Script: Dan McDaid Art: Mike Collins, James Offredi
The Silenced World by Noe Geric 16/10/20
I don't think the DWM does experimental stories really often, and that's a shame because there's a lot of things to try in comic form. But I finally, I think I should be careful what I wish for, because Onomatopoeia isn't very good. The story sees the Doctor and Majenta Pryce arrive on a world where no one can speak. That's the sort of things you can't do in an audio story, that isn't impossible in prose, and that can be done on TV (like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 'Hush'). It isn't simple in comic form, the drawings needs to be very good and to show a lot of actions, something that don't work very well here.
Mike Collins is an artist I like very much, he's actually in my top five and has done a great job in the Ninth Doctor comic era. His drawings here seems flat, he completely misses the Tenth Doctor, and the rest are rather dull. I didn't feel any tension or any great sense of action. The story needed those sort of drawings, but Collins failed. The script isn't incredible either, even if the idea was interesting. The world is a big graveyard put in silence by its Keeper who wants the dead to be honoured. There are rat people who evolved on this world and who are attacked by the Keeper who thinks they are parasites. These elements are enough to explain why no one can talk.
The rat people are friendly, and we manage to learn some things about them even without dialogue! There are (only) two pages of dialogue, but every sentence manages to be flat and sound false. I don't know how it is possible to do something interesting with the script and to miss every line spoken on two pages. Majenta saved the day by explaining everything to the Keeper, but the Doctor was uncounscious and didn't see that, so he now thinks HE has saved the day. That should be the sort of line you smile at when you read it, but for some reason it doesn't work. Even the 'Hush' at the end could've been funny, but, for some reason, it didn't feel right.
A story without any lines is a very quick read. It leaves you only the drawings to analyse. I can recommend Onomatopoeia, but it is a missed experiment. The idea was really good, some parts work perfectly, but the drawings and the few lines there was weren't good enough to make this one an instant classic: people can like this sort of story. For me, it could've been far better, but it failed... And that's really disapointing! 6/10