Redemption! by: Simon Furman with art by: Kev Hopgood and Tim Perkins and letters by: Zed

 

“Redemption!” is written by: Simon Furman with art by Kev Hopgood and Tim Perkins, and lettering by: Zed (a pseudonym for Richard Starkings.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 134 (February 1988) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! by Panini Books.

 

“Redemption!” is a comic story that commits one of the cardinal sins of storytelling, closing the path for any interesting stories immediately after opening them up.  “A Cold Day in Hell!” introduced Olla as a companion and while that story wasn’t exactly great, there at least was some attempt to give Olla an introductory arc.  She’s a heat vampire who at the end of “A Cold Day in Hell!” wanted to get back to her own people, a perfectly fine motivation, and was established to be at the very least a little selfish.  It’s clear that Simon Furman in creating this character wants to do something with this character, “Redemption!” serving as the next step in that story.  Except “Redemption!” is also the final step in that story.  In an eight page comic strip, Olla is revealed in a series of twists to be: from a people who are treated as badly as the Romani but in space and enslaved, have been lying to the Doctor and is actually an evil criminal and cold blooded murderer, and is swiftly booted from the TARDIS because the Doctor doesn’t condone murder.  That’s literally all that “Redemption!” actually does as a story, that and starting with Olla as a servant to the Doctor, something for whatever reason he doesn’t really question, just giving some lip service to it being something he doesn’t like.

 

Now Furman is still characterizing the Doctor as a more generic characterization, though by the time this strip came out Season 24 had finished airing.  There is at least a little bit of Sylvester McCoy’s voice in the strip, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t start to feel like the Seventh Doctor until 1989.  “Redemption!” as a story doesn’t actually work, but it feels that a lot of that isn’t actually in Furman’s hands but in the hands of editor Richard Starkings.  Starkings wanted short, one-issue stories with rotating teams and specifically without a companion.  Anything Furman wanted to do with Olla he basically had to do here so she could be written out and the strip could move onto basically episodic adventures.  “Redemption!” is drawn by Kev Hopgood and his style is quite exaggerated, which at least partially suits some of the alien imagery in the script (there is an alien warlord attacking the TARDIS so we can get to the Olla reveal).  It isn’t a style that I particularly like, but he is a new artist coming onto the strip and trying to give it his own stamp with the teams being rotated between stories like the authors.

 

Overall, “Redemption!” is the prime example of how to not tell a story, compressing several stories into the shortest period possible because of editorial mandate, striking off what could have been a lot of interesting storytelling to take things into a new direction, ignoring the potential interest of a Doctor and companion at odds with each other.  3/10.