Top Five Titan Comic Stories: The Ninth Doctor (Doctor Who)

*A few spoilers.*

After IDW’s Doctor Who license ended, Titan Comics was the go-to place for comic stories outside of Doctor Who Magazine. Nine’s run started a little later than Ten, Eleven, and Twelve’s, and he had far fewer stories than any of them did, but he had some great ones. All set in the Rose and Captain Jack era, these are my favorite Titan stories for the Ninth Doctor.

 

Doctormania (2016)

This is a fun story. The Doctor, Rose, and Jack arrive on Gharusa Prime, where the Doctor is an unexpected celebrity! We get a tricky doppelganger who’s been giving the Doctor quite a reputation, although not the one he wants. The story goes to some fun places, and in the second half, it’s a nice showcase for Rose.

 

The Transformed (2016)

This is neat: when team TARDIS shows up in San Francisco in 2016, the Doctor runs into a post-“Journey’s End” Mickey Smith! At this point, Mickey is with Martha, who Nine hasn’t met, and he needs the Doctor’s help to investigate the sudden onset of superhuman abilities in a fraction of the population, somehow connected with mysterious lights in the sky. It’s interesting to see Nine interacting with a Mickey who’s better acquainted with him than the Doctor is, investigating the mystery while also trying to avoid glimpsing too much of his own future. Not to mention, in a comic format, it’s easier to enjoy Mickey the character without any involvement from Noel Clarke beyond his likeness.

 

Official Secrets (2016)

And we go straight from new Who fanservice to classic Who nostalgia! The adventure finds the Doctor, Rose, and Jack in the UNIT era, slightly after the Doctor’s original time there. The Brigadier is away, so none other than Harry Sullivan is filling in, trying to get a lid on a series of mysterious monster sightings. And in addition to all the continuity goodness, we’re also introduced to a new comics-only companion in the form of Tara Mishra, a former nurse now working for UNIT.

 

Sin-Eaters (2017)

Shades of “The Mind of Evil,” with a prison touting a revolutionary new treatment that completely rehabilitates inmates, and it of course having disastrous unforeseen consequences. Except this time around, the prison is in space and the Doctor isn’t a visiting scientist touring the facility—he’s infiltrated the prison as an inmate! Even though some of the plot developments are well telegraphed, it still makes for a good time.

 

The Bidding War (2017)

I don’t know if the creators of this story went into it knowing it’d be the final story in Titan’s Ninth Doctor line, but it’s a fitting conclusion to this entire run, which began with the Doctor offering to auction off his memories of the Time War in order to flush out bad actors. Here, someone sets about making that a reality. The story involves futuristic memory tech that sends the companions on a pretty trippy excursion, a shadowy league of would-be buyers, and the Doctor facing his grief and guilt head-on.