IDW comics have been a recent discovery of mine and here is another timeslip back to the 17th Century with a ‘one-shot’ strip featuring the 10th Doctor and Martha. On route to the Beatles rooftop concert in 1969, the TARDIS ends up in 1669 amidst an outbreak of plague.  Martha gets to employ some of her medical skills and the Doctor discovers an angel healing the sick.


With this being a short, ‘one-shot’ comic, there isn’t a huge amount of room for plot development and everything happens fairly quickly.  They arrive, find people with a strange sickness (which is quickly diagnosed as alien in origin), Martha contracts it, the Doctor finds an angel who turns out (unsurprisingly) to be an alien, and a sentient, giant virus is found to be the cause.


The Doctor and Martha are rather broadly characterised.  Martha is a doctor; the Doctor runs and puts his glasses on to examine things.  He gets a bit melancholy over war and the resolution to the adventure.  It’s all a bit unsatisfying: Martha, in particular, could be absolutely any companion.
Historically, the Doctor notes that this plague is anachronistic, with the last cases being recorded in 1666.  The depiction of the plague doctors, however, is firmly rooted in those images familiar from the era of the Great Plague; although they are drawn deliberately darker and suspiciously alien-looking (making it only a small surprise when they are revealed to actually be aliens). 

The settings include the village, suitably drab and depressing and the church, which is similarly downbeat, emphasising the golden glow of the healing angel.  The various stock characters, the priest, the villagers are all fairly generic and add very little to the story.

The artwork is good, although the Doctor and Martha only really bear a passing resemblance to their TV counterparts.  The concept of a macro-virus is well presented with their design echoing those microscope images you see of real-life viruses.  The immunoglobulin (the alien healer) is a slightly amorphous, golem-like creature which glows.


All in all, this is an enjoyable diversion but not a significant contribution to the 17th Century-set collection of stories.