3 out of 5

A cute, somewhat clunky (narratively) mini-comic from Ben Sears, The Doctor is done in green ink on off-white paper, done as more of a storybook than a comic – full page illustrations (with shading!) and accompanying text on the opposite page.

Now, “clunky” is pretty mean: crafting a full story in the small size and on limited pages is daunting; furthermore setting out a goal of writing in verse. Alas, I’m not one who knows how to critique stanzas, and so all I can try to identify are whether or not things rhyme, and… hm, they kinda sorta don’t, always, and Ben switches up if it’s every other line, or the cadence per page, hence the clunk. Someone more educated in this approach might tell me that Ben’s actually following a very rigid, technical style; as a reader, I just felt like I was fighting to get the beat of the text.

But: set that aside as much as you can, because the work is indelibly cute. A self-professed evil scientist takes some dastardly methods to procure bits and bobs for his killer robot, only to create a… not that. The faux-Frankenstein pacing and horror-movie lighting is super fun; Ben tries to steer the ending towards a final gag, and it is funny, if kind of abrupt in execution.