• Bloody Tea Time by Noe Geric

Bloody Tea Time by Noe Geric 24/3/26

After an epic encounter against the Daleks, it's time for the Eighth Doctor and Izzy to have some historical adventures and meet a new companion. Tooth and Claw, without any werewolf, is an intriguing gothic tale of vampires. Set during second world war on a desert island, we see our two heroes being called by Fey Truscott-Shade (a character the Doctor met off-screen) to investigate some mysterious disappearance on the island and its owner's secret.

The imagery is beautiful, as every panel has been meticulously drawn to look like it was from a high-budget movie. There's a lot going on, and each character is pretty distinct; no one looks like each other, and that's a good start. As it's about vampires and cannibal monkeys, you might think the ''camera'' would turn away at every drop of blood. Of course not! You've got the dead body of the cleric being dragged across the house, one of the animal's heads being broken and even a man writing warnings with his own blood before dying. Izzy and the Doctor don't feel safe trapped on such an island with such a lunatic bunch of people. Of course, nothing is as it seems, and there's some alien involvement behind all this!

And that's where the problem lies. The three episodes are marvelous, slowly building a claustrophobic atmosphere on the whole island as it's thrown into darkness. But the last part is mostly the villain revealing his plan, with the previous cliffhanger being resolved in the most unsatisfying of manners. It's just people standing on the volcano and talking, before the Doctor make the obvious sacrifice and needs to be taken home in the next episode. It's as if the last 24 pages never happened. Characters are killed because the murder mystery is over and they're no longer needed. And the alien machine itself seems out of place in a story that had the feeling of a true Dracula adventure taken to the middle of the ocean. Another odd part is that the owner of the island blows up the plane (the only means of escape from the island) and ask his chimpanzees to point guns at everyone, but he was never suspected to be the bad guy? Perhaps with TRUE vampires and less SF, it could've been more memorable. There wasn't really any future technology with big consequences in the previous episodes, but now we're thrown a machine from the dawn of whatever with its whole genesis story in less than 8 pages. At the same time, the story needs to reach a satisfying conclusion!

Nonetheless, not thinking about the last episode, Tooth and Claw is nearly perfect. Gheraghty took great pleasure playing with the black and white of the comics, and it's all brilliantly written to make you wonder if the island isn't more dangerous than the Dalek ship from Fire and Brimstone. The Doctor shines as ever, and each episode ends on a terribly gripping cliffhanger! (Something Barnes is good at in comics). A very good opus for the adventures of the Eighth Doctor which are becoming the golden age of the DWM strip as they progress. Next step: Gallifrey! 9/10