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JUNE 2009

IDW Publishing continues its series of regular one-off adventures with Autopia, and, on the strength of previous offerings, I expected something pretty good. Sadly, what I got was a very bland, generic robot story.

It’s all very much by the book here: the Doctor

and Donna land on the planet Autopia to find

out why the people there have shut their planet

off from the rest of the Universe. They find

a decadent society dependent on its robotic

servants, one of which is on the cusp of self-

awareness. Frankly, there’s nothing here that

hasn’t been done a thousand times before in science fiction, and there’s little in the writing

to set Autopia apart from any of its thematic cousins. Granted, the Doctor and Donna are both reasonably well-characterised, but the few subsidiary characters are terribly generic -

if the robot (nicknamed Sam by Donna, after her cat) is supposed to be developing a per-sonality, at least Ostrander could have written him with one.

The artwork, too, has little to mark this story out. Kelly Yates is quite well-regarded in the

comics community, but her work here is below par. Depending on the panel, the art varies

from pretty good to pretty dreadful, with the latter sadly dominating. I’m afraid to say that this

is the first real flunk by IDW’s Doctor Who range.

Copyright © Daniel Tessier 2010

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