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Rift War

APRIL 2009

Rift War is the first Torchwood graphic no-

vel, collecting the strips originally published in the

official Torchwood Magazine. The titular Rift War

itself makes up the bulk of the book, being as

it is a ten-part serial, with the one-off Jetsam finishing the volume off. This covers the strips

from issues three to thirteen – apparently the

second issue had no strip, but what happened

to that of the first issue, I know not.

Rift War present us with a fun, if flawed, science-

fiction adventure. The various writers are clearly

having fun with the idea that anything can happen

in Torchwood. There are some decidedly peculiar

goings on in here, albeit mixed in with some very

predictable ones as well. Things start with a fairly

by-the-book instalment, in which pig ugly warrior

aliens – the usual macho pseudo-Klingons that

often feature in this sort of thing – start assaulting

Cardiff in an attempt to locate and take out the

Torchwood team. There’s a stonking cliffhanger, in

which the aliens try to remove the Hub from time and space, with Tosh still inside it. At the

end of Chapter One, all that’s left of the HQ is a big ol’ hole in the pavement.

Fortunately, Tosh throws a spanner into the works by activating the Rift Manipulator. Drifting with the Hub and its resident Pteranodon in a featureless black void, she meets Vox, a mys-terious humanoid who helps get her home and helpfully explains much of the plot. Turns out the Rift has exit points in a region of space run by a race known as the Sanctified. This evil empire blames Torchwood for the Rift’s increasingly dangerous activity, and are looking to put a stop to them and it. Now, Vox, for all his wise words and benevolence, is so clearly going to turn out to be the villain of the piece he might as well have worn a moustache, to

twirl whilst being sneakily evil behind the team’s backs. So it’s no real shock when he later does turn out to be the villain, and the Sanctified turn out to be not all that bad, after all.

Still, in the meantime, we get several episodes of peculiar goings on, as various creatures pop through the Rift as side effects of the Sanctified’s influence. Chapter Three involves Gwen and Rhys taking care of a Zansi baby – a young alien who takes the form of a giant human infant. Peculiar imagery aside, this is a very dull instalment, and rather than hurriedly covering six months of the baby’s life, I think it would have been better to feature this as an ongoing background thread, whilst more interesting things were going on in the foreground.

Still, Chapter Four is a corker, with a stampede of dinosaurs thundering out of the Rift. I bloody love dinosaurs, so any chance to see them charging around a city is alright with

me. We even get a Baryonyx, one of my favourites, causing trouble (we all love a British dinosaur). The only, very pedantic point I have to make is this: why do the dinosaurs make

for Bute park, in search of ‘familiar’ grassland? Grass didn’t evolve until at least thirty million years after the dinosaurs became extinct!

While Chapter Six involves a fairly lacklustre hop to the Dark Ages, Chapter Seven appeals to my curiosity by showing us an earlier version of Torchwood at work. The rather cool agent Harriet should become a frequent feature, in my opinion – she’s got more personality than most of the 21st century team. The plot to this section involves a circle of standing stones which have been under observation by Torchwood since its founding. Every eighty years

they are the focus of a renewed burst of Rift activity. While Vox insists they’d be better off destroyed, Jack prefers to use the opportunity to study them. However, the appearance

of an elderly man intrinsically linked to earlier events here cause trouble. Due to the temp-orally twisty nature of the sit, events from eight decades previously play out alongside those occurring today, leading to some excellently portrayed time slip sequences.

The remaining chapters serve to further the main plot, with a trip to the Sanctified realms inside a dimensionally transcendent robot named Omicron, an appearance by the gaunt aliens themselves, and the ‘shocking’ revelation that Vox is actually after the Rift power for himself bringing the story to a frenetic close. Vox is neutralised with the help of the standing stones, the Sanctified and a horde of golems. Making sense of all this isn’t really necessary – better just to enjoy the spectacle.

Art wise, the story is a mixed bag. Paul Grist provides the

artwork for Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 9 and 10. His work is highly

stylised and looks very little like the actors from the show, but

does encapsulate their characters nicely. The slightly off kilter look to everything really rather suits the story. Chapters 3 and

4 are illustrated by SL Gallant, who has a more traditional

style that nonetheless works well. Everything is clear, which

isn’t always the case I modern comics, and he draws a fine

dinosaur. Parts seven and eight are illustrated by D’Israeli,

whose distinctive style renders the Torchwood team virtually

unrecognisable. However, he does provide some beautiful

alien vistas, and does a fine job portraying the Sanctified’s footsoldiers, so it’s something of

a qualified success.

At the close of the book, we get Jetsam, a slight story both written and illustrated by Brian Williamson. The artwork is beautiful here, but the story is less successful. Involving giant

alien bikes with AI and guns, it’s an incredibly overblown bit of machismo, that seems at odds with its attempt to flesh out Tosh’s background by having her bond with one of the bikes and relive her Japanese childhood tales through the interface. It’d probably make a brilliant film, but it makes a strangely hard to enjoy comic strip.

Altogether then, this is a fun romp, imperfect but enjoyable. It’s nothing to write home about, but if you’re hankering for some more Torchwood action to keep you going until Children of Earth airs, you could do a lot worse.

Copyright © Daniel Tessier 2009

Daniel Tessier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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