Comic Book / Doctor Who (Titan): Eleventh Doctor

The Eleventh Doctor comics were one of Titan's three initial on-going series of Doctor Who comics, and like the other three were published from 2014 to 2018 and divided into three "years" similar to TV seasons. They were written by Rob Williams with different collaborators in each of the three "years": Al Ewing in Year One, Si Spurrier in Year Two, and Alex Paknadel in Year Three. The major artists were first Simon Fraser and then INJ Culbard.

The series was officially set at some point between Amy's and Rory's honeymoon in "A Christmas Carol" and their return to travelling with the Doctor in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon". Eleven's companion throughout was Alice Obiefune, an unemployed forty-something librarian from contemporary London, with additional companions in each "year". Year One teamed them with Jones, an initially unsuccessful sixties London rock musician who was a blatant No Celebrities Were Harmed for David Bowie, and ARC, a childlike shape-shifting robot with a mysterious origin. Year Two had the Squire, an aging female soldier with amnesia, Abslom Daak, a bloodthirsty '90s Anti-Hero character who had made intermittent appearances in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips, and whose introduction to this sub-canon was a real shock, and the ever enigmatic and charming River Song. For Year Three, Eleven and Alice were joined by the Stalk, an innocent young member of a highly dangerous alien species.

The Eleventh Doctor comics were the most heavily serialised of the three ongoing comics, with each "year" dominated by a single ongoing plot. Year One had the Doctor's war with ServeYouInc, an intergalactic MegaCorp with a tendency to make Faustian pacts with individual people and whole cultures. Year Two had the Doctor accused of commiting genocide during the Time War, and trying to find out the truth about an incident he couldn't remember while evading the bounty hunters set on his tail. Year Three had the Doctor and friends pursued by an insane and incredibly powerful Silent known as the Scream.

This series contains the following tropes:

• Alien Kudzu: The Planting in "The Scream". The Planting is an organic virus. It arrives on planets in a sapling form, and starts to take roots. Then, it starts to grow and spread, until the whole planet is covered by it. Thus, all native life is replaced by it. After the planet is covered by it, the Planting forms a new sapling and goes on to another planet.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: The Year Two arc is based around this, with the Doctor being accused of committing a horrific genocide during his period as the War Doctor, which at this stage he can't remember. It is eventually revealed that his companion Alice went back into the Time War, became associated with the War Doctor, and activated a device that led to the genocide itself, as seen in "Kill God" and "Fast Asleep".
• Anachronic Order: The stories involving ServeYouInc are out of order from the Doctor's perspective, which makes things a bit confusing.
• Arc Words: In Year Two, "Exterminhate".
• Armed with Canon: Some of the words Ewing and Williams put into Alice's mouth sound like metafictional criticisms of Doctor Who writers and fans who think it's cool when the Doctor acts arrogant and condescending to people who aren't villains and are obsessed with having him constantly be the smartest guy in the room.
  Alice PoV captions: He made a cup of tea. He didn't make silly remarks. Or condescend. Or judge. Or pity. Or act like he was the important one in the room. He just listened.
• Art Imitates Art: A panel of Jones talking about feeling "low" in 1976 Berlin is a direct homage to the cover of David Bowie's album Low, recorded in Berlin at the same time.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The Doctor finally manages to help the Cyclors and Overcaste to do this together, and defeat the Volatix Cabal's attempt to hitch a ride.
• Been There, Shaped History: The Emperor Constantine's vision at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that converted him to Christianity turns out to have been a combination of a crashing Cyberman spaceship and a hallucination the Doctor created to drive them off.
• Bird People: The Jarrodic are raptor-headed avian humanoids.
• Book Ends: For the entire Year One. "After Life" revolves around Alice suffering from the loss of her mother, with her sadness depicted in mostly grey colours, before a giant, multi-coloured Chinese dog and the Doctor re-sparks control to her life. When it comes to the final story, "The Comfort of the Good", the same thing happens to the Doctor himself, after his TARDIS ditches him in favour of the Talent Scout (disguised as the Doctor's mother), until a giant, multi-coloured dragon and Alice brings the Doctor back to save the day. For bonus points, the first page of both stories (with the latter being the second part, as it is a two-part story) are nearly identical, taking place in a graveyard.
  Grey captions: ("After Life") The sky was a cold, slate grey when Alice Obiefune buried her mother. Everything was grey. Grey and barren and as cold as sharp stone. After a few days, she returned to the library, working her usual shifts. Assisting the computer-illiterate, or just plain illiterate. Usually people the Department for Work and Pensions had turned away, since actually helping wasn't in their remit. Once, thoughts like that had made her burn inside. Now she felt nothing. And when she read to the children at story-time, she felt no joy. She felt nothing but empty. Empty and grey. Alice had looked after her mother for years; gradually, Ada Obiefune had become the cornerstone of her life. Without that stone... her life seemed to crumble. Everything just seemed to get worse. The grief. The greyness. The emptiness. Alice started to wonder if the greyness would ever end. If she'd ever feel anything but numb and empty again. Maybe she needed to see somebody. Maybe she needed to see a—
  Alice PoV captions: ("The Comfort of the Good, part 2") The sky was a cold, slate grey on the day the Doctor died. Oh, his eyes were open. He stayed on his feet. He kept moving, kept walking. But he went nowhere. There was nowhere to go. The Doctor had lost his hearts. The Doctor had lost his home. Ejected. Rejected. The TARDIS's gravity fields turned against him — forcing him out of the doors — and into this. Everything he was — gone. All hope, torn away. Hearts cracked by the enormity of loss, the dead, damned Doctor walked, going nowhere, feeling nothing. What else could he do?
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The Talent Scout turns the Doctor into his own evil minion, the Chief Executive.
• Brown Note: The dimension at the end of the Amstrons' wormhole is so beautiful that everyone who travelled there just sat there looking at it until their oxygen ran out.
• Call-Back:
  • The Doctor considers the possibility that the fake Ava might somehow have her real mind, after remembering Auton Rory.
  • When the Doctor and Alice find one another inside the Scream's memory construct in "Hungry Thirsty Roots", the events echo their original meeting.
• Call-Forward:
  • In "Space In Relative Dimension And Time", when the Eleventh Doctor finds out that a Time Vortex Leech has been responsible for all the jumps backwards in time, he states that the leech only latched onto the TARDIS simply because it wants to go back to something, and that we all want to go back to something.
  • "Strange Loops" includes flashbacks to the Eleventh Doctor's memories of the War Doctor activating the Moment, which isn't revealed until "Day of the Doctor", set after the Eleventh Doctor comics which, according to All There in the Manual, are set in between the Eleventh Doctor's first two TV seasons.
• Clock Roaches: The Time Vortex Leech is a rare benevolent one, whose interference saves the lives of Jones and everyone on Datastore 8.
• Company Town: ServeYouInc has a Company Planet.
• Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: In "Strange Loops", the villains turn out to be making money with stolen technological innovation through an unusual combination of this and Giving Radio to the Romans.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Doctor discusses some people he previously encountered who remembered him as "Very rude. Tasteless coat."
  • The Doctor remembers that a "wise man" once said "There will be no battle here".
  • Jones speculates that the Cyberman spaceship crashing is what wiped out the dinosaurs. It was actually a different spaceship full of Cybermen.
  • In "The One", the Doctor finds an old "office" within the TARDIS that is filled with references to the Fourth Doctor's era, including a Mona Lisa, a seemingly-inactive K-9, the Doctor's coat, scarf and hat, and jelly babies.
  • The Doctor feels unhappy when River mentions libraries.
  • Year Three issue 2 opens with memories of various characters saying "Doctor!", similarly to the Doctor's Continuity Cavalcade memories during his regeneration in "Logopolis".
  • At the beginning of "Time of the Ood", the Doctor dismisses chess as a game for "control freaks and robot dogs", presumably referring to the Master and K-9.
  • When the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling are fleeing through simulations of the Doctors' memories in "The Memory Feast", the scenes are Skaro, I M Foreman's scrapyard, and a quarry in Kent.
  • In "Hungry, Thirsty Roots", the Doctor refers to encountering the Monoids, Aridians, Voord, and Krotons.
  • In "The Steampunk Conundrum", the villainous Protoform reminds Alice of ARC.
• Continuity Snarl: Everything concerning Absalom Daak in Year Two:
  • He is shown to still have the frozen body of Taiyin, despite the body being unfrozen and incinerated in Emperor of the Daleks. In addition, that story saw him cured of his obsession with her in that story.
  • He refers to Taiyin as his wife, despite the fact that in his debut, they knew each other for all of a few minutes before she got killed. Hardly time for a wedding, although he does get called on that at one point in the comic.
• Despair Event Horizon: The Doctor has one after his TARDIS teams up with the Talent Scout (disguised as the Doctor's mother), which is reminiscent of Alice's initial depression from the very first Year One story, "After Life".
• Diabolus ex Machina: ARC and the rest of the Entity have been reunited, Jones has come into his power, and it's time for a happy ending. Oops, the TARDIS has teamed up with the Talent Scout...
• Emotion Eater: The Khartite Joy-Beast is a rare benevolent one, which eats people's negative emotions to make them happy.
• Evil Costume Switch: The Chief Executive initially wears an all-black version of the Doctor's costume.
• Flanderization: In the Year Two comics, the Master's TARDIS is depicted as a white classical column, with the Doctor recognising it as such solely through Alice's description and a splinter-group Sontaran banner. In the TV show, it only assumed this form in the later episodes of "Logopolis" and the opening of "Castrovalva", although it is recognised as the "standard" form of the Master's TARDIS by many fans, especially among Sexy/Lolita shippers. (Yes, it's a thing.)
• Fluffy the Terrible: The first story has a terrifying but innocent alien pet rampaging through London.
• Forever War: The "Eternal Dogfight" between the Amstrons and the J'Arrodic.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The people running Rokhandi world do this to the staff and visitors.
• Ghost Ship: The Xerxes memory ark in "The Memory Feast".
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The Cyclors were drawn into the universe by the faith of the Overcaste.
• Going to Give It More Energy: The climax of "The Memory Feast", as the Doctor overfeeds the Thrakes to death with the contents of the memory ark.
• Good Hair, Evil Hair: As the Chief Executive, the Eleventh Doctor's wildish hair is replaced by an eighties-yuppie-style slicked down look.
• Got Volunteered: Alice stumbles upon a form of words that will prevent the Amstrons killing everyone, and then discovers that she's volunteered for an extradimensional mission that nobody has ever returned from.
• Heroic Sacrifice: A double example at the end of "Strange Loops", when the Orphaned Hour allows herself to be absorbed into the TARDIS to prevent herself from violently self-destructing with apocalyptic results, which effectively kills her and almost destroys the TARDIS.
• Historical Domain Character: Robert Johnson appears in a story about the Talent Scout appearing to black people at a crossroads in 1931.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In "The Steampunk Conundrum", the Protoform is killed by his own battle robots according to their crude programming, as by reverting to his original form in the street he risked blowing their cover.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: How Alice brings the Doctor out of the Talent Scout's control.
• I Was Born Ready: Alice makes this response when she and the Doctor prepare to race back to the TARDIS in "Time of the Ood".
• Imagine Spot:
  • Alice's daydream about Ava's resurrection turning out happily.
  • The Doctor's interrogation in "Pull to Open" turns out to be an imaginary one by his former incarnations.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Zzagnar, a "living fiction" who tries to enslave humanity, but is really a pathetic and pitiful creature who wants to be appreciated. He takes the Doctor's suggestion that he simply tries being a writer.
• It Is Dehumanising: The Doctor has a rant on these lines when Alice refers to the Sapling as "it".
• Last-Second Chance: After the Doctor and Alice show the Scream that he can duplicate himself inside his memory construct, they are obviously considering leaving him there in the hope that he can be happy with his own company. However, when he is still determined to take over the universe, they trick him into destroying himself.
• Let's You and Him Fight: The Doctor manipulates The Then And The Now into fighting the security systems of Shada so that he can get in.
• Little Green Man in a Can: The Amstrons turn out to be intelligent hamsters in human-sized mecha.
• Majority-Share Dictator: The Doctor buys 51% of ServeYouInc through rich friends and Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit, but ends up getting corrupted by the Talent Scout.
• Mass Hypnosis: The Talent Scout controlling all of the juke joint customers in 1931 Mississippi.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": When the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling realise that the Scream has all of the Doctor's memories and could potentially build himself a time machine.
• Merlin Sickness: In "Space In Dimensions Relative And Time", the Doctor finds himself travelling backwards through the previous hour or so, which allows him to retcon a disastrous series of events involving a rogue Nimon hijacking the TARDIS and Jones being killed.
• Mind Virus: Zzagnar, a narrative virus, who somehow uses a fiction about himself to try bringing humanity under his control.
• Mood Whiplash: The first issue of "Year Three" goes from Brexit-related comedy to the revelation of Jones's death.
• More Expendable Than You: Alice tries to use the Psilent Songbox to save the Doctor's life and prevent him from being the one to commit genocide.
• My Future Self and Me: When the Earth's timezones start colliding due to the 68'ers' activities, happens to Alice's neighbour Kushak.
• Nice to the Waiter: When the Doctor and Alice first arrive at Rokhandi World, Alice points out that ranting at and browbeating low-level workers about how evil their employer is isn't exactly speaking truth to power.
• Nightmare Fetishist:
  • Daak encounters a dealer in Dalek memorabilia. The fact that a market for such a thing exists is clearly an example.
  The Doctor: Whoever sent this is very powerful and almost certainly probably a machiavellian, universe-ending plan-style evil genius. Squeeeeee. Excited!
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: John Jones (the Chameleon of Pop, Xavi Moonburst, the Tall Pale Earl) is clearly David Bowie.
  • The first story, set in 2014, portrays a Prime Minister who is clearly meant to be the then Prime Minister David Cameron, though older and pudgier looking. The story also alludes to some of his austerity policies.
• No Man of Woman Born: The Squire is able to survive the time-based defence mechanism of Shada because she has no known history for it to use to attack her.
• Noodle Incident: The weird events referred to that happened in the Doctor's earlier visit to Zoline in "Strange Loops".
• One Nation Under Copyright: Taken to extremes in societies where ServeYouInc is in full control, where they will capture and brainwash you if you create anything without their permission.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Alice recognises that the resurrected Ava is a fake because she didn't recognise Jones, her lifelong favourite singer.
• Out of Order: The UK reprint. The story got left on a massive cliffhanger (see Brainwashed and Crazy above) when they interrupted the storyline in order to reprint Four Doctors.
• Painting the Medium: In "Pull to Open", the panel arrangement on each page is made to look like the front of the TARDIS, with a text panel where the notice sits.
• Peace & Love Incorporated: ServeYouInc will provide you with everything you want, at the cost of your freedom and individuality.
• Perception Filter: John Jones's "chameleon" powers initially manifest as making him unnoticeable, which is a bit of a problem for an aspiring rock star. (Once he learns how to use the powers, he becomes extremely visible.)
• Pinkerton Detective: The Doctor and Alice claim to be Pinkertons in "The Steampunk Conundrum".
• Polluted Wasteland: The planet Zoline has become this in "Strange Loops", due to an irresponsibly accelerated industrial revolution, complete with unbreathable air and corrosive rain.
• Posthumous Character: Alice's mother Ava is buried on the first page, but is a strongly felt presence throughout.
• The Power of Rock: Robert Johnson uses The Power Of Blues to de-brainwash his neighbours. Using the TARDIS as an amp.
• Psycho Sidekick: The TARDIS is overloaded with them in Year Two, what with the Squire, Abslom, and River Song.
  The Doctor: Violence and so forth. It's not really what I do. But I know someone who does.
  River: Hello, sweetie.
• Psychological Torment Zone: The Scream's mental construct in "Hungry Thirsty Roots", where he has trapped the Doctor and Alice.
• Punny Name: Rokhandi, a reference to the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain".
• Reset Button: All of the events of "Space In Dimensions Relative And Time" end up being erased by the end of the story thanks to the Doctor living it in reverse.
• The Reveal
  • The Year Two stories "Kill God" and "Fast Asleep" contains many answers towards a lot of mysteries from previous Year Two stories.
    • Who banished the Cyclors to a higher dimension, robbing the Overcast of their gods? Alice herself, when she activated the Psilent Songbox.
    • What is the Malignant? The result of a Volatix Cabal Dalek mutant and the energy from the Psilent Songbox, which deformed it further.
    • What is The Then and The Now? A chrono tracker (which was collected by the creature in the future) that had it's origins reversed by the War Doctor, combined with the Psilent Songbox.
    • The child who has accompanied the War Doctor in flashbacks is not a young Squire, but the War Master.
• Scared of What's Behind You: When the Year Two crew visit a Bad Guy Bar, the Doctor initially thinks the clientele have recognised him and are scared of him, but it's actually Abslom they're reacting to and talking about.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: The Doctor tries to defeat ServeYouInc by buying them (thanks to wealthy friends and Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit) but ends up getting corrupted by them.
• Sapient Ship: Alice has a direct conversation with the Master's TARDIS, who is as creepy as you'd expect from who she keeps hanging around with.
• Shaming the Mob: The Doctor to the people from 1985 in the 68'ers arc, with direct references to the Third Reich.
• Shout-Out:
  • In a panel of Piccadilly Circus, the Criterion Theatre is advertising a stage version of "Lily Mackenzie", a Two Thousand AD strip written by one of the Eleventh Doctor comic writers, Simon Fraser.
  • The "Prohibited Sphere" book and comic shop in the Zzagnar story is a reference to the famous real London comic and SFFH book shop Forbidden Planet.
  • In "Four Dimensions", the red, blue and yellow tinges to the panels set in different sections of the splintered TARDIS are the same as the colours used for different dimensional splinters of Moya in the Farscape episode "Through the Looking Glass".
  • Also in "Four Dimensions", the Talent Scout appears to Jones in the form of Jareth from Labyrinth.
  • The Doctor grimly compares the Cyclors to Looney Tunes characters.
  • The security system of Shada has developed a personality reminiscent of Marvin from The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.
  • The city of Disch in "Strange Loops" is probably a reference to the SF novelist Thomas M Disch.
  • In "The Steampunk Conundrum", the Doctor compares the Astanzis' appearance to Ziggy Stardust.
  • The Doctor sums up the Protoform's plan as "robots in disguise".
• Silly Reason for War:
  • The Amstrons and Jarrodic used to be allies, until an ambiguous transmission from extradimensional explorers that they had "seen the face of the Creator" led to arguments about which one of them the Creator looked like.
  • The Master once started a Sontaran civil war by persuading a group of Sontarans to grow his Beard of Evil.
• Souvenir Land: Rokhandi World, a theme park devoted to being an effective corporate drone, and secretly using evil organic technology to brainwash people into being effective corporate drones.
• Steampunk: Apparently happens in "The Steampunk Conundrum", but it's actually an alien invasion.
• Take That!: The opening of Year Three involves a deranged "brixit" Earth colony populated by clones of Nigel Farage and a Humongous Mecha-cyborg Boris Johnson.
• Took a Level in Badass: Bessie reappears. The Doctor upgraded her into a monster truck.
• Tortured Monster: The mysterious entity when separated from its brain.
• Tracking Device: The Then And The Now hits Alice with one.
• Transferable Memory: Used as a theme in the overall plot of Year Three and in some individual stories, such as the Thrake memory eaters in "The Memory Feast" and the memory thief in "Fooled".
• Trauma Button: The TARDIS telepathically reminding Abslom Daak of his wife's death drives him to a violent meltdown. Similarly the mere mention of the word "Exterminate!".
• Waxing Lyrical: Quite a bit of Jones's dialogue comprises paraphrases of Bowie lyrics (or, presumably, his own).
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: ServeYouInc has a name in this format.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Haliburton in "Time of the Ood" is trying to "save" a small group of still-enslaved Ood post-"Planet of the Ood" by driving them insane and getting them killed. She ends up getting killed by them.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • The TARDIS ends up abandoning the Doctor for his recklessness and fall into corruption while fighting ServeYouInc.
  • In Year Two, Abslom nearly kills the Doctor in rage for manipulating Alice into taking the Master's TARDIS back into the Time War to investigate.

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