Preview Images For IDW's Rebooted DOCTOR WHO Series

IDW's rebooted Doctor Who ongoing series by Tony Lee hit shelves this week.  The series begins the comic adventures of the Eleventh Doctor as portrayed onscreen by Matt Smith.  I haven't gotten my hands on it yet, but I did just finish reading Lee's run of Tenth Doctor comics, and I'm very much looking forward to what he does with the new Doctor.  

I spotted some preview pages from the first issue on Wired.  So far, everything looks great.  Lee more successfully captured the personality of the Tenth Doctor than his predecessors at IDW, and I imagine he'll nail the Eleventh Doctor just as well, especially now that we've had a full season to get the hang of the character onscreen.  Lee's previous run filled three graphic novel collections plus a fourth in The Forgotten, the mini-series that got him the job, and his stories are filled with Easter eggs and references (some subtle and others loud) to classic episodes of the TV series.  Also, Lee has proven himself to be very good at long story arcs that pay off in the end, like the wrap up of his Tenth Doctor series.

Wired also got to talk with Lee a bit.  Here are some notable quotes from their conversation.

The 11th Time Lord tackles holographic spam and other annoying online extrapolations in the first issue of the all-new Doctor Who comic book series.

“There’s no Norton AntiVirus for the Tardis,” long-time Doctor Who comics writer Tony Lee told Wired.com in an e-mail chat. “So the spam e-mails take physical form … people offering amazing offers from far-off kingdoms who just need a chapo like yourself to help them — oh, and your account details of course…. And if it’s destroying your inbox … well, you really shouldn’t be joining those sorts of websites now, should you?”

“I think Smith took a couple of episodes to settle in, but overall I felt that he made [the character] his own,” Lee said. “Which, after David Tennant, was always going to be a problem. Smith was the Peter Davison after Tom Baker. He had to take [the role of the Doctor in] a totally different direction before he could own it.”

Like other loyal fans of the longest-running sci-fi show in television history, Lee demurs on having a favorite Doctor. (“I know it’s a cop-out, but it’s true,” he said.) But he also welcomes the question as a chance to marry the show’s enduring appeal to his own life.

“Everyone goes through this, because your tastes change as you age,” Lee explained. “When I was 8, I loved Tom Baker and hated the first three. When he changed to Peter Davison, I was 11, and I felt a far stronger kinship with this younger, more earnest chap. I enjoyed Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, but they came during a time in my life that I was discovering other worlds, like girls.

“Tennant brought me back to the new series,” Lee added. “He became my favorite because I wrote him. I had to sit and watch the same episodes time and again to get his mannerisms just right. By that point, I was in my late 30s, and enjoying stories of a crotchety old man who turns into a bit of a hobo.”

The preview images pick up part of the way through the first issue, but so far, everything looks good.  The first images is below.  Click on it to see the rest of the images on Wired's page.