Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor Volume 4 – The School of Death

A distressed phone call from a fellow teacher leads Clara to an exclusive private school. When she calls the Doctor in for help uncovering the mystery of her friend’s disappearance, she uncovers a monstrous plot afoot, one with ties to the Earth’s distant past! Also, people are disappearing from comic book shops at an alarming rate, and a titanic robotic foe from the Doctor’s past reemerges, but this time, it’ll have to contend with UNIT superfan Osgood!

A lot of the Doctor Who comics these days veer wildly between nostalgic revisitings of favorite foes or story lines and vast, complicated, Moffat-esque timey-wimey stories. The School of Death, on the other hand, gives us three brief adventures with the Doctor that all feel like fun one-shots, letting the characters, not the plot or fans, drive the story.

Admittedly, Capaldi gets a little silly in the main story — trading his trusty dueling spoon for a stuffed fish he calls Sonny — but the gag really comes to life when Clara gets jealous of the Doctor’s endless praise for his “new companion.” This is the perfect breather between longer plot arcs, one I suspect avid readers will return to again and again.