As the first year of Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor’s run of comics with Titan wraps up, author, Jody Houser has brought back an old friend and mentor of the Doctor’s, The Corsair.
This Time Lord was heavily mentioned in Neil Gaiman’s Eleventh Doctor story, The Doctor’s Wife, and an eventual victim of House, a sentient asteroid who had been luring Time Lord’s into its web for centuries. The Doctor is incredibly affected by the death of his old friend in the story, eventually leading him to destroy House entirely.
The Corsair was also the first time we learnt that Time Lords could change their gender if they wanted to when they regenerated. Later, we would see it with the General, Missy, and then the Doctor. And now we’ve met the Corsair in one of her female incarnations.
The Eleventh Doctor also mentioned to Rory that her TARDIS took on the form of a large pirate ship, something we get to enjoy in the comic and it looks really awesome. In the comic book, companions Ryan Sinclair, Graham O’Brien, and Yaz Khan all comment on how much cooler it looks than the TARDIS.
“Bit fancier than your TARDIS isn’t it?” says Graham.
I’ve picked up virtually all of the Thirteenth Doctor’s comic book run and enjoyed it a great deal, but particularly this arc, where Houser really came into her own, bringing together all the threads from the first full year, while leaving some more tantalisingly tangling for the Thirteenth Doctor’s next run.
What was especially brilliant was how the Doctor knew what fate awaited the Corsair and how she couldn’t warn her. Without the Corsair’s death luring in the Doctor, House could’ve gone on to murder more. But there is also a great chemistry between the Doctor and the Corsair. It is something that feels different to the relationship between the Doctor and the Master/Missy. The Corsair is a good person at heart, but she goes about things in a dodgy way.
She is incredibly naughty but also fun; what was also interesting was that she had a lot of respect for the Doctor’s companions. For Missy, Clara Oswald, Bill Potts, and Nardole were irritating, people who were canon fodder. While that was a sometimes funny look at the character, the Corsair gradually came to respect them, with the arc even ending with the Doctor telling her to find some travelling companions of her own.
And that is how we leave the Corsair, flying off into space, having freed a space-whale from imprisonment in her pirate-ship-TARDIS. It was a great opportunity to meet a Time Lord we’d only previously heard of and reading these comics, you understand why the Doctor had so much respect for her.
Something tells me that this isn’t going to be the last we see from the Corsair…
Titan’s Thirteenth Doctor #12 is out now, priced $3.99.