Two good stories in this. The first, the WWI-set Weeping Angel story that makes up 80% of the volume, is rock solid, and places the Angels suitably against the aesthetic of gothic European architecture, whilst also playing up the most visceral, actually quite brutal imagery and ideas possible with the monsters, such as with an insane German soldier who has stitched his eyes open to stop him blinking, or two soldiers being sent back in time by an Angel, only to die in a cataclysmic train crash minutes later. This sense of brutality is hammered home by really fantastic, scratchy pencil work by Daniel Indro that makes each and every page feel dirty, hairy and unclean, with a suggestion of a more hypermasculine direction (the Doctor has a six pack for some reason), which is again bolstered by the Doctor’s odd characterisation in the story, shouting, looking angry and vengeful, his figure appearing fuller and wider in the frame than in previous issues. This characterisation feels like a bit of a leap, to put it mildly, and I hope it doesn’t continue in later volumes because it feels antithetical to the character, but I can’t argue that it doesn’t make for a cohesive whole.
On that basis, the second story is definitely the stronger of the two, a small scale breezy invasion story back with Gabby’s family in New York, which acts as a loose vehicle for some incredible pages of artwork as massive blocks of sound, literally visualised on the page as onomatopoeia flood the panels. The way this builds and ultimately climaxes on top of the Empire State Building, with the hulking blocks of BOOMs and VWAAAARRRs swirling around the spire and shooting up into space like zero-gravity alphabetty spaghetti is nothing short of stunning, and shows that the creators behind this series are really considerate of the medium and can really play to its strengths and with its conventions. There are also some funny little aliens in this story so how am I supposed to complain?