So it may be a bit presumptuous of me to bother posting on a thread that’s already featured art by notable comics professionals, but I had to take a shot at imagining a thirteenth Doctor – his final regeneration – based on the art challenge from Warren Ellis’s Whitechapel forum thread. Here’s my hamfisted attempt:

I made up a bit of backstory for him as I was drawing:

In my mind, XIII comes after the troubled but optimistic 12th incarnation (played by Chewitel Ejiofor). Too trusting of his last companion, he is betrayed, captured and partially converted by the Cybermen before barely escaping to the TARDIS, which has finally grown fully sentient. The TARDIS is able to save him, at the cost of his final regeneration, by grafting him with its own systems to combat the Cyber-implants, which now fight a constant, painful battle for control of the time lord’s body. The Doctor’s TARDIS also creates a new K-9 to serve as his protector, as it believes if he dies, it will die as well. The Doctor does not take kindly to this over-protective guardian, doing everything he can to baffle, annoy, and get rid of his “Nanny-bot”. The other time lords, led by reinstated President Romana, are hunting him across time and space, believing him to finally have reached the incarnation of the Valeyard, which combined with the possibility of control by the Cybermen makes him the greatest threat to existence they have yet faced. Meanwhile the Daleks, long thought destroyed in the Second Time War, have resurfaced: in a neighboring dimension, The Alliance Daleks, corrupted by Davros in the wake of the disappearance of the Mentor, are, with the help of the Renegade Triumvirate (The Rani, The Master, and Rassilon) preparing a fleet of dimension-travelling, heavily armed SIDRATs to invade New Gallifrey and destroy the Time Lords once and for all, relieving them of the final obstacle to their conquest of the Multiverse.

So basically, this is the Doctor having a Very Bad Day.

At least he’s finally ginger.