060 Torchwood: World Without End

I was a big fan of the Torchwood television show.  If you're not aware of what Torchwood is, it's a spin off of Doctor Who (as well as being an anagram of Doctor Who).  Captain Jack Harkness, former sort of companion, headed up an agency who investigated alien incursions in and around England.  It ran for four series on tv, with most of the original cast dying.  The two main characters left were Captain Jack and Gwen Cooper, and they both star in this new adventure.

This is my first Torchwood comic.  There was a series published by Doctor Who's former publisher IDW, but if it was ever collected in trade format, I never realized it.  And I'm not sure if this is Titan Comics' first Torchwood comic, but like I said, it's my first.  And this definitely picks up where former comics left off.  There are new characters here I don't recognize.  Jack is now operating out of a ship.  He and Gwen aren't currently working together.  But it's easy enough to put who's who in order.

I didn't enjoy this book.  It took me a minute to figure out why.  It wasn't the story.  The story (of which this collection reprints the first half) was fine.  Well, it was fine during the parts I could follow.  It was the storytelling.  It's written by John Barrowman and Carole Barrowman.  It's sooooooo choppy and that it doesn't flow.  At all.  It's too choppy to make a lot of sense.  They've written a handful of comics together by the time this book came out, so they should know how to tell a story in this format, but they just don't.  It's like they write each panel as it's own separate story or something, forgetting that you need to logically progress from the previous panel and on to the next.  It's very choppy, there are big gaps in storytelling, there are things that happen that just don't seem to make sense, they pick up one plot point and drop it just as quickly as they pick up the next.  It's just not a fun read, though it is nice to look at.

Torchwood: World Without End

Writer: John Barrowman, Carole Barrowman

Artist: Antonio Fuso, Pasquale Qualano

Titan Comics