the lack of) is stretched even more during the festivities when the telly shows the Doctor and co. getting up to the wackiest of adventures, the audios ramp up their sound design to deliver something truly crisp and beautiful to the ears, and the comics chime in by creating wonderful, eye-popping art for us to enjoy. 

  In comes Holiday Special (which is its actual title), a comic in which Jody Houser is given even more free reign than usual to display just how willing she is to have fun with the material of Doctor Who --  a quality I admire greatly in a lead writer. Here, we have the Doctor and co. losing their memories, an entire Christmas-themed factory with toy workers, Krampus and her devilish minions and an overt reference to Santa Claus himself as the Doctor's friend! It may be a tad bit childish for some, but I don't think that way; I think Doctor Who's fun whenever it doesn't take itself too seriously (not that it's not fun when it does take itself seriously), and to see the Thirteenth Doctor and her fam help liberate the enslaved workers of the Krampus fills me with a kind of joy I used to feel a lot when I was a child. It's a fun adventure that decides to prioritise the festive spirit, never straying too far from Christmas imagery or references, and I think it's completely fine. The best way to describe it would be to compare it to The Return of Doctor Mysterio; I've seen some very vocal people rip it to shreds for being so ridiculous and childish, but that's rather the point -- and I enjoy childish (childlike, more like) things. Holiday Special isn't the pantomime embarrassment some people would have you believe, and it's not some high-concept surrealist artpiece either. It's a very fun Thirteenth Doctor comic, it's got good illustrations (Roberta Ingranata seems to have drawn these illustrations with much more confidence this time around, which I love for her), and it's a very good display of the TARDIS fam at work.