In the book Doctor Who 25 Glorious Years, there is a section on some of the comics based on Doctor Who, with a few reprinted panels.
A "Doctor Who" strip ran in a weekly magazine called TV Comic. It was 2 pages, until it became "Doctor Who And The Daleks" when it turned into a 3 pager, but reverted back to 2 pages when it once again became "Doctor Who".
Since I've only seen 3 pages of this strip, I don't have many nits.
The most obvious nit is that people call the Doctor "Doctor Who". Even his grandchildren, John & Gillian call him that. (Hmmm, did the Doctor play first base? Was he married to Sue Who?) Also in the first strip the TARDIS revolves as it disappears, instead of simply dematerializing.

"The Daleks" published in TV 21 actually sounds like a fun strip. It would be nice if they would publish it as a graphic novel sometime. David Whitaker wrote the scripts. It was 1 page and ran for 2 years.
The 1 page I have seen also has some nits.
The Daleks use a line of meteorites, filled with magnetic power, to draw off the planet Skardal and send it towards the Mechanoids' homeworld.
1. They show a pretty well organized line of meteorites.
2. A meteorite is what it is called after it crashes on a planet. In space it is called a meteoroid, or asteroid if it is larger than a kilometer.
3. Those were some pretty round meteorites. No odd shapes or anything.
4. Where is the Mechanoids' homeworld? If it's in the Skaro system then using a planet as weapon should only take a few months, but if it is in another star system, then I think the Daleks will have to wait a few centuries before declaring victory. Also did they take the orbit of the Mechanoids' homeworld into account? It would be awfully embarressing to miss the target because someone forgot that stars & planets move through space.

Perhaps he was related to Cindy Lou Who, who was no more than two.

"The Daleks" has been released as a complimation volume by Marvel, under the title "The Dalek Chronicles".

Oh and by the way, the Dalek Chronicles is slightly less exciting than it sounds.

Marvel Premiere #57-60
I believe these were the first Doctor Who comic books printed in the USA. I think they were also reprints of stories printed in Doctor Who Weekly.

Doctor Who & The Iron Legion ran in issues 57 & 58, and had the 4th Doctor on an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire never fell, but expanded outward into space, conquering other worlds and dimensions. The Doctor discovers that the gods of the Roman Empire are an evil race called the Malevilus. The Doctor defeats the Malevilus thanks to a spare, empty dimension kept in his TARDIS.

The Doctor is alone in this adventure, which would indicate that it probably takes place between The Deadly Assassin & The Face Of Evil, or, less likely, between The Invasion Of Time & The Ribos Operation.

In issue 58 the Malevilus are desribed as "Hideous forms of anti-life. The Malevilus feed off death."
First, are there forms of anti-life which are not hideous, perhaps even beautiful?
Second, is anti-life a reference to Jack Kirby's New Gods? (In Kirby's New Gods & his other Fourth World stories, the evil Darkseid searches for the secret of anti-life.)
Third, don't all creatures feed off death? Isn't this line just a variation of what the guardian of the Doomsday Weapon said about Jo Grant & the Doctor in Colony In Space? (Or at least in the novelization?)

The leader of the Malevilus is Magog. Not necasarily a nit since names tend to repeat. I just thought it odd because in The Stones Of Blood the Doctor said that the Ogron were the basis for the names Ogre, Gog & Magog.

The backup story in #58 was K-9's Finest Hour. A villain tries to beam the Doctor off the TARDIS into a death trap, but gets K-9 instead. K-9 must then defeat the bad guys before the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS.
Probably takes place between The Invasion Of Time & The Ribos Operation since there is no evidence of Romana in the TARDIS.
K-9 is beamed off the TARDIS by a "gravitronic tractor beam". How can a tractor beam grab hold of K-9 inside of the TARDIS and pull it out without damaging the TARDIS? (Now if the writer had used a word like transporter, teleporter or transmat, instead of tractor, this wouldn't be a nit.)

City Of The Cursed ran in issues 59 & 60 and take place after The Iron Legion. The Doctor ends up in a city where emotion is a crime, so of course, he's a major criminal. The Doctor is rescued by a group of freedom fighters whose members all have one emotion each and see the Doctor as the prophisied Great Emoter. A militaristic freedom fighter unleashes a batch of carnivorous blood bugs into the city and the Doctor convinces the Brains Trust, (brains on humanoid bodies, I kid you not) that they must restore emotions to the population because adrenalin kills the blood bugs. They agree, but are killed by the Moderator General who sees that as a traitorous act. The Doctor stops him and restores emotion to the population. Before leaving the Doctor leaves behind a brain scan of his emotions so that everyone can have a complete set of emotions, which leads to the funny gag of a cityful of people dressed and acting like the Doctor.
My summary does not really do this story justice.

The personality of the Moderator seemed too much like that of General Ironicus from The Iron Legion.

There's a character in the rebellion named Half-Daft which I assume is an English expression meaning half-crazy. (Although the pessimist says he's half crazy, the optomist says he's half sane. Sorry, couldn't help it.)

In issues 57 & 60 they fill out the books with some background on Doctor Who and some artwork. In #57 they have a portrait of the 5 Doctors drawn by Cockrum & Giacoia. The 4th Doctor looks pretty much like Tom Baker. The 2nd Doctor looks pretty much like Troughton although with shoulders like a football player. The movie Doctor looks like Peter Cushing with really bad eyebrows. I think the penciller was working from a photograph of Hartnell, but the inker clearly didn't have a clue. The only thing right about the 3rd Doctor was the outfit. I have no idea whose face they used, but it certainly wasn't Jon Pertwee's. The artwork used in the back of issue 60, is best not mentioned.

Don't you mean Ogri, not Ogron?

Probably, I haven't seen Stones Of Blood in years.

Ogrons are the blue-faced ape creatures in Day Of The Daleks and Frontier In Space

Abslom Daak: loathe or love him? I've quite liked the comic appearances I'v seen him in (admittedly only Nemesis Of The Daleks and Emperor of the Daleks) although his appearance in The New Adventure Deceit seemed a bit Superfluous.
Darvill-Evans went to all that trouble not to contradict Nemesis, where Daak supposedly sacrifices himself, and then in Emperor they resurrect him anyway.

The Daak in "Deceit" was a clone of the real Daak. Ace was very upset to learn that fact.

Yes I know that but the Doctor carries on for most of the book - because he doesn't know - telling Ace to look out for Daak because he is supposed to die at the end of Nemesis Of The Daleks. But given Emperor, written later, he needn't have been so concerned. And, as you say, it didn't matter anyway because this Daak was a clone. Which makes you wonder how many Daaks are out there - and why they cloned him, given he had the choice of death or assignment as a Dalek Killer.

I got the impression that the Doctor knew Daak was a clone, but led Ace to believe that it was the real Daak in order to keep her distracted. Otherwise she might have interfered with his plans.

Guess I was too busy trying not to upchuck at the thought of that vat at brains.
There I go again - missing the underlying thread of the Doctor's plan. I missed the bit you mentioned.

This link can take you to a few comics that can now be found on the web, such as the eighth Doctor strips from Radio Times:
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~r.anderson/doctor/cartoons.htm

They need to release more graphic novels of old comics (or new ones - like the 8th Doctor strips in DWM). I've got 'Mark fo Mandragora' and I've read (a long time ago) the one with Frobisher and that Lord of Life guy, and they were both good.
I wanna read these 8th Doc ones (they sound good) but there's no way I forking out for every DWM just to read four pages of comics a month.

It's more than four pages but I can see your point. But then the main devotees of the comic would be DWM readers, and why would they fork out money again for something they've already read?

:( yeah, true. I forked out for two copies of Mark of Mandragora though :), and I'll fork out for more: hint, hint Marvel comics.

Ism't DWM owned by Pannini now?

One of the best comics is TRAIN FLIGHT in the
MARK OF MANDRAGORA TPB.

What makes it so interesting is the way they
team up the 7th Doctor with Sarah Jane Smith!

I liked Cartmel's 'Fellow Travellers'

Just receieved the first 7 issues of Marvel's Doctor Who series today. I was surprised at how good the first one was - expecting it to be heaps childing, but it was quite witty and not as run-of-the-mill as I expected.

The first Who comic strip I got to read was The Glorious Dead.
Ouch.
Its not a good place to start.

Why, what happens?

The Master returns, post-Enemy Within

But it seems to be the Ancestor Cell of the DWM strip, building on and resolving an arc I knew absolutely nothing about. And I started off at part 3 as well.

I see that No-ones mentioned the parody strip, "Doctor OOH" published by Mad Magazine in it's U.K Version.
Basically, it took the mickey out of the early 4th doctor & his companions (Harry & Sarah) & went on from there.
The Author was Steve Markhouse, who went on to become editor of Doctor Who Weekly & the Early Monthlys.

Actually the artist was Steve Parkhouse and he was never the editor of any DWW/DWM in any of its incarnations! He was however the regular writer of the DW strip between 1981 and 1985, felt by many to be the best run of strips in the series history.

I stand corrected (I was working from memory),
Doctor OOH was still very funny, though LOL!!!!
"How do you deal with a self-knitting scarf ?
Take away it's wool supply....!"

*Shakes head despairingly* God, every word people say about comics just reinforces my belief that they're kids' rubbish for illiterate morons who can't cope with proper books.

Of course, a lot of eating-of-words might occur when Lawrence's Faction Paradox comic books hit the shelves. But don't count on it.

Now those are fighting words, Emily. You are talking to a long time comic book, cartoon, animated cartoon, etc. fan, and I don't appreciate the negative comments. After all, we Doctor Who fans have to deal with the abuse heaped onto us by the outside world; there's no need to turn upon each other as well.

Comics are just as valid a form of storytelling as Novels, Poems, Plays, Movies, TV, etc., etc.

However as Theodore Sturgeon once said, "90% of evereything is ••••." Novels only seem superior because their 10% is larger on behalf of being around longer than comics. There are good comics out there.

Of course maybe if Emily would expand her entertainment choices to things outside the realm of Doctor Who she just might discover that.

You read my mind, KAM.

I would also like to point out that comic books have won both the World Fantasy Award (Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman") and the Pulitzer ("Maus"), so it's a bit hard to fall back on the cliche that they are only for "illiterate morons."

If you ask very politely Emily will share her thoughts on 'Miranda' with the board...

Hey Mike, I'm not criticising Doctor Who comics. Just the entire genre. I just...don't get them. What with all the (EXTREMELY badly-drawn) little pictures, and the stilted dialogue in BUBBLES coming out of people's mouths, there doesn't seem much room for a good story. Plus I can't suspend my disbelief as I can with most other mediums. Dunno whether that's because I haven't had much practice, or because of some flaw inherent in the whole picture/bubble thing.

Admittedly I never used to get audios either - too much like watching television with your eyes shut, removing half the point, not to mention half the pleasure, but long exposure to Big Finishes has...well, not exactly made me a fan, but made me accept them as some kind of replacement, however inadequate, for the lack of Who on our screens. (Plus it's a great way of getting over the aging actor problem). Perhaps one day desperation will similarly drive me to embrace comic strips as the future of Who, but don't hold your breath. It's not as if Daniel hasn't forced me to read Lance Parkin's Miranda, not to mention some non-Who rubbish about a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

My thoughts on Miranda: Lots of ghastly pictures, and a wafer-thin 'story' that contradicts Father Time in about 14 places. The only redeeming feature is the 'tee hee' after the 'this is canon' claim.

I was going to start her on 'From Hell' next.

I'm not criticising Doctor Who comics. Just the entire genre.
Comics covers quite a few genres, actually. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Western, Romance, Horror, etc., etc.

As for the art quality there are good artists as well as bad artists working in comics.

The bubbles are so the words don't get lost amongst the art.

A few years back I was working on a comic script and I wondered just how many words could go on a comic page & still have room for the pictures, so I pulled out some of my wordier comics and counted. It came out to an average of 200 words a page. A novel averages out to 250 words per page. The main difference being that if you wanted to do a novel length comic story you either have to do it in multiple issues or as a graphic novel.

If you are really interested in learning more about comics you might want to check your local library and see if they have Comics And Sequential Art by Will Eisner, or Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. (Although personally I found the latter to be a bit too smart alecky.)

I was once going to suggest "The Sandman" comics, maybe starting out with "The Dream of a Thousand Cats."

Emily, you're starting off on the wrong foot by considering comics/audios/etc. at substitutes, which they are not. They are their own separate art forms, with their own limitations and strengths. They should be evaluated accordingly.

True, there are many badly-drawn comic books, but there are also many badly written books, poorly filmed movies, poorly produced plays, etc, ad infinitum. Judge not the whole by the failure of its members, I say.

How about The Spirit, instead, Daniel?

While not Science Fiction (mostly) it does have some elements that are kinda-sorta Whovian.

The hero is the smartest one around.

Inspector Dolan is similar to the Brigadier.

Ebony is like a black Harry Sullivan, only funnier.

Ellen Dolan is sorta Sarah Jane-ish (if you ignore the romantic elements.)

Keith - what on Earth makes you think I want to understand comics? Do I LOOK open-minded to you?!

Mike - cats?! Ah, you've hit on the one thing that might get me looking at a comic-book. Any picture of a moggie is to be gazed at adoringly, even if aforementioned oochie has a s t u p i d bubble coming out of its mouth.

Emily - you may borrow my copy at your leisure. Though bear in mind it is very precious to me and valuable on the open market so I don't want it to get damaged!

No, Emily, you never have. (Which is odd given you're an atheist.) However being a comic lover I thought I would suggest some tomes that would help explain the 'language' of sequential art storytelling (comics).

Mike & Daniel, should we warn her that Sandman is written by the guy who wrote Neverwhere?

If she likes cats then maybe she should try Catwoman? Any issue drawn by Jim Balenti should evoke an interesting response. (I'll probably hear the scream all the way over here in the states.)

Emily, you'd definitely love "The Dream of a Thousand Cats." I strongly suggest you find it (or ask Daniel if he has a copy of the Sandman you can borrow.

KAM - Marvel Premiere #57-60
I believe these were the first Doctor Who comic books printed in the USA.

And I was wrong.

Was going through the book Science fiction Comics: The Illustrated History and saw a listing for Dr. Who And The Daleks an adaptation of the movie by Dell Comics in 1966. The art was by Dick Giordano & Sal Trapani.

Could find no listing for an adaptation of Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. however.

I don't think there was one. As I understand it, the Dell comic was a promotional one for the US release of the film (it came out in 1967 eventually, and I think David Whitaker's novelisation got it's Avon Books paperback edition for much the same reason*). I don't think the film did very well so there wouldn't have been the same interest when 'Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.' came along.

The Dell comic was immensely collectible for a long time then Marvel UK reprinted it in 'Doctor Who Classic Comics' in 1993 and in the process wiped out the nest-eggs of many American fans.

* Quite why they needed get Paul Weller (not *the* Paul Weller?) to restage keys events of the show/film with giant squeezy bottles and sparklers for this edition is a mystery whose solution is lost on the Tides of Time.

I have now promised Emily a loan of 'A Dream of a Thousand Cats'. I also intend to force her to read 'Watchmen' at gunpoint...

"A Dream of a Thousand Cats"? The Sandman story? That was a pretty good. I haven't read The Wathcmen in years. I need to at least get in TPB form. It was a classic. Though I might find it flawed these days.

No more comics thank YOU. However many oochies they've got in them. I went and bought Faction Paradox: Political Animals and frankly I can't be bothered to finish it. And if Lawrence can't write a good comic, then - as I've always suspected - no-one can.

"And if Lawrence can't write a good comic, then - as I've always suspected - no-one can." - Emily

Pardon me, for butting in and prosetylizing on your board, ma'am, but I completely disagree. I have no idea who Lawrence is, but I suspect he may a novelist. (Not D.H. Lawrence, is it?) Just because he's a great writer in one medium, does not mean that skill will translate into another. Comics can be a specialized writing exercise. It requires skills that are different from writing a novel. That doesn't mean that comics cannot live up to the level of a novel. Far from it. Art spiegelman's (SIC) MAUS is an excellent example. This is a comic book, a graphic novel really, that tells the tale of a Holocaust survivor. Sure it uses (subverts, really) the "funny animal" genre, but it does so in a very poignant and intelligent manner. The book is really more of a biography (of spiegelman's father), than anything else. More importantly, this is a work that actually won the Pulizter Prize in a catagory created especially for it.

I realize, Emily, that this may not change your mind about the genre, but, as a life long comics fan, I felt it incumbent upon myself to defend the medium that has given me hours of pleasure and entertainment over these many years.

Oops! I apologize! In my first sentence of my August 10th, 2003 3:57 p.m., I wrote the word, "prosetylizing". I meant to write "proselytizing". We regret the error.

>I have no idea who Lawrence is

I'm sure Emily is referring to Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen. His new console room is a dream of pinkish shimmery grey, silver haze and moonstone. The glass bottle chandelier hangs over the new console crafted from glass blocks, MDF and etched acrylic. In places, the floor has been removed and replaced by gravel for a Zen garden feel.

And as for what Diarmuid Gavin has done with the cloister room...

Uh, okay. I do not know who that is. I'm not a fan of Dr. Who, just a comics fan.... (I take it that it's a Dr. Who reference.)

I think Sophie means the guy on "Changing Rooms" (aka "Trading Spaces"). Lawrence is Lawrence Miles, author of "Christmas on a Rational Planet", "Alien Bodies", "Interference", "The Adventuress of Henrietta Street", and a few other Who written works.

Yes, sorry if that was a bit obscure. (And I took a liberty with name spelling.)

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is a popular foppish interior designer on British TV makeover shows.

And if Lawrence can't write a good comic, then - as I've always suspected - no-one can.
Rubbish!!!

Novels are a medium that depends solely on the written word to get a story across.

Comics are a medium that requires pictures, usually, but not always, with dialogue, to get a story across.

Also comics tend to be limited in page count so a comic author has to be to the point rather than going on & on like one might in a novel.

A comic author is dependent on the artist to produce the pictures that go with the story. A novelist who is used to 'painting pictures with words' might have problems adapting to that. A novelist who tends to neglect backgrounds will also have problems.

Novels, comics, plays, movies, etc., are all different forms of storytelling with their own strengths and weaknesses. A story that works in one format will not necessarily work in another.

Daniel, I was being somewhat flip when I made the comment about the second movie adaptation.

I also intend to force her to read 'Watchmen' at gunpoint...
Isn't the main appeal of Watchmen, besides the naughty bits, the fact that it's an English deconstructionist ripping to shreds the American superhero myth?
Since Emily doesn't read American superheroes wouldn't forcing her to read it be like forcing a deaf person to listen to the Spice Girls?

I saw Faction Paradox on Mile High Comics First Looks page & wondered if it was Doctor Who related. Wasn't impressed by the first 4 pages.

Watchmen is a story about superheroes rather than a superhero story per se and I think seeing it simply as a deconstruction of the superhero genre is a bit limiting (there's a lot more to it than that!) I think Emily could read and appreciate it all the more without necessarily knowing the significance of a superhero who lives in an Antarctic retreat.

And that's the first time I've seen it compared to the Spice Girls. How about 'forcing a blind man to join the Green Lantern Corps' as an alternative?

Getting back on topic, I like the first issue of the FP comic but it suffers from two faults: it's very one-note throughout, an interesting note but one that doesn't change or develop; and it's much too short. It's not going to set Doctor Who or the comics world on fire, which is what we were all hoping it would. On the other hand, I have Emily's word that she did finish it in the end.

It also pays homage to the Image house style by featuring at least one enormously-bosomed lady.

Yes, the comparison to the Spice Girls isn't fair. I actually like some of their songs. How about if we compare it to N'SYNC or The Backstreet Boys instead?

As for 'forcing a blind man to join the Green Lantern Corps' you obviously missed the Annual where Katmai Tu recruits a member of a sightless alien race. (Since his race had no words for Green or Lantern he calls himself an "F-Sharp Bell".)

It also pays homage to the Image house style by featuring at least one enormously-bosomed lady.
Was that how she was referred to in the story?
"Excuse me, miss...?"
"Enormously-Bosomed Lady."
"Yes. Well, Miss Enormously-Bosomed Lady, would you mind standing around and assuming odd poses for our readers who are getting a bit bored with the time travel storyline?"
"Certainly."

I see all. My reference to 'In Blackest Night' (Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #3, 1987, recently reprinted in Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore) was deliberate - its another superhero ref that Emily wouldn't get.

But then again, aren't they all?

And you're not getting any spoilers from me - you'll have to read the FP comic to find out.

Completely off-topic, but since I've recently tried and miserably failed to get Emily to even glance in the direction of my copy of Watchmen, I decided to pop onto the 'Which Watchman character are you?' website. Following rigourous questioning, I discovered that:

"YOU ARE SILK SPECTRE II
"No doubt about it, you're one tough cookie, and there's a place in law enforcement just for you! Your liberal sense of indignation is just charming and keeps you going. On top of all that, you'd look just great in a uniform."

Given the alternatives, I think that's the best possible outcome.

Back on topic, I wonder whether anyone has decided to do one of these for different incarnation of the Doctors? Just put in your own characteristics and see whether you are a) Jon Pertwee ("you have an unholy fascination with impractical forms of transport"), b) Sylvester McCoy ("you have our deepest sympathy") or c) Richard E. Grant ("you will find yourself overshadowed after a couple of weeks").

Hypocrite! Since when have you sympathised with Sylvester McCoy???

(Not that he NEEDS your sympathy, a fine figure of a Doctor like that.)

And I'll have you know that Pertwee's transportation was always deeply practical. (Well...fairly practical. At least he wasn't obsessed with travelling round in go-karts at 0mph like the Sixth and Seventh Doctors (Vengeance on Varos and Happiness Patrol.))

Other Doctors on that quiz.

William Hartnell "You like solving problems directly by bashing in their skull with a rock."

Tom Baker "You offer strangers candy in the hopes of whisking them away."

Peter Davison "You look pretty in pink."

Christopher Eccleston "To be determined later."

I don't even have to take the quiz - I know what it would tell me. Yup, I'm Hartnell. What a hideous realisation.

Does that mean you have 12 regenerations to go? ;-)

Non-canon, but a so-far enjoyable fan comic The Ten Doctors. It's up to 40 pages so far & Who knows how long it'll run.

For a fan page, not too bad. The artwork reminds me of Phil Foglio.

Re:The Ten Doctors
It's up to page 87, now....

Im reading Doctor Who - The Forgotten #2. Is that Jean-Luc Picard from page 7 to 10... really seems like him, only he's on a Station..

I've recently dug out the Doctor Who Fun Book from 1987 and been reminded that Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett actually attempted a Doctor Who strip that wasn't funny...

Sorry, I'll start again...

Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett actually attempted a Doctor Who strip that *intentionally* wasn't funny. Though you can't always tell because Howett's art - even though slightly more detailed than in the cartoons - is basically the same sort of caricature he always does. The story (or stories - it comes in two parts) is called 'The Test of Time', features all six Doctors, Susan and some punk-looking Daleks in a story orchestrated for no readily apparent reason by 'the Father of Time'. It makes no sense whatsoever and looks really out of place in a joke book - but I kind of admire Q&H for trying it. (Quinn did later write one "straight" strip: 'A Religious Experience' in Doctor Who Yearbook 1994, but with John Ridgway on art.)

And it's got to be the most obscure Doctor Who comic ever!

And now to something that deserves to be the most obscure Doctor Who comic ever: 'The Only Good Dalek' by Justin Richards and Mike Collins. (This paragraph will be the only time you will find "good" in the review.)

It's quite bizarre actually. What it reminds me of most is the 'Terry Nation's Dalek Annuals' of the 1970s, dating from a good decade after the Daleks' comic strip heyday and executed with all the slapdash quasi-amateurism one expected from World Distributors at the time. Except a) it has the Doctor in it, b) it has more continuity than anyone at World would ever have bothered with, and c) it's at least 120 pages longer than anything World ever published. And not 120 pages better either.

It also has the most amazingly unexpected plot twist ever. Surely there's no way that Tranter, who single-handedly fought his way out of Dalek prison, could possibly be secretly a conditioned Dalek agent? And I'm sure none of his superiors would ever give such a nonsensical possibility a second thought, even as they happily hand him the most top secret and high security job in the war effort? And, most plausibly, no one would ever think to ask "What is that thing on your face that you didn't have before you were captured by the Daleks but you suddenly do now?"

Then they have another character who's horribly injured in a planetary crash and has to rebuild himself using the local steam technology. Except that no one seems to have told Mike Collins this, so he just looks like some normal bloke. Possibly with metal hands. Or metal gloves. But he wears a cowl and acts all enigmatic when we first see him, even though we know that there might be a mysteriously disappeared and probably not dead at all scientist of great import somewhere on this planet.

Why does said scientist's assistant allow himself to be lured into a trap by one of the captive Daleks? Is it just so that we can fit some irrelevant Varga plant action into the plot? And then why does one of the "tame"* Daleks tell Amy that they know why Hadleigh was killed, thus potentially tipping her off to the possibility that they might be up to something? Fortunately Amy is too thick to ask any follow-up questions!

(*Gotcha! They're not really tame. It's all a trick, another thrilling plot twist that is in no way visible a mile off.)

The big mystery, though, is why the art and writing is so shonky. Collins's work is usually better than this; it looks very crude, scratchy and poorly detailed in the places where there's no detail at all. There are rumours flying round the net that everything had to be rejigged for the 11th Doctor and Amy after starting out as a 10th Doctor book, but that doesn't explain why everything else looks so hurried and slapdash. Though a long lead time implies that it was commissioned before the public had seen the New Paradigm Daleks and collectively gone "Yuck!"

But it is Richards's tedious by the numbers recycled script that makes this such a leaden read. You'd imagine that the BBC's first original Doctor Who graphic novel might be offered to someone with a decent track record in the field, maybe even someone who'd written for the TV series as well (Gareth Roberts? Paul Cornell? Robert Shearman even?) But no, apparently what's important is that Justin Richards should add another carriage to his gravy train.

And it's one of those stories that keeps telling us how amazing humans are. Not on this evidence they're not.

A few curious continuity points:

Why is Hadleigh's access code denied when he tries to escape the Skaro jungle? It can't be the Dalek's doing, as there's no indication that they've managed to subvert Station 7's systems?

And why is the Dalek in the jungle awaiting rescue, given that it can have no inkling of what the Daleks are planning? Is it just a general expectation.

The Mechanoids date from at least 1000 years before this story is set, but there's at least one still intact. Fine, they've been built to last. But why does no one seem to be aware that humans built them in the first place?

Why does Weston abandon ship when he hears Tranter is coming back? True, Tranter is opposed to his experimentation but he's got a living docile Dalek to show off to him this time. It can't be because he suspects Tranter is a Dalek agent because he only finds out late in this story.

The Daleks only notice the Doctor is involved after they've occupied Station 7, even though they have a visual feed from Tranter's eyepiece. It's also rather fortunate that they haven't indiscriminately exterminated Amy by this point, but are keeping her alive because she's the Doctor's companion. Even though this is totally irrelevant to their plan.

In fact their plan involves using one of the human-controlled (supposedly) Daleks to lull the humans into a false sense of security and lead them to Weston. But they had no way of knowing that Weston's assistants had found a way of remote-controlling Daleks and that they'd be employed in defence of the station. Even if they were using Tranter for this purpose (and he still seems sceptical) what if the scientists thought the process just wasn't ready? Or inherently risky what with the acting chief technician getting killed in mysterious circumstances after being lured away by a supposedly-tame Dalek.

How do the Daleks even know about the abomination? Possibly via Tranter, but he's not been on Station 7 for ages before his capture and can't know how far advanced Weston is in his research? The Daleks could be setting him up to run the station on a whim. In fact with Tranter in command couldn't they just get him to clamp down on Weston's experiments (or just ignore him, now that he's presumed to be dead and unlikely to be able to escape the planet)? Then they'd be able to keep Tranter in place monitoring Station 7's progress without anyone else noticing.

Or maybe there plan was just to destroy Station 7 in the first place. In which case, having achieved that, why not bombard the planet with nukes or plague missiles? They'd get Weston and the Doctor in one go.

The Doctor doesn't believe there's such a thing as a good Dalek. What about Alpha, Beta and Omega?

The Doctor doesn't believe there's such a thing as a good Dalek. What about Alpha, Beta and Omega?

AND poor old Daleks Sec and Caan, who both sacrificed their LIVES to save his miserable skin/the universe/whatever.

Dalek Sec is "good" in the sense of "not evil" but is not "good" in the sense "not rubbish".

HELL yeah.

The imprisoned Daleks on Station 7 have their guns removed, but not their sink-plungers. Aren't the SSS worried about being sucked to death?

I've just been re-reading the complete 5th Doctor run from DWM, as reprinted in 'The Tides of Time'. Now obviously this (and Colin Baker's first year) represents the Golden Age of the Who comic strip and it looks even better in contrast with 'The Only Good Dalek' but...

... there is a certain lack of story logic involved, a fault also apparent in 'Voyager' though these lack the later strip's compensatory oneric dream-sense.

Like, why don't the Althracians pipe up at the start of Episode 3 of 'The Tides of Time' - "We've got a plan to sort out Melanicus, why don't you pop along to our white hole and save yourself 2 1/2 episodes of running around?" Really nothing much happens in the middle episodes beyond giving Dave Gibbons lots of nice things to draw and shovelling in some exposition about Shayde.

And while it's a nice idea that the Doctor has been hanging around on Earth keeping his eyes open for the Monk on behalf of the Matrix Lords, it would have been nicer still if there'd been some - any - hint of this in strips prior to '4-Dimensional Vistas'. In fact he seems to be looking for a quiet life most of the time.

Also it's never clear what the Monk hopes to gain from his alliance with the Ice Warriors, and their plan feels like (admittedly convoluted) small beer, especially compared with a) the literally demonic Melanicus seizing control of the Event Synthesiser that controls all of reality [why does the Prime Mover play a bum note in the first place] and b) the elemental being that's been hunting the TARDIS for the entirety of human history and whose actions result in Rassilon himself getting medieval on the Doctor's donkey.

The collection ends with Josiah W. Dogbolter - the universe's most evil capitalist frog - basically declaring war on the Doctor. He reappears twice in the comics, both times in fluffy romps, and once in a fluffy romp on audio. Why build him up as such a formidable villain and then barely use him again?

... there is a certain lack of story logic involved

You don't say!

And while it's a nice idea that the Doctor has been hanging around on Earth keeping his eyes open for the Monk

No it isn't! The Doctor HATES being exiled to Earth! It drove him mad even when there was a fun new alien invasion to fight every week - god knows what it'd do to him if he was just waiting for that stupid Monk!

The collection ends with Josiah W. Dogbolter - the universe's most evil capitalist frog - basically declaring war on the Doctor.

THAT rings a bell...hang on...Maltese Penguin?

Yep, that's the fluffy romp on audio.

I've just noticed that the Ectoplasm monster in 'Doctor Who and the Iron Legion' is apparently called "Eccy" by its fans. A subtle foreshadowing of the ninth Doctor...!

D'oh, I meant Ectoslime.

Calling it "Ectoplasm" is like spelling Christopher's surname "Ecclestone"!

Since this is a nitpicking site I should point out that General Ironicus knows that the Doctor is called "the Doctor" even though no one's used the name in dialogue.

"It's vital you remember!" the Doctor tells Vesuvius, who has forgotten the Secret of the Gods. Except that he never does. He later tells the Doctor that Magog has taken over Juno's body but the Doctor figured that one out three issues ago.

There are five Malevilus, all of whom are visible at the start of part five, even though Magog is also present as Juno. OK, later on Magog claims "I can be in a hundred places at once" and demonstrates it in one panel, but never uses this power again (even though it would be quite handy to defeat the Doctor). So this line looks like an awkward fix for an earlier continuity error.

When did the Malevilus arrive? The Doctor thinks that they're the ones who gave the Romans the technology to become galactic conquerors, but later on its implied that they arrive during the (quite young-looking) Juno's lifetime. General Ironicus has been around for over three thousand years. The only way this works is if the Malevilus have been around for millennia but have only just got round to possessing any of the royal family. In any case, Vesuvius clearly predates the Malevilus and he's a robot so, er, maybe the Doctor's just wrong about the source of Roman technology. In which case, why was this highly advanced dimension-spanning Empire so easily taken over by admittedly formidable aliens. Especially given that most of the population have never even seen "the god"?

Why is Ironicus regent anyway? It can't be because Adolphus is a child because the regency has lasted over three thousand years. Clearly there is still a royal succession as Magog plans to take over Adolphus one day but it makes this act of possession a bit meaningless as Ironicus is already serving the Gods directly. Did Magog just like the idea of getting out and about and enjoying a rather sedate looking orgy?

In fact why hasn't Magog possessed Adolphus yet? Moral qualms? A mad alien-possessed boy god-emperor would fit nicely with this type of story but no Magog just has to hang around as his mum. True, they might have been worried about showing a child being killed... except that Magog doesn't get killed, just trapped forever.

This is because, apparently the Malevilus can't die. Fair enough, but no one seems to have told the other four who get blown up on the final page.

In 'Doctor Who and the Time Witch', Brimo isn't a witch and does nothing involving time.

He's not called Doctor Who either...

Is it just me or does the Doctor never get round to removing the bomb that the Wrarth Warriors implant in his body in 'Doctor Who and the Star Beast'? We see him using lead to block the detonation signal and then... it's never mentioned again - despite there still being two episodes of running around before both parties realise that they're the goodies and it is actually the hated Meep who is the villain of the piece. The Doctor doesn't look like he's hauling any lead around when he gets on the bus!

Sharon and Fudge find the Meep and call it the Meep because all it says is "Meep". Later on, we discover that "the Meep" is actually his name. What a lucky coincidence - just like the ones with the Sea Devils and the Ice Warriors!

Anyone who has a copy of 'The Flood' collection might like to know that, subsequent to what Scott Gray says in the notes for 'The Land of Happy Endings', we now know who wrote all the TV Comic strips of the 1960s. It was one Roger Noel Cook - who was previously known to have written the strips from 1968-1970 - but has been tracked down this excellent website:

http://www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/roger_noel_cook.html

Among other things, we discover that the man who once gave the Doctor such memorable dialogue as "Quickly children, arm yourselves with vegetables" and "Die, hideous monster! Die!" is now a millionaire tax exile. How did he get so rich? By publishing porn (and not by inventing Daleks, which is the previous established Who-writer-to-millionaire route).

Back to 'Doctor Who and the Time Witch'? Is it just me or does Brimo not actually seem that evil? OK, she's a bit too quick on the draw but she doesn't seem to do anything actually bad until the Doctor shows up and starts being annoying at her. In fact her story is not too dissimilar to Omega's, so it feels a bit off that the Doctor imprisons her for all eternity again at the end.

And why is she imprisoned in the first place? She used her "subconscious mind to conspire with creatures unknown to pervert the course of destiny". Is it just me or does that sound like the sort of charge that'd be untestable in court?

D'oh, I meant Ectoslime.

Ectoslime is an EXCELLENT name for The Actor Who Betrayed And Abandoned Us And Broke My Heart And MURDERED The Ninth Doctor.

So this line looks like an awkward fix for an earlier continuity error.

Hey, in their defence, at least they're TRYING to fix those nits.

And not even writing an entire novel in order to do so, a la To The Slaughter...

The only way this works is if the Malevilus have been around for millennia but have only just got round to possessing any of the royal family.

Be honest...would YOU be in a rush to possess a member of the royal family? ANY royal family?

apparently the Malevilus can't die. Fair enough, but no one seems to have told the other four who get blown up on the final page.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

In 'Doctor Who and the Time Witch', Brimo isn't a witch and does nothing involving time.

He's not called Doctor Who either...

But hey, at least the 'and the' bit was correct, right?

Sharon and Fudge find the Meep and call it the Meep because all it says is "Meep". Later on, we discover that "the Meep" is actually his name. What a lucky coincidence - just like the ones with the Sea Devils and the Ice Warriors!

Bless!

Anyone who has a copy of 'The Flood' collection

Just you, then.

Among other things, we discover that the man who once gave the Doctor such memorable dialogue as "Quickly children, arm yourselves with vegetables" and "Die, hideous monster! Die!" is now a millionaire tax exile. How did he get so rich? By publishing porn

Didn't Virgin do the same thing (other than getting rich, obviously)? What IS the Who/Porn connection?

it feels a bit off that the Doctor imprisons her for all eternity again at the end.

Never mind this obvious miscarriage of justice - HOW does he imprison her for eternity?

"Be honest...would YOU be in a rush to possess a member of the royal family? ANY royal family?"

If that particular royal family were absolute rulers of the universe there'd be certain advantages that, say, the Windsors don't possess.

"But hey, at least the 'and the' bit was correct, right?"

They drop the "and the" bit after the first episode (for good but very boring reasons that I won't go into here).

"HOW does he imprison her for eternity?"

The Doctor and Brimo are having a mind duel - Brimo is down to her last ever bit of mental power when the Doctor tricks her into thinking about the worst thing she can imagine: which turns out to be the eternity cage in which she was imprisoned for, um, eternity.

"Anyone who has a copy of 'The Flood' collection

"Just you, then."

Erm, my copy is on loan from a local library.

Incidentally, Russell T. God's idea for how DWM could do the 8th/9th Doctor regeneration without mucking up their own internal continuity is probably the stupidest thing he - or anyone else - has ever come up with*.

(* Except possibly "Captain Jack and a bunch of Welsh people are a secret organisation fighting aliens. In Cardiff.")

Basically, to get around the ninth Doctor having to appear with Rose, he suggests a series of stories that take place while the Doctor is regenerating - so he only appears as a fuzzy blur in a frock coat. This is so marvellously dumb I wish they'd done it, just to see what it looked like.

This might however be the source of the rumour that Rusty was going to write the first 9th Doctor strip in DWM (and not, as it turned out, Gareth Roberts).

"What IS the Who/Porn connection?"

Have you never seen 'The Creature from the Pit'?

Incidentally, Russell T. God's idea for DWM could do the 8th/9th Doctor regeneration without mucking up their own internal continuity is probably the stupidest thing he - or anyone else - has ever come up with*.

(* Except possibly "Captain Jack and a bunch of Welsh people are a secret organisation fighting aliens. In Cardiff.")

THAT is an entirely wonderful idea which in a couple of weeks will be my main reason to keep on breathing.

Basically, to get around the ninth Doctor having to appear with Rose, he suggests a series of stories that take place while the Doctor is regenerating - so he only appears as a fuzzy blur in a frock coat. This is so marvellously dumb I wish they'd done it, just to see what it looked like.

Fantastic! Are you quite sure this was to get around Nine having to appear with Rose - and not to get around the fact none of those 'artists' can actually draw a recognisable Doctor-face at the best of times...?

"THAT is an entirely wonderful idea which in a couple of weeks will be my main reason to keep on breathing."

You are Auntie and Uncle and 'Torchwood' is your House?

"Fantastic! Are you quite sure this was to get around Nine having to appear with Rose - and not to get around the fact none of those 'artists' can actually draw a recognisable Doctor-face at the best of times...?"

Well, given that there are now several volumes with pictures of Tennant in and, er, a slim pamphlet with pictures of Eccleston, they were undissuaded.

The ultimate in trivial nitpicking - in 'The Flood', MI6 head Woodrow is thankfully called away from a tedious formal dinner to deal with a Cyberman invasion. One of the attendees was "this year's winner of Pop Idol" - but there was no Pop Idol that year!!!

What happens to the army of Hates in 'City of the Damned'? They just seem to vanish from the story once the Barabara have been unleashed on the city. Do they all just become Tom Baker clones like everyone else?

If they survived, probably. Maybe taking on the 4th Doctor's grumpier moments rather than his more light-hearted ones.

Yay! I have finally caught up with 'The Age of Chaos', which until recently was the longest ever Doctor Who story in comic strip form. It's also not to mention the only Who story of any length in any medium to be written by one of the stars of the show - namely, Colin Baker. It would be slightly unfair on him to say that it's easy to see why this never happened again.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why it happened this time. The plan was to release it as a four-issue mini-series for the US market in 1993, presumably with Baker's name as the USP. Then John Burns took forever with the art, so they ditched him and got Barrie Mitchell to finish the 3 outstanding issues. And I get the impression that at some point losses were cut and it was decided to release the whole thing in the UK format for the domestic market in one fell swoop.

And then Colin Baker - according to his introduction - persuaded them to publish it in colour.

Uh?

This is really odd, because if it was intended to be released in the US colour would have come as standard. It would have been a Marvel publication, not some indie thing, so was b&w ever really on the cards. Apparently so, because contemporary adverts announced that its going to be in black and white. And it isn't.

Which is almost a shame, because the colouring does this no favours at all. This is the Doctor Who Classic Comics age when unsympathetic and garish colour is being lathered all over places where it was never meant to go. 'The Age of Chaos' is no exception. It particularly ruins the work of the legendary John Burns, though the resizing also can't help.

(Another odd fact: Burns is the only artist to have worked on Doctor Who for both Marvel and Polystyle, his previous strip for the series - 'Woden's Warrior' in the 1975 TV Comic Annual - includes some of the ugliest pictures of Tom Baker ever published!)

It all looks rather rushed anyway, and Mitchell's work is no improvement. Ironically, the Doctor hardly ever looks like Colin Baker. (The penultimate panel on page 67 is my favourite "who's that supposed to be?!" example.) Weirdly, given that he's an alien shapeshifter, Frobisher never looks like himself either. At the foot of page 68 he looks like Iris Wildthyme.

But my favourite piece of art is the Nahrung, an alien lizard who always slouches into frame in the same pose as if a) he's been photoreferenced and b) he's just been having a crafty fag. He is my favourite character in this. I imagine him being played by Dylan Moran in a TV version.

This is all about the art, mainly because there's not much to say about the story. It's not bad exactly. It's certainly not good. It's Doctor Who as a sub-ERB romp in a generic fantasy-land. The hints we pick up from Yrcanos in 'The Trial of a Time Lord', though obviously rather parodic and over-the-top, suggest something more interesting than we see here.

I'm not entirely sure why Frobisher is in this, as Peri's granddaughter Actis would obviously be a lot more to have around as a foil. True, she's supposed to stay at home and not put herself in any danger - but she sneaks off anyway. The thinking seems to be that people like Frobisher... in which case why give him to a writer who doesn't seem to have a clue of what he's like.

Oh, yes, because Colin Baker's name will boost sales. And the regular writers of the time won't - though I'm fairly sure that Paul Cornell and Dan Abnett wouldn't be impediments to comics buying today. In fact the whole thing covers in 92 pages what the DWM strip of the time could have done in 28. It feels like a sales gimmick gone wrong.

It's hard to find any specific nits, though the Doctor doesn't seem to be that afraid of what's supposed to be his greatest fear - not surprisingly, as it's a giant Michael Aspel. No, that's not sarcasm. It is actually a giant Michael Aspel.

Quite what 'Ranith' thinks she's up to is a bit of a grey idea. It's not an error exactly, but it is a bit weird that a character who appears briefly at the start then disappears unmentioned for about 60 pages should turn out to be so significant.

This is also the only Doctor Who comic to have appeared in 'Drop the Dead Donkey' - it's visible being read by Eastern European scab labourers in an episode where the newsroom team have gone on strike. I wonder what they made of Colin's dialogue? Choice examples:

"That was when you brought that huge rabbit which Actis became so fond of..."

"There goes the vacation, Doc - I think a little vworping is called for."

"A woman came from the killing ground. We will not be defiled by the sins of women."

"I know the full power of Algifer can't damage the neural system of a Time Lord - you posturing oaf!" (yep, that's the Doctor. Moments later he says "No-o-o-o!")

"The time has come to ride a Time-Lord!!"

But enough mockery. If you only ever read one Doctor Who comic strip in your life, make it 'Death to the Doctor!' by Jonathan Morris and Roger Langridge, first published in DWM #390 and since reprinted in 'The Widow's Curse'.

Including, among other delights, Dodo's comic strip debut a mere 41 years after she was last seen in the TV series!

Another wonderfully wrong picture at the bottom of p.13 - it looks like the Doctor has been replaced by Frasier Crane in a Harpo wig.

An *evil* Frasier Crane...

As I've just quoted a whole lot of bad dialogue from 'The Age of Chaos', here - to balance things out - is some good dialogue from 'Death to the Doctor!':

"But why would anyone want to kill Kraarn of the Kraagaaron?"
"Well, he is one of the most evil beings in the galaxy..."
"Apart from that."
"And he's laid waste to whole solar systems..."
"Apart from that."
"And enslaved entire species..."
"Apart from that."

"I am usually referred to as the Mentor!"
"Oh, right! Like the --"
"Yes... but not copying. It's purely coincidental!"

Yay! I have finally caught up with 'The Age of Chaos', which until recently was the longest ever Doctor Who story in comic strip form.

Are you quite sure you should be 'Yay!'ing and not, say, phoning the Samaritans?

the only Who story of any length in any medium to be written by one of the stars of the show - namely, Colin Baker. It would be slightly unfair on him to say that it's easy to see why this never happened again.

Hasn't John Barrowman just written some kind of Torchwood comic?

Ironically, the Doctor hardly ever looks like Colin Baker.

Excellent!

Wait a minute, SURELY he's recognisable by his coat...?

"I know the full power of Algifer can't damage the neural system of a Time Lord - you posturing oaf!"

Sure, calling someone a posturing oaf would be out of character for any OTHER Doctor...but don't forget, this IS the Acid Bath One.

"The time has come to ride a Time-Lord!!"

Oh-kay...I think I'll stop pathetically attempting to defend the dialogue.

Including, among other delights, Dodo's comic strip debut a mere 41 years after she was last seen in the TV series!

Yeah, but surely only Daniel O'Mahony would care about THAT!

"But why would anyone want to kill Kraarn of the Kraagaaron?"
"Well, he is one of the most evil beings in the galaxy..."
"Apart from that."
"And he's laid waste to whole solar systems..."
"Apart from that."
"And enslaved entire species..."
"Apart from that."

WHAT! When was this thing published? PLEASE tell me RTG didn't nick the Greatest Scene Since Tom-And-The-Thumbscrews from a mere COMIC?!

"Are you quite sure you should be 'Yay!'ing and not, say, phoning the Samaritans?"

Tell me about this Earth thing you call "sarcasm".

"Hasn't John Barrowman just written some kind of Torchwood comic?"

He didn't write it but he has a co-credit for the story (unlike Gareth David-Lloyd who did actually write his own strip). Besides it's Torchwood not Who and it isn't particularly long.

"WHAT! When was this thing published? PLEASE tell me RTG didn't nick the Greatest Scene Since Tom-And-The-Thumbscrews from a mere COMIC?"

December 2007. Er, to which scene do you refer...?

Phew! The stupid comic nicked it from RTG. My world-view is restored.

Boom Town (DUH!):

BLON: This is persecution. What have I ever done to you?
DOCTOR: You tried to kill me and destroy this entire planet.
BLON: Apart from that.

Ah, but it's the repetition that makes it funny. RTG should have hired Jonathan Morris to help polish his dialogue.

Another good line from a different strip, wherein the Sycorax wives clan turn up to wreak revenge on the human race for blowing up their husbands' ship. The Doctor begs them to spare humanity but:

"No second chances. We're that kind of clan."

'A Cold Day in Hell!' must surely be the least loved of the Panini collections, assembling as it does the first two years' worth of seventh Doctor strips that are generally regarded as DWM's nadir.

Funnily enough the barebones commentary goes someway to addressing why this period was so horrid. It's a measly six pages plus two introductions, which is a far cry from the copious behind-the-scenes notes in the 8th and 10th Doctor volumes; and on top of that the Now Big Name contributors of the period are quoted from other sources (Grant Morrison) or can barely remember what they were thinking (Dan Abnett). I would have liked a bit more about the thinking behind Olla the Heat Vampire, introduced as the new companion at the start of the 7th Doctor's run and then unceremoniously disposed of in the very next story as if she'd only been included in a soon-regretted drunken fugue. There could have been some mileage in her, at least as much as John and Gillian. Or Arnold.

Well, maybe not Arnold.

(Feel free to ask who Arnold was, but be warned - the answer is quite dull.)

But strip editor Richard Starkings is quite open about the behind-the-scenes problems, including budget cuts, DWM's precarious sales and the sacking of John Ridgway. (The artist himself seems none too perturbed by this, though I recall an interview from Doctor Who Classic Comics where he talks about losing the DWM gig just after he quit DC's 'Hellblazer'.)

The loss of Ridgway after the first 7th Doctor serial is probably the defining event of the strip's decline. Ridgway had been associated with the Doctor Who comic for four years and had given it a strong sense of artistic continuity. Like Dave Gibbons before him, his art had a distinctively European feel more in line with '2000AD' and the TV show itself than with Marvel's usual output. The art that follows is a mixed bag, but even the good stuff looks scruffy in this company. It doesn't help that no one in this period can draw Sylvester McCoy (and it won't be until they rope in photorealists like Arthur Ranson and Richard Piers Rayner that this changes - but neither are represented here.) Apparently Sylvester McCoy forced one artist to re-do his likeness; couldn't he have forced them all?

And the moment Ridgway's gone, the Doctor starts looking more Marvel and meeting more Marvel characters. And not even the famous ones, just a lot of UK-originated second stringers, like the rather charming Death's Head, and the entirely charmless (not to mention actionable) Sleaze Brothers, whose appearance is at least fun and over quickly unlike the stories either side of it. 'Time and Tide' and 'Invaders from Gantac!' were quite horrid in 1989 and are still horrid over 20 years later.

There's a missed opportunity in this volume, as it might have been the ideal place to collect the more juvenile Doctor Who strips that appeared in 'The Incredible Hulk Presents' in late 1989. Any prospective 2nd volume of McCoy strips will cover the period when the DWM strip begins to get its act together, so they might look out of place there. Here they would have made an interesting bonus feature, not least because the final 6 instalments - including 'Who's That Girl!', which is claimed (by the few who've seen it) as "the good one" - have never been reprinted.

Oh, and the presence of Frobisher in the title strip creates a continuity nightmare, which will later be further addled by 'The Age of Chaos'. Frobisher had been the 6th Doctor's comic companion since 1984; the following year they were joined by Peri (who, unusually for a TV companion, got her own introduction in the comics - she had left the TARDIS for a bit in order to work as a secretary in New York... as you do). Peri disappears after the final Colin strip, 'The World Shapers' and now Frobisher is travelling with the 7th Doctor and missing Peri.

So, er, where's Mel? Where was Frobisher during Mel's time in the TARDIS? Why is he only now missing Peri given that her departure must have been ages ago? The only way this makes sense is if - for purposes of the comic strip continuity - the entirety of the 6th Doctor's adventures with Mel simply didn't happen.

Oh, to be that lucky!

Apparently the IDW comic is currently running a story about Jack the Ripper, which has just been completely invalidated by a throwaway line in 'A Good Man Goes to War'. Don't they have whole teams of people making sure this sort of thing doesn't happen any more?

Ah, but it's the repetition that makes it funny.

Stuff n'nonsense!

'Apart from that' is hilarious all by itself. Though admittedly the repetition doesn't do it any harm.

I would have liked a bit more about the thinking behind Olla the Heat Vampire,

The WHAT?

There could have been some mileage in her, at least as much as John and Gillian. Or Arnold.

Well, maybe not Arnold.

(Feel free to ask who Arnold was, but be warned - the answer is quite dull.)

Sorry, I can't help myself...who's Arnold?

But strip editor Richard Starkings is quite open about the behind-the-scenes problems, including budget cuts

They SURELY can't have been paying much for those godawful 'stories' and illustrations in the first place...

DWM's precarious sales

Ooh! DWM nearly went under?

the more juvenile Doctor Who strips that appeared in 'The Incredible Hulk Presents' in late 1989.

MY DOCTOR was presented by some Incredible Hulk??

Peri (who, unusually for a TV companion, got her own introduction in the comics - she had left the TARDIS for a bit in order to work as a secretary in New York... as you do).

Oh, of course. If I was travelling round space and time in the Doctor's company, naturally I'd want to become a secretary instead.

(Well, come to think of it, as the Doctor in question was the Sixth...)

Apparently the IDW comic is currently running a story about Jack the Ripper, which has just been completely invalidated by a throwaway line in 'A Good Man Goes to War'.

Surely it was already completely invalidated by the fact that IT WAS A BLOODY COMIC?

Incidentally, during your heroic wade through this sewage, do be on the look-out for the single line of surpassing ghastliness that sums up everything about the comics, so I can use it for the top of this section...

"I would have liked a bit more about the thinking behind Olla the Heat Vampire,"

"The WHAT?"

In his first comic strip story the 7th Doctor is helped by Olla, an alien Dreilyn - or "heat vampire" - who comes in useful in defeating the Ice Warriors. The clue is in the name.

Anyway, Olla joins the Doctor at the end of the story, looking like his new comics-only companion, but in the very next (single episode) story she is exposed as a criminal and the Doctor hands her over to justice. It all looks extremely perfunctory, as if the set-up was meant to be that she was a fugitive and the Doctor needs to help her elude her captors - but was then rewritten at the last minute to get rid of her.

Both stories are by Simon Furman, but the first was edited by outgoing DWM editor Sheila Cranna, while the second is edited by Richard Starkings, who says: "The one thing I wanted to avoid was a lame duck companion slowing the strip down". Neither Furman nor Cranna seem to have been interviewed for the commentaries, and it would have been nice to have my suspicions confirmed that Olla was supposed to be around for a lot longer.

"Sorry, I can't help myself...who's Arnold?"

That's a Father Ted quote isn't it?

Sorry. Arnold was a boy from the 32nd century, introduced in the TV Comic strip 'Children of the Evil Eye' (1973) - about a hideous dystopian future where chilren rule. He joins the 3rd Doctor on his travels at the end of the story, but lasts for one more serial before the Doctor decides to dump him back in his own time and travel on alone.

See, I told you it was dull. Let's see Steve Lyons revive him for the 21st century!

"They SURELY can't have been paying much for those godawful 'stories' and illustrations in the first place..."

Ridgway was a big established artist who could demand top rates. Starkings says he "was given free rein to bring in younger, less expensive, up-and-coming talent... I could get 12 pages for the price of 8." (And later on he reduced the number of pages to 7).

"Ooh! DWM nearly went under?"

It nearly suffered an evil more dreadful fate: being sold to Visual Imagination!

"MY DOCTOR was presented by some Incredible Hulk??"

And it was barely 10 years since they were up against each other in a ratings-war-to-the-death!

"Incidentally, during your heroic wade through this sewage, do be on the look-out for the single line of surpassing ghastliness that sums up everything about the comics, so I can use it for the top of this section..."

Surely if there's one line that summons up the ghastliness of Doctor Who comics it's the 2nd Doctor's ray-gun toting exclamation of "Die, Hideous Monster! Die!"

BTW: Olla is pictured on the cover of the collection, and looks rather good. The 7th Doctor, on the other hand, looks like Humphrey Bogart playing Liberace. Frobisher is technically better but is curiously showing off his kung fu dance moves. That penguin's fast as lightnin'!

In his first comic strip story the 7th Doctor is helped by Olla, an alien Dreilyn - or "heat vampire" - who comes in useful in defeating the Ice Warriors. The clue is in the name.

Yeah, like you need a VAMPIRE to kill off the Ice Warriors. Even I could probably manage to...turn up the heating.

Anyway, Olla joins the Doctor at the end of the story, looking like his new comics-only companion, but in the very next (single episode) story she is exposed as a criminal and the Doctor hands her over to justice.

My god, she's a prototype River Song!

It all looks extremely perfunctory, as if the set-up was meant to be that she was a fugitive and the Doctor needs to help her elude her captors - but was then rewritten at the last minute to get rid of her.

If only the comics had displayed so much sense with all their other so-called Companions...

...well, MAYBE except for Frobisher.

"Sorry, I can't help myself...who's Arnold?"

That's a Father Ted quote isn't it?

How should I know?

See, I told you it was dull.

Oh, I don't know. A world ruled by children is MY definition of a hideous dystopian future.

Surely if there's one line that summons up the ghastliness of Doctor Who comics it's the 2nd Doctor's ray-gun toting exclamation of "Die, Hideous Monster! Die!"

Perfect! Encapsulating both the comics AND my attitude towards them! Thanks!

Actually I fear I misquoted. The correct version is visible here:

http://www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/second_doctor.html#MasterSpiders

No problem

Still, it MIGHT be the other bloke saying this - the speech-bubble was kinda hovering in mid-air between them...

The other bloke?! That's Doctor Who's grandson John, memorably described on the Altered Vistas site as "the fattest, ugliest child you have ever seen".

Incidentally the same site reproduces a panel of John Burns's gargoylish take on the fourth Doctor:

http://www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/fourth_doctor_part_one.html#TVCAnnual76

But it's worse. If you scan down you'll find some frame-to-frame comparisons of the third Doctor strips that were reprinted in the late 1970s with Tom Baker's face drawn over Pertwee's. I say "Tom Baker's face" but most of you will be wondering who this weird grinning goon is. What makes it exceptionally galling is that the original art is by Gerry Haylock, probably the best artist to work on Who comics up to this time, and his Pertwee looks just right.

But worse still, pan up from 'Woden's Warriors' and you'll see the panel in the preceding strip in which Paul Crompton has drawn the fourth Doctor as Colin Baker. In the 6th Doctor's costume. In 1975.

However, when it comes to the Stupidest Panel of a Doctor Who Comic Ever it would be on the last page of the final episode of 'Invaders from Gantac!' - panel 3. There's something about the way the artist has crammed the foreground with deformed looking people - apparently still suffering from PTSD after the Gantac invasion of 1992 - that suggests he was trying to distract attention from the smudgy blur Doctor (actually the best likeness of McCoy on this page), his flea-ridden tramp pal, his giant alien dog, his odd dialogue ("Ah! My Ohmodom! I was wondering where he'd got to.") and the fact that someone's nicked the TARDIS lamp.

Said foreground activity also looks like it's been cropped down badly because it was too violent, pornographic or otherwise offensive. Speculating about this is way more interesting than the rest of the story.

I do wonder why the Doctor's never again used the hypnotic phrase he learned from the Lizard-Wizards of the Quasimodo System. I can think of many scenarios when it would have come in extremely handy...

That's Doctor Who's grandson John, memorably described on the Altered Vistas site as "the fattest, ugliest child you have ever seen".



Incidentally the same site reproduces a panel of John Burns's gargoylish take on the fourth Doctor:

http://www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/fourth_doctor_part_one.html#TVCAnnual76

Why are you doing this to me?

What makes it exceptionally galling is that the original art is by Gerry Haylock, probably the best artist to work on Who comics up to this time, and his Pertwee looks just right.

Don't be ridiculous, as if ANY comic "artwork" could possibly -

- oh. Yeah, that actually....looks like Pertwee!

Sorry...LOOKED like Pertwee.

I do wonder why the Doctor's never again used the hypnotic phrase he learned from the Lizard-Wizards of the Quasimodo System.

Because there's no such phrase. These comics are LIES, ALL LIES. You have GOT to start getting the hang of this fact/fiction thing...

I have recently happened upon some of the rarest Who strips: the Time Lord trilogy by Alan Moore, published in the monthly in 1980-1981. Unlike Moore's earlier backup serials, these have never been reprinted in another Doctor Who venue (though they did crop up in Marvel's 'The Daredevils'... back in 1983). Nor, given Moore's long-standing animus against Marvel, are they ever likely to be.

Why is this significant? Well, Alan Moore is the biggest name comics writer ever. (Neil Gaiman is arguably more famous, but no one has thought of him primarily as a comics writer for at least a decade.) His 'Who' backup strips are among his earliest published work as a comics scriptwriter. Not only are they touched by his genius but they show how much of a huge Doctor Who fan he was, not least because he was the first person to put Rassilon and Omega in the same place at the same time.

Testicles! Not only are they really not very good, all of his Doctor Who lore - it transpires - came from buying Jeremy Bentham pints at lunchtime. The Gallifrey trilogy - 'Star Death', '4-D War' and 'Black Sun Rising' - is at least marginally better than the two serials he wrote for DWW in 1980 ('Black Legacy' contains the classic Cyberman line "Blood of my ancestors! Noooooo!") but not much more than that.

Tonally they're quite similar to his other early work, for Star Wars Monthly, 2000AD and Captain Britain. There's an embarrassingly earnest faux-hardboiled quality to his caption writing in his period that makes one appreciate all the more his decision to ditch explanatory captions altogether by the time of 'V for Vendetta' and 'Watchmen'.

The dialogue is in a similar vein, marginally more appropriately given that we're dealing with mock epic figures like the Time Lords and their enemies. Unfortunately it's all a bit generic, over-familiar from a tradition of comics that stretch back at least as far as Marvel's reinvention of Thor in the 1960s. For Doctor Who fans, seeing Rassilon as a cowled, mystically-powered 'grand wizard of the Prydonian order' is sufficiently different from the tone of the TV series to seem impressive (and certainly I'm not alone in instinctively visualising Rassilon as John Stokes's version from 'Star Death' rather than anything we saw on TV), but its bog-standard comics stuff.

It doesn't help that their enemies are so badly defined as well. The Black Sun are utterly ordinary from a distance, and up close they descend into romantic interlude cliche. Fenris the Hellbringer: cool name, naff person. The Special Executive will actually turn out to be quirkily impressive when Moore introduces them into 'Captain Britain' a couple of years later, but here they're indistinguishable from the pontificating Time Lords. Why would Gallifreyans need to rely on para-humans for security anyway? And why are they negotiating over uranium rights?

Oh, and any time someone tells you that these strips foreshadow the Time Wars from the TV series or the Faction Paradox books, remind them that the whole thing is kickstarted by a randy Sontaran. It's rather less than epic and stutters away into confusion at the end of the final strip.

None of these strips are bad exactly but they don't suggest that the author is going to go places that the other backup strip writers period won't. Nor does John Stokes and David Lloyd's art hint at how impressive they'll become later on. That said, Stokes does do a fabulously eerie Tom Baker head (doing the introductory narration for 'Star Death') where it looks like he's gradually turning into 'The Deadly Assassin' version of The Master.

Oh, and it's a big swizz: Omega remains off-panel throughout 'Star Death'. And in the next strip we learn that Lady Rema-du has been preparing for ten years to enter the black hole and locate Fenris, but no one says a word about trying to fish Omega out as well. No wonder he's so annoyed with the Time Lords in 'The Three Doctors'

Why would Gallifreyans need to rely on para-humans for security anyway?

Because they're getting invaded every two minutes and the Gallifreyan security forces are staggeringly useless - when they're not actively aiding and abetting said invaders?

And why are they negotiating over uranium rights?

Gotta pay the para-humans somehow, I guess. Unlike the Doctor not everyone saves the planet free of charge.

Oh, and any time someone tells you that these strips foreshadow the Time Wars from the TV series or the Faction Paradox books, remind them that the whole thing is kickstarted by a randy Sontaran.

IT - WAS - WHAT!!!!

And to think a fortnight ago I'd've sworn nothing could beat the lactic fluid as a Sontaran Surprise.

Lady Rema-du has been preparing for ten years to enter the black hole and locate Fenris

It's Fenric! And he's in a jar, not a black hole! God, what a cretin!

"It's Fenric!"

No, it's Fenris the Hell-bringer, who is just a bloke with an eye-patch and whom I describe above as "cool name, naff person". (Bear in mind that while Alan Moore did show an admirable willingness to incorporate Who mythology into his work, none of the fans he spoke to would have known about 'The Curse of Fenric' in 1980.)

"IT - WAS - WHAT!!!!"

Yep, well ostensibly it's becuase Brilox the Sontaran thinks that the Time Lords and the Black Sun are getting too pally in the negotiations but reading between the lines he just wants to shag Rema-du. (Though frankly the Special Executive member whom Brilox brainwashes into assassinating the Black Sun Elder is a lot tastier.)

No, it's Fenris the Hell-bringer, who is just a bloke with an eye-patch...none of the fans he spoke to would have known about 'The Curse of Fenric' in 1980.)

Don't give me this kind of pathetic excuse!

but reading between the lines he just wants to shag Rema-du.

Ah! By 'reading between the lines' you do, of course, mean 'I just made it all up'...?

I've just taken another look at 'Black Sun Rising'. I particularly like the way that Brilox's plot succeeds because the Special Executive are all camping out on the grass while the Black Sun bodyguards are just... not there, for no apparent reason.

I particularly like the shocked face of the alien delegate during the gruesome temporal assassination, which gives the impression that s/he's seeing nothing more awful than Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.

I've just started reading 'Agent Provocateur'. Freema Agyeman may have her faults, but being The Ugliest Human Being Who Has Ever Lived is not one of them, and she really needs to sue IDW for suggesting otherwise.

During chapter 2 there are many scenes of a giant cat monster on the rampage, which reminded me very much of the 'Killer Cars' sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus (see the lower tier of panels on p 39 for the best examples).

Then, lo and behold, chapter 3 features an entirely different set of giant cat monsters on the rampage on an entirely different planet for entirely different reasons.

Running out of ideas much?

Well, when you ARE running out of ideas what better than to put in a few oochies? They're so adorably distracting that NO TRUE CAT-LOVER would ever notice the slight...repetition.

Though I am of course shocked and concerned about these 'rampage' allegations...

Right, I have finished the thing. It's definitely in the same league of Quite Astonishingly Bad as 'The Only Good Dalek', though for completely different reasons. Funnily enough, these are among the longest ever 'Doctor Who' strips ('AP' is 134 pages, 'TOGDalek' is 128; apart from IDW's 'The Forgotten' nothing else tops 100 pages) and both demonstrate the virtues of the brevity found in the DWM strip. 'The Only Good Dalek' could easily have been a brisk 6 part story in DWM and this is much the same...

...mainly because it's so astonishingly padded and incoherent that cutting it down to basics should be easy. Only chapter 3 has anything like 22 pages worth of plot: only 2 of them are given over to pointless scenes of the Doctor and Martha doing fun stuff in the TARDIS, which seem to go on and on for ages in other episodes. And there is an awful lot of pointless blather about continuity, including an attempt to resolve the contradictions between 'Terror of the Zygons' and 'Timelash'. The first chapter has seemingly nothing to do with the rest of the story and ends with a cliffhanger so badly executed you actually have to read the resolution in chapter 2 in order to see what's supposed to be happening.

(Weirdly chapter one has a Sycorax collecting sole survivors of alien races. In later chapters whole planetary populations are disappearing in one fell swoop, leaving only a solitary representative on their world. It looks like these things are going to be related, but then they aren't. In fact we need find out why one alien gets left behind each time, unless it happened during one of the long explanations during which I fell asleep.)

The overarching plot seems to have been made up as the author went along and frequently veers off into weird and pointless digressions. So, where have we seen these authorial tics before? Why in the collected works of Gary Russell of course! And in fact this sometimes resembles his novels in more ways than just incoherence and irrelevance: it feels like there's more text on pages 120-121 and 126-127 than you'd find in a proper prose book. Worse, there's no attempt to break up the long wordy explanations into manageable chunks or to capture the rhythms of the character's speech - they're solid blocks of infodump, and once again there seems to be a curious desire on the part of graphic novel publishers to employ well-connected Who profans to write these instead of anyone who, you know, might have professional comics-writing chops. Gary Russell has written a couple of DWM strips but he looks as out of his depth here and he does in... well, any other medium he's written for.

Strangely the whole planetary-conjunction plot seems to prefigure the events of 'The Stolen Earth', which would have been broadcast around the time the final chapters of this were first published. Since IDW would have had to get plot approval from the BBC, and *the author was actually working on the TV series at the same time he was writing this* you'd think that it might have been nipped in the bud.

A quick word about the art: it is variable. Chapter 1 is nicely stylised, even if the Doctor is a weird caricature, and Martha looks as though she's just escaped from some mad scientist's lab. Chapters 2 and 3 are more pleasingly caricatured, and the former features an adorable malevolent Cat God, but later instalments seem more perfunctory as if the artists were getting bored with jumping through the author's hoops. Chapter 4, with the same stiff photo-referenced image of Freema Agyeman cropping up in several panels, has a whiff of the uncanny valley about it. I preferred Martha when she was a hideous galumphing freak-thing.

The final line is most amusing. The Doctor, having relucantly helped out a bunch of god-like beings called the Pantheon, remarks "I have told [them] I never want to see, hear or read about [them] ever again." This is called a Message from Fred. If only Gary Russell hadn't set up an obvious hook for a sequel just a few pages earlier... though IDW don't seem to have taken the bait as I understand that it's never been followed up!

And there is an awful lot of pointless blather about continuity, including an attempt to resolve the contradictions between 'Terror of the Zygons' and 'Timelash'.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Hang on...WHAT contradications between Zygons and Timelash??

has a whiff of the uncanny valley about it.

The what?

I preferred Martha when she was a hideous galumphing freak-thing.

Yeah, wouldn't that have made Who and Torchwood so much more fun?

"Hang on...WHAT contradications between Zygons and Timelash??"

Two different Loch Ness Monsters.

"The what?"

Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers."

Mind you, that could just be Martha in general.

"Hang on...WHAT contradications between Zygons and Timelash??"

Two different Loch Ness Monsters.

Oh, THEM. That wasn't a contradiction - well, not by Who standards. Either there are two monsters in that rather large lake, or the PROPER Nessie just got peckish one day and...no more Borad. Or, of course, the Borad got out of the lake and went to live elsewhere. (Come to think of it...why didn't he try to take over the world or something?) Or he just DROWNED - that might be the simplest explanation.

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers."

Mind you, that could just be Martha in general.

Oh, you're so mean to poor Martha!

I recently read 'Seaside Rendezvous' for the first time. This was a seventh Doctor strip that appeared in the 1991 'Doctor Who Magazine Summer Special' and is interesting for a couple of historical reasons, even if the strip itself isn't particularly remarkable (or good).

First, it's an inauspicious start to Marvel's attempt - fairly successful - in the first half of the 1990s to get comic strips back into their DWM specials. Through the 1980s there were plenty of specials but fiction content was an afterthought, particularly as DWM transitioned from its early comics-orientated form into more of a magazine-with-a-comic-in-it. Most of the comics material was reprinted; the only original strips appeared in the 1981 Winter Special and the 1982 Summer Special but these were backup strips rather than all-new adventures of the Doctor. The 1982 special is particularly weird as the two strips therein feature characters from the previous year's 'Doctor Who and the Free-Fall Warriors' from DWM but no actual connection to the TV series. Even as an 8 year old I remember thinking "what has this to do with Doctor Who?!"

Then between 1991 and 1996 things blossomed. The specials (and the newly-introduced yearbooks) got detailed and serious (perhaps a little staid at times) with detailed articles and at least one original strip. They looked like they were spinoffs from DWM rather than hastily-put-together cash-ins. And the 1991 Summer Special was the start of this trend...

...except that, curiously, it isn't. It looks cheap and nasty compared even to the same year's Winter Special. And, in a reversal of the reprint situation from the decade earlier, 'Seaside Rendezvous' is - apart from the cover (of which more later) and the editorial, the only new content. All of the feature material is reprinted from DWM. Admittedly it's a themed recpackaging of a series of articles about Doctor Who on location, and it's nice to have it all in one place, but for the dedicated collector the strip is the only surprise.

The other main draw of 'Seaside Rendezvous' is that it's a very early piece of Doctor Who fiction by Paul Cornell, published months before 'Timewyrm: Revelation'. This was the second Doctor Who strip he'd written, following 'The Chameleon Factor' in DWM a couple of months earlier. He'd also written a couple of short stories for DWM the previous year, and the 1989 strip 'Stairway to Heaven' was based on one of his ideas, all of which predates the better-known spinoffery of the 1990s.

One curious thing becomes apparent straight away: it's short. Like 'The Chameleon Factor' it's only 5 pages long. The DWM standard at the time was 7 or 8 pages, and later specials would adopt this as a standard. The Doctor doesn't even appear on the first page, an historical prologue set in 1826. What it actually reminds me of is the shorter self-contained DW strips in The Incredible Hulk Presents. DWM had already salvaged one IHP leftover and it's tempting to speculate that this and 'The Chameleon Factor' were at least written for IHP and later pressed into service for DWM strips. One factor suggests not though: 'Seaside Rendezvous' has Ace in it.

(An alternative hypothesis: as I mentioned in an earlier review, DWM was having to cut the costs of the strip massively, slashing the page count and dropping it altogether on a regular basis in 1989-1990. Maybe at some point there was a push to reduce it to a mere 5 pages per issue? Perhaps if Panini gets round to publishing a second 7th Doctor collection we may find out!)

The story's actually a very basic one. An Ogri, dumped into the Irish Sea in 1826, has been worn down to sand and now emerges in the rather unimaginative form of a humanoid sand monster. Whereupon the Doctor defeats it. It's actually an object lesson in how dramatically limited the 7th Doctor 'style' was. The Doctor knows from the start what's going on and the entire story boils down to the trick he plays to defeat the monster, plus an explanation.

The art emphasises the lack of danger. In its published form it feels static, like it's been pebble-dashed onto the page. Regular readers of Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics page will have seen many examples of amateurishly over-inked 80s comic and this has a whiff of them. It's slightly better. The art is at least detailed and of a professional standard and the inking itself is not really the problem: there's a terrible lack of urgency or dynamism to the art. Scenes such as the monster attack, firemen putting out a seafront blaze, and holiday-makers fleeing the beach all feel very listless and unhurried. In a story as a simple and undramatic as this that's fatal.

Similarly things seem to happen in isolation. Only Ace seems to notice the burning building (which is there for minor plot convenience anyway). There are no characters apart from the Doctor and Ace themselves, which gives the impression of everyone else being bystanders who don't exist when they're not on-panel. While some of the problems are clearly the result of art failing to match the scale of the script, this at least is a failing of the writer who - uncharacteristically - isn't able to imbue any kind of human connection to the story.

Two or three more pages might have made a difference, and I also feel that a more confident Cornell might have been able to do something more interesting with the Ogri-as-sand-monster idea than we see here. Like Alan Moore's Gallifrey trilogy it's hard to believe, on the evidence presented here, that the author will be going places.

Mention needs to be made of the cover, which isn't by the strip's art team of Frank & Baskerville but by the much more celebrated Lee Sullivan, already considered DWM's star artist in this period. Shame it's such a horrible picture. It looks like it belongs on a special aimed at a much younger audience. Kids who bought this on the basis of the comedy Doctor putting his feet up on K9 will surely have been horribly disappointed by the pages of dull text and the humourless and unadventurous strip therein. If they expected strips featuring Daleks, Haemovores and Sea Devils they had grounds to sue. (Also, if you look in the background, you can see the Nucleus of the Swarm - in its original "big sack with a claw" form rather than the better known "giant prawn" version - for no readily apparent reason.) Sullivan even manages to make Ace look rubbish in a swimsuit. Gah!

Any nits? Just a couple (with spoilers!) The Ogri is defeated by being reduced to cement and then used to build a brick wall. Fine, but it's already survived for around 150 years in eroded form but is still hungry and active. Doesn't this mean that the wall itself will become a horrible death-trap for anyone who touches it?

And also: where does this wall come from. It looks like its just randomly assembled in the street somewhere. It might possibly be on a pre-existing building site, but if so where all the workers? What do all the surveyors and union reps have to say about all these firemen and the man in the stupid jumper coming along to tamper with their site? That cement can't be industry-standard!

Like Alan Moore's Gallifrey trilogy it's hard to believe, on the evidence presented here, that the author will be going places.

Well, Alan Moore DIDN'T go places.

Haven't noticed HIM writing a single Who book/audio/episode.

There may be an official Doctor Who/Star Trek the Next Generation crossover: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/02/10/scoop-doctor-who-star-trek-official-crossover/

I love Doctor Who, and I love Star Trek, but I'm not sure how the two can be brought together. It would be like mixing fish fingers and custard.

Oh, wait...

"Well, Alan Moore DIDN'T go places.

"Haven't noticed HIM writing a single Who book/audio/episode."

That's because they keep asking him and he keeps turning them down.

***

Anyway, a few months ago I reviewed IDW's first Doctor Who miniseries, 'Agent Provocateur' on here. Lately I've come into possession of the second 'The Forgotten', which followed immediately after.

I didn't have much nice to say about 'Agent Provocateur', particularly not about the writing. Urban legend has it that AP wasn't supposed to be a self-contained miniseries but the start of a regular run, but that when Gary Russell's horribly substandard scripts showed up they forced a major rethink on IDW's part and they decided to start again from scratch.

Whether this is at all true or not, 'The Forgotten' does look a bit like a reboot. Russell is out, and Tony Lee is in, as he will be for most IDW Doctor Who comics from this point on. His previous form was a forgettable 3-parter from DWM in 2006, plus a few non-Who things, some of them a bit notorious (I'd explain all about "poogate" but I'm eating while I'm writing and don't want to have to think about it.)

This time round it does feel like it was conceived as a 6-issue run from the start and there's a definite sense of reboot about it, plus a sense that its being designed to introduce new readers to the series. Unfortunately, it takes the same approach to introductions as did the TVM: the idea that newcomers need to be infodumped everything, the entire 40+ years of Doctor Who backstory in one brutal lump.

What we have is effectively a clip show in comics form. The tenth Doctor is faced with a vague menace in a museum dedicated to his past lives and spends the first 5 issues flashing back to previously unseen adventures, one for each of his nine prior incarnations. This itself isn't a bad idea but it is a very limiting one, and it doesn't help that all of the flashbacks are very slight.

The best of these mini-stories is arguably the sixth Doctor one, a courtroom story in which he has to defend Peri against a charge of murder, one that she believes she's actually committed. The worst is the fourth Doctor/Romana strip, which is - in a sign of how characteristically tired and derivative of the parent show 'The Forgotten' is - set in Paris. Apart from that it makes no sense whatsoever but involves an evil time travelling mime artist. This makes it sound better than it is.

On the whole though these are throwaway and inconsequential, seemingly designed mainly to shoehorn as many companions and TV references as possible, even if the companions don't really resemble the TV versions at all: Ian and Barbara as wisecracking time tourists might be the worst offender, and it's very hard not to read Jo's dialogue in Liz's voice. The first and second Doctor flashbacks are also "coloured" entirely in black, white and greys for no readily apparent reason. True, DWM's marvellous 'Death to the Doctor!' (published a few months before this) played a similar trick but there it's part of a consciously witty parody/pastiche. Here it feels like IDW are slavishly reproducing the conditions of the TV series (also seen in the sequence with the Judoon, only one of whom bothers to take his hat off despite the absence of TV's budgetary restrictions). It's not bad as such, just unimaginative and weightless. Nothing here feels like much is at stake.

Sadly this extends to the frame story as well, which oddly prefigures 'Amy's Choice'. Scenes of the Doctor's flashbacks and musings over what's going on are punctuated by random attacks by old monsters. The villain initially appears to be an old-style beardie version of the Master - a curious decision given that this came out a whole year after 'Last of the Time Lords'. Later there's a welcome spark of ingenuity when it seems that he's actually the Oddbod Jr version of the tenth Doctor, as seen in 'Journey's End', but sadly this idea is too discarded and the whole thing ends in a pointless runaround.

The art is... unhelpful. 'The Forgotten' eschews the caricatures of 'Agent Provocateur' but one the whole the likenesses are very poor. Pia Guerra, something of a big name in comics, gives us an effective tenth Doctor and Martha but none of her other Doctors/companions are right. Other artists crop up in later chapters and the art deteriorates badly. Voc Robots have never looked as camp as they do here (partner one with a clockwork robot from 'The Girl in the Fireplace' and you've got what look like a pair of septugenarian transvestites at a retro glam rock party). There's a two page spread in the final chapter when all ten Doctors appear together and is clearly supposed to be the money shot of the issue. Unfortunately it's horrible, and would still be horrible if it didn't make them look as if they're uniformly ten feet tall. Not since 'Marvel Premiere' depicted the first Doctor as bald and hulking has a Doctor Who group shot looked so utterly wrong.

Ultimately it's nowhere near as bad as 'Agent Provocateur' but at least that level of stunning awfulness sticks in the mind. The big problem with 'The Forgotten' is that it's just not very memorable.

And why is there a note on the back saying "not intended for children under 13"?

There may be an official Doctor Who/Star Trek the Next Generation crossover

Luckily I don't give a •••• what the stupid comics do.

Or I'd be SEVERELY DISPLEASED, about now.

"Haven't noticed HIM writing a single Who book/audio/episode."

That's because they keep asking [Alan Moore] and he keeps turning them down.

A likely story.

Urban legend has it that AP wasn't supposed to be a self-contained miniseries but the start of a regular run, but that when Gary Russell's horribly substandard scripts showed up they forced a major rethink on IDW's part and they decided to start again from scratch.

I find that hard to believe. How could even Gary Russell produce a horribly substandard COMIC? I mean, how could you TELL? They're ALL horribly substandard.

(Well, OK, there's The Lodger and the Donna-saying-goodbye one, and the villains-killing-each-other one...anyone else getting the impression that the only good comic is a one-off one a few pages long...?)

Unfortunately, it takes the same approach to introductions as did the TVM: the idea that newcomers need to be infodumped everything, the entire 40+ years of Doctor Who backstory in one brutal lump.

Actually I...um...rather like the thought of a brutal lump of Who backstory.

Not since 'Marvel Premiere' depicted the first Doctor as bald and hulking has a Doctor Who group shot looked so utterly wrong.

Bald? Bald? BALD?!

The big problem with 'The Forgotten' is that it's just not very memorable.



And why is there a note on the back saying "not intended for children under 13"?

Cos by the sound of it they'd be even more traumatised than you by this rubbish?

"Bald? Bald? BALD?!"

I fear so. This was 1980 before any Hartnell stories had been broadcast in the US, though surely they'd have better photoreference. Alternatively, maybe it was a mistake in inking.

The modern offender can be seen in all its horror here: http://www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/tenth_doctor_us.html#Forgotten

***

More IDW. Following the two miniseries, they published 6 one-off Doctor Who comics each containing a self-contained 24 page story by a different writer/artist team. I recently caught up with 'Through Time and Space', which collects them in a single volume.

IDW's first ongoing comic series was launched while these issues were still being published, with 'The Forgotten's Tony Lee as regular writer. Most of IDW's subsequent 'Doctor Who' strips have been by Lee so 'Through Time and Space' is an interesting look at the variety of writers that might have been employed instead (though Lee is also in there, and its tempting - though probably entirely wrong - to see these as a series of try-outs for a regular writer!)

There are some interesting credits here. 'Cold-Blooded War!' is of particular note as it's a Marvel creators reunion with Adrian Salmon providing art to a script by former DWM strip editor Richard Starkings from a story by Gary Russell.

Um, right.

This doesn't bode terribly well. Salmon - who is curiously unlisted on the back, even though all the other artists are (as is Russell) - is a distinctive black and white artist whose work is not well-served by colour. Starkings presided over the DWM strip in it's 'A Cold Day in Hell!' nadir years (see my review above), for which he was not entirely to blame even though he did co-write one of the worst of all DWM stories, 'Time & Tide'.

And I've slagged off Gary Russell enough already, so I'll stick to pointing out that the story amounts to the Doctor getting captured and escaping, with the remaining 21 pages taken up by Donna rehashing all those "a middle-aged male scriptwriter explains feminism" speeches that Sarah gave to the court of Queen Thalira, only this time the queen's a Draconian. The unnecessary presence of Ice Warriors, Ajudicators and Alpha Centauri - and one recurring and embarrassing nit (see below) - point to another Gary Russell continuity overload, though even this is mild compared to Tony Lee's 'The Time Machination', which ropes in references to Timelash, Ghost Light and Magnus Greel in a story featuring Evil Victorian Torchwood and ending with a two page reprise of the TARDIS's arrival in The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

The other writers are all making their Who scriptwriting debuts though there are some familiar names here. Charlie Kirchoff - IDW's celebrated colourist - writes the final story, 'Black Death White Life'. John Ostrander, author of the abortive 1980s stage production 'The Inheritors of Time' and a long-promised, never-produced Big Finish, finally breaks his Doctor Who duck with 'Autopia'. And the opening story, 'The Whispering Gallery', is co-written by Leah Moore, Alan's daughter, which must count as some sort of first.

Perhaps because it's a series of different stories with different tones, the wildly varying and often caricatured art styles is quite effective. Kelly Yates, whose work in 'The Forgotten' is not impressive, does rather better with 'Autopia', although it might have worked better still if Ostrander's script had even a trace of humour too it (the story doesn't bear comparison to DWM's similar 'The Autonomy Bug'). Ben Templesmith's idiosyncratic quasi-photoshopped work is apparently unpopular with Doctor Who fans who prefer more conventional "realism" in their art, but perfectly fits the tone of the best story in the collection.

The stories themselves are all quite slight, and 'Black Death White Life' goes off the rails when it tries to scale up to a cosmic level. Most remind me of DWM's occasional one-off scripts and I suspect that they could have worked equally well condensed to 8 pages. 'Black Death White Life' is reminiscent at times of the 1988 DWM one-off 'Culture Shock', while 'Room with a Deja Vu' is a more sophisticated take on TV Comic's 'Time in Reverse' from 1965!

(Though in one sense 'Time in Reverse' captures the central conceit of both strips - creatures for whom time is running backwards - rather better by at least having the dialogue run backwards, rather than having the alien speak "positive" sentences in "negative" order.)

The exception is 'Cold Blooded War', which feels like it was supposed to be part one of a longer story and has had to be tweaked to get it into this state. The generally embarrassing attempt to map real world sectarian conflict onto the Star Trek-thin politics of the Draconian court is bad enough but the whole thing is resolved by the accidental but violent death of a child shocking all the warring parties to their senses. Because that's how it works in real life.

Martha turns up in a couple of the stories, and seems quite well-versed with the bubonic plague but still needs the Doctor to explain who all these people in bird-masks and robes are (which is just about plausible if you squint). Kirchoff also deserves credit for basing a story round a magic alien healer in 1669 yet not having a single cry of "Burn the witch!" Meanwhile Donna is not keen on burqas and once had a cat named Sam; these facts may or may not be related.

Nit-wise: well, the dating of 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' has never been particularly clear, but 1889 is plausible so H.G. Wells (born 1866) should probably not look quite so middle-aged but we can perhaps chalk this one up to Paul Grist's stylised art. Similarly the idea that he wrote 'The Time Machine' not because of his enthusiasm for Darwin, Marx and bicycling but because he kept meeting these annoying blokes in stupid clothes is the UK equivalent of all those American films where white people go back in time to invent rock n roll... but it's not actually a nit. But it's about thirty years too early for him to be describing Evil Victorian Torchwood as (accurately enough) "fascists".

Oh, that nit in 'Cold Blooded War'? Draconian women are described as having "curves". Over a decade after 'The Scales of Injustice' and he still hasn't worked out what the USP of mammals is.

John Ostrander
Author of (amongst other comics) Grimjack, Suicide Squad, & The Spectre?

Looks like SOMEONE (ie Emily) will have to become a trekkie for THIS!!!

This should be awesome!

The Borg and the Cybermen together? Egad! That's the stuff nightmares are made of.

One thing I would like to see though is how the Doctor and Q would get along.

The Doctor would probably ask why he doesn't have a bird on his head. ;-)

The Borg? Ugg! Okay I can see why someone would want to pair them up given the similarities, but then one could just have the Klingon & Ogrons team up (which would probably mean the Daleks would be involved. *sigh*)

Borg: We are the Borg! You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Dalek : EX-TER-MI-NA-TE!

11th Doctor: Ah! A Borg! I love a Borg!

But Francois, unlike the Cybermen, the Borg would adapt after the first 2 or 3 shots & the Daleks would have to try something else or be assimilated.

And frankly the Borg are powerful enough, adding RTG's Uber-Daleks to the equation... ugg!

And I've slagged off Gary Russell enough already

I'm not convinced there's such a thing as slagging off Gary Russell enough...

Draconian women are described as having "curves". Over a decade after 'The Scales of Injustice' and he still hasn't worked out what the USP of mammals is.

Though to be fair, reptiles DO rather unexpectedly have curves. Just see Hungry Earth/Cold Blood.

Looks like SOMEONE (ie Emily) will have to become a trekkie for THIS!!!

The HELL I will!

I'll just ignore it like I try to ignore every other Who comic.

(Sure, my fanatical completism will ensure that I'll crack ONE day and succumb to the comic menace, but I'm kinda hoping civilisation will collapse first.)

Issue 2 of the lovely fanzine 'Vworp! Vworp!' has a new (well, old) Star Tigers strip, 'The World of the War-King', based on an unused Steve Moore script from the early 1980s and illustrated by DWM's own Martin Geraghty. It's a bit of an oddity, given that at this stage Moore was aiming to de-link the series from Doctor Who as far as possible (Draconian Prince Salander is killed off after just one line of dialogue and Moore admits that Hama the Ice Warrior would have been next for the chop), and also because he can't remember where else he was going with it and so big revelations like the identity of the War-King are never going to be followed up.

It also depends on how tolerant you are of Abslom Daak, who has his own following (and not terribly successful spinoff record, discussed at length here), but to me he's always felt like he's strayed in from the lower rent band of '2000AD' or 'Warrior'. I am in agreement with Moore that killing off his supporting cast in 'Nemesis of the Daleks' was a big mistake though, a tone shared by the publication (and presumably by Paul Cornell and John Freeman who retconned them back to life in 'Emperor of the Daleks!') and thus setting up the possibility that next issue's interview with John Tomlinson is going to be one long j'accuse!

There's also a very lovely new strip about Mrs Wibbsey by Paul Magrs and Bret M Herholz. And a whole lot of interviews with ex-DWM employees all of whom have horror stories about JN-T to share...

It's hard to pick nits in 'Planet of the Rain Gods', given that it's only three pages long and basically a capture/escape scene, but here goes... doesn't it completely contradict the opening scenes of 'The Doctor's Wife'?!

But it is notable as the first Who strip by Neil Gaiman (who hardly writes comics at all these days) and Mark Buckingham (who has done IDW covers though, for the comics where Smith's Doctor is travelling with Kevin the Talking Dinosaur and that BANG you just heard is Emily's head exploding).

Having said that, Gaiman did co-plot, co-edit and co-write the 1991 Comic Relief Comic, which has a two-page bit where all seven Doctors, various companions and monsters* encounter Dan Dare and the Mekon. One of the other co-plotters was Richard Curtis. It's a small world.

(* Though the Daleks are kept off-panel, presumably because Terry Nation was unpersuaded by cries of "but it's for charity!")

the comics where Smith's Doctor is travelling with Kevin the Talking Dinosaur and that BANG you just heard is Emily's head exploding).

Kevin. The. Talking. Dinosaur.

Kevin. The - oooh! *Forestalls head explosion by gleefully adding Kevin the T****** D******* to the list of abominations at the top of the page*

(* Though the Daleks are kept off-panel, presumably because Terry Nation was unpersuaded by cries of "but it's for charity!")

USUALLY the Terry Nation Estate's cries of 'But we have to protect the Daleks!' are a blatantly obvious ploy to wring an absolute fortune out of the BBC for use of the metal meanies, but in THIS case I'm perfectly prepared to believe they were genuinely concerned with what appearing in a godawful comic strip would do to the Daleks' reputation.

Kitten - Kevin the Talking Dinosaur
Sayyyyyy, isn't one of our posters named Kevin? You don't think...? ;-)

Guess this belongs here. At the Comics Should Be Good blog one of the bloggers, Greg Burgas, takes first pages of comics & analyzes them & he analyzed the first page of Doctor Who Magazine #139 on April 2nd.

I'm being totally unfair to Kevin, who isn't a Talking Dinosaur at all but a dinosaur-shaped robot. That can talk. (Kroton the Happy Cybermen is rarely happy btw, though he is a Cyberman.)

"USUALLY the Terry Nation Estate's cries of 'But we have to protect the Daleks!' are a blatantly obvious ploy to wring an absolute fortune out of the BBC for use of the metal meanies, but in THIS case I'm perfectly prepared to believe they were genuinely concerned with what appearing in a godawful comic strip would do to the Daleks' reputation."

They are in it, or at least there is something that keeps saying "Exterminate!" (and later "Donate! Donate!") off-panel.

"Guess this belongs here. At the Comics Should Be Good blog one of the bloggers, Greg Burgas, takes first pages of comics & analyzes them & he analyzed the first page of Doctor Who Magazine #139 on April 2nd."

Despite his assumption, and as the commentators have pointed out on the page itself, 'Culture Shock' was originally published in black-and-white.

Gee, and I thought only my students called me that...

Get ready for the rumble of the Decade - it's MIRANDA vs. FACTION PARADOX!

Last decade that is... Would you believe it's almost 10 years since unofficial Doctor Who spinoffery attempted its breakout from the field of books and audio into the field of comics? Actually the timing is surely significant, as both 'Miranda' (from British indie newcomer Comeuppance Comics) and 'Faction Paradox' (from American funnybook goliath Image Comics) shrivelled up and died at the same time: Autumn 2003, around the time that it was announced that Doctor Who was definitely, positively coming back to TV. So, apart from a brief online comic based on Big Finish's Forge characters in 2005/6, these comics occupy a unique place on the periphery of the Doctor Who canon. They're also in an unfamiliar format.

Prior to IDW's arrival on the scene in 2007, American comicbook-format Doctor Who comics were rare and were exclusively reprint titles. Doctor Who in comics had always been in "strips", never in "books". Even Doctor Who Weekly maintained the style of a traditional British anthology comic, even if Tom's likeness was pressed into service to introduce the "Doctorless" stories.

But 'Miranda' and 'Faction Paradox' were written by and for a generation who'd grown up with the US format as the norm, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they gravitated towards it (though obviously 'Faction Paradox' was originated in America via an American company so it was a natural decision). Both were nominally bi-monthly. Both were guaranteed a run of at least six issues. 'Faction Paradox' managed two; 'Miranda' eaked out three. The final issue of the latter has an advert on the book announcing: "Issue four available at the end of July". Since said issue only appeared in the autumn of 2003, this could be viewed sceptically. 'Miranda' appears to have been the only thing Comeuppance ever published.

They also appear to be rare professional comics works by fans-turned-writer. Lance Parkin, who created Miranda - the Doctor's adopted daughter - for his 2001 novel 'Father Time', appears to have done no other pro comics work. Lawrence Miles had a 3 page 'Tharg's Time Twister' in 2000AD in 1991. There is an element of running-before-they-can-walk to both comics, though it manifests in different ways.

'Miranda' is baggy. Each issue has 20 pages of strip (black and white except for a colour centre-spread) but enough material for less than half. In fact I can imagine it running as a serial in 2000AD, and covering the same ground rather more efficiently in three 5-page chunks.

The story is a terribly generic runaround in a generically terrible space opera setting. We're not assumed to have any knowledge of 'Father Time' (and this story seems to replace the little-loved third and final section of that book rather than continuing from it) but we're barely introduced to Miranda as a character at all. She's defined entirely by her decision to spend the entire story dressed in her old school uniform (and this isn't the only bit of tediously adolescent perving in the story, which starts with her losing her virginity on the very first page!)

Yet most of the story focuses on Miranda, leaving little room for anyone else. There's a bargain basement Ming villain (and it takes Miranda about 40 pages to decide to run away from him even though he looks like he ties women to railway tracks for a living and can't wait to grow a moustache so he can wax it villainously), a plot device maid in a Dalek dress, and a Flash Gordon type who gets killed off as soon as he appears.

It's relentlessly facile and this applies as much to the space opera background as the foreground. We're told everything and shown nothing. Issue 1 in particular feels like reading through a catalogue of forthcoming thrills (and the centrespread is practically an advert for 'Silver', another EDA spinoff character turned comic book that didn't happen after 'Miranda' tanked). There's some nice but generic robot designs from Allan Bednar but that's it. Bednar's art isn't strong enough to salvage the narrative, and while issue 3 has some smoother work from Miguel Montenegro it's still very anonymous.

As a weekly serial in an anthology comic this would have been worthwhile, and perhaps might have provided writer and artist with a decent learning curve. (A weekly anthology would probably have been beyond Comeuppance's means, but a monthly or bi-monthly might have stood a chance.)

'Faction Paradox's problems are rather more difficult to quantify. It only lasted two issues, but unlike 'Miranda' this can hardly be attributed to the uncertainties of indie publishing. Image was (and remains) one of the big names of American comic book publishing and even if sales were poor it shouldn't have spelled instant cancellation.

The first two issues include 32 pages of comic strip, plus various text pieces by Lawrence Miles that don't feel as an integral to the story as they should do (even though some plot information is only alluded to there). It doesn't help that the prose is in the style of 'The Adventuress of Henrietta Street', but with the archness turned up to 11.

The strip itself is rather busier than 'Miranda' manages to be in twice as many pages, but it's not terribly clear what's going on or why it's significant. Nor is Faction Paradox particularly well introduced as a concept, and in fact the story feels at times like it's set in the universe of 'The Adventuress of Henrietta Street' with the Faction as mere interlopers. For regular readers of the EDAs and Lawrence's books in particular there's a lot of substance... for newcomers it must seem baffling and slow.

It takes a certain amount of joyful perversity to launch a big new American comics series with a story set entirely in the court of King George III and it almost works but for three things.

First, Lawrence's inexperience as a comics writer: it feels like he's not taking risks with structure and pacing, and expects readers to be contented with the occasional money shot (Mammoths! Bald native women!) while the plot simmers away. Fine for a book, not so much for something that comes out in 16-page chunks every two months. Second, Jim Calafiore's art is never more than adequate to the task. There's no sense of immersion or engagement with this world (imagine what someone like Jill Thompson could do with it).

Third, it's just too short. The 32 pages we have already make for a nice chunk but possibly shouldn't have been spread over 2 issues. A double-sized Issue 1 might have been nice. Better still, they should have ditched the US format altogether and gone for European-style albums instead. These issues feel like chapters of a larger work, that should have been accessible in one go - or at least in bigger pieces.

But we'll never know for sure. The first issue includes a letter from Lawrence Miles that, he says, will be published in both the first and last issue of 'Faction Paradox'. In this he was out by exactly one issue, sadly.

Faction spinoffery has continued in other media but no one's taken up the chance to continue its comic incarnation. Miranda was revamped without the science fiction elements and is now a very successful sitcom on BBC2.

So, apart from a brief online comic based on Big Finish's Forge characters in 2005/6

They DIDN'T.

Bloody Forge, it's as bad as the Selachians at getting into every conceivable media (except the Real Thing) despite just not being very good.

(and this story seems to replace the little-loved third and final section of that book rather than continuing from it)

Yes! I'm sure it contradicted Father Time even though I can't exactly remember how...

...Hang on, what d'you MEAN, little-loved??

She's defined entirely by her decision to spend the entire story dressed in her old school uniform (and this isn't the only bit of tediously adolescent perving in the story, which starts with her losing her virginity on the very first page!)

Ah yes, THAT was what I found unconvincing. Father Time implied she'd been having sex for a few years before she got whisked off into space. Also, she certainly hadn't been in school for a few years.

(and the centrespread is practically an advert for 'Silver', another EDA spinoff character turned comic book that didn't happen after 'Miranda' tanked)

You're joking. Miranda was the Doctor's daughter and Father Time was an all-time classic. Silver and Hope...not so much.

Miranda was revamped without the science fiction elements and is now a very successful sitcom on BBC2.

It is...?

"They DIDN'T."

They did. I've never worked up the nerve to check if they're still available.

"Hang on, what d'you MEAN, little-loved??"

Almost all the reviews for 'Father Time' raved about the first two sections then said that the final part was a let-down.

"Ah yes, THAT was what I found unconvincing. Father Time implied she'd been having sex for a few years before she got whisked off into space. Also, she certainly hadn't been in school for a few years."

The comic states its her old school uniform, which might be taken to imply that she hasn't been to school for a while. Or it might be taken as a sign that someone realised that making Miranda actually school age might get everyone involved into trouble.

"You're joking."

Tragically not.

"Miranda was revamped without the science fiction elements and is now a very successful sitcom on BBC2.

"It is...?"

Well, er, there is a BBC2 sitcom called 'Miranda' but it bears no resemblance to the comic 'Miranda'. For one thing, it's popular.

On an unrelated note, the second Doctor has a single panel cameo in last year's 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century - 1969', the first time (to my knowledge) that Doctor Who has ever been illustrated by the mighty Kevin O'Neill.

The Karkus is mentioned on the same page. Fortunately neither of them hang around long enough to be sexually assaulted by Lord Voldemort.

Almost all the reviews for 'Father Time' raved about the first two sections then said that the final part was a let-down.

It wasn't quite as brilliant, true, but on the other hand at least it didn't mention the Doctor's ponytail...

The comic states its her old school uniform, which might be taken to imply that she hasn't been to school for a while. Or it might be taken as a sign that someone realised that making Miranda actually school age might get everyone involved into trouble.

Wimps. Adventuress had THE DOCTOR trying to MARRY a THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD.

The Karkus is mentioned on the same page. Fortunately neither of them hang around long enough to be sexually assaulted by Lord Voldemort.

*Backing slowly away* Yeah...um...that is...lucky.

"It wasn't quite as brilliant, true, but on the other hand at least it didn't mention the Doctor's ponytail..."

Which was presumably as genuine and luxuriant as the rest of the 8th Doctor's hair.

"Wimps. Adventuress had THE DOCTOR trying to MARRY a THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD."

It was a purely symbolic alchemical marriage.

"*Backing slowly away* Yeah...um...that is...lucky."

There's also an LSD-induced hallucinatory Dalek!

Ponytails are cool

Which was presumably as genuine and luxuriant as the rest of the 8th Doctor's hair.

SOME people obviously need PSYCHIATRIC HELP to cope with the fact that Eight regenerated with those lovely locks.

It was a purely symbolic alchemical marriage.

Yeah, that's what I thought...AT THE TIME. My views on the Doctor's sexuality (or lack thereof) have been sadly forced to go through a certain amount of revision in the last few years, for some reason...

Ponytails are cool

Even MATT never tried claiming THAT.

"Even MATT never tried claiming THAT."

The eleventh Doctor's hair is all natural. He is one of the many Doctors who can proudly and honestly make that claim.

The beard too?

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2012/05/16/star-trek-and-doctor-who-picard-and-time-lord-vs-cyberborg/#/0

Ah, good! Only a few more months to wait.

BURN THE BLASPHEMERS!

Issue 1 has sold out of its first printing*, which is plenty of paper with which to burn them.

* Of 22,800 copies, which actually sounds quite teeny and probably only a fraction of DWM's sales, let alone the days when a single American comic could shift millons of copies...

And 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century - 2009' also has Doctor cameos as both Hartnell and Smith turn up for a two panel appearance (on the same page as Captain Jack and the 'Ashes to Ashes' people). There are references to UNIT and Torchwood elsewhere. Yay.

So what's the copyright position? They can get away with a figure or two without paying/getting sued?

Usually.

The only time I ever heard of a lawsuit over a cameo was when an artist put Godzilla on the cover of an issue of Amazing Spider-Man.

Toho felt that that was using their character to help sell copies of the comic, IIRC.

It's fair use in this instance.

On the other hand, the world's most widely-read living author definitely has grounds to sue.

A comic fanzine that might have a few articles of interest to Who fans.

So it turns out that Russell T. Davies pitched a Doctor Who graphic novel to the BBC and was rejected.

Well, he's no Justin Richards is he...?

WHAT! When?

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/10/28/bbc-turned-down-a-russell-t-davies-doctor-who-graphic-novel-for-the-fiftieth-anniversary/

[Breaks out the popcorn, awaiting the hilarious hijinks that will surely ensue at the Beeb.]

bugger the Beeb- I'm looking forward to the rant Emily is about to go on....

I'm not gonna bother going on a rant! It's only a COMIC! It's not like He asked to write our multi-Doctor Fiftieth Anniversary story or anything...Still, it's a BIT of a shame, those cartoons He drew in Writer's Tale were ADORABLE.

I just read my first Who graphic novel. What got me hooked was that The Forgotten was available in a Kindle edition, although not for us b&w Kindle users. Still I read the free sample and decided to order the paper edition.

Unfortunately, it's pure fan wank with more continuity references than the entire JNT era. You know you're in trouble when the plot, such as it is, borrows heavily from The Five Doctors (a mysterious enemy, with face hidden to the readers until the climax, is stealing the Doctor's past incarnations with the goal of extending his own life) and The Eight Doctors (the Doctor must visit past adventures to regain his memories of that incarnations).

The individual stories of each previous incarnation are not only short and undeveloped but also cliche--so much so that I expected that to become a plot point which it never did. We get Hartnel, Susan, Ian and Barbara emerging from a tomb in a historical setting, the second Doctor in a base-under-siege story, the third Doctor and UNIT fighting an alien invasion, the fourth Doctor and second Romana in Paris battling a minotaur, the fifth Doctor playing cricket, the sixth in a courtroom scene, the seventh in a warzone, the eighth imprisoned for days on end,
and the ninth, um, I forgot already. The dialogue is just as cliche, to the point where you could practically piece an audio recording from existing episodes. We get giddy aunts, five rounds rapid, great balls of fire, jelly babies, fantastics, etc. We also get Voords, clockwork robots, Sandminer robots, etc, cameos (outside of their mini-adventures) from Susan, Steven, Kamelion--it just never ends.

Non-canonical fank wank at best.

With Doctor Who Adventures reaching 300 issues this surely means that John Ross is the most prolific Who comic strip artist ever. With a 4/5-page strip every week he must be well over a thousand pages even before you factor in his work in other publications. Even John Canning - who illustrated almost every Doctor Who strip from 1966-1971 and then from 1975-1978 - can't match that.

Fans of my age grew up thinking that a Doctor Who comic should naturally look like it was illustrated either by Dave Gibbons or John Ridgway. But there must now be a whole new audience who can't cope with anything that doesn't look like Ross's work...

Well, at least when...whatshisface...does a comic strip, you know what Doctor it's supposed to be.

Admittedly the whole 'bow tie' thing helps IMMENSELY.

Hmmm. I've done some number crunching - it's not exact, because I don't have all the figures but Ross definitely seems to be well in the lead with around 1,500 pages to his belt.

Perhaps surprisingly, I estimate Martin Geraghty has done over 1,000 pages. John Canning's next, then Mike Collins. Gerry Haylock, Dave Gibbons, John Ridgway, Lee Sullivan and Matthew Dow Smith all seem to be over 300 pages each, though I've cheated with Sullivan slightly by including each episode of the 1996/7 Radio Times strip as 1 page.

This isn't including inkers btw. I imagine David Roach probably has quite a high score on that basis though he's only ever pencilled one strip. (Roach is an excellent artist in his own right, and his inks are surely a contributing factor to the high reputations enjoyed by Geraghty and Collins.)

Just for the record, my favourite Who artists are Mike McMahon and Arthur Ranson, who clock in at 20 and 21 pages respectively. Sometimes quality beats quantity!

Yeah, I'd like to vote for whoever-did-the-fewest-comics too, please...

That would probably be either Geoff Jones (who did the advertising strip 'Dr Who and the Turgids') or the unknown illustrator of the Genesis of the Daleks soundtrack advert. These are probably the shortest strips by one-time only Who comics artists.

(The Doctor Who Give-a-Show Projector slides are shorter individually but there are 16 of the things and they all seem to be by the same artist...)

Exciting breaking news on the interwebs is that a single page of a previously unseen Doctor Who strip appeared in 'The Art of Brian Bolland' in 2006. Bolland's done no other Who work, which might make him the least prolific conventionally-published-comic artist for the series...

I'm working my way through Grant Morrison's 'Supergods', which is an interesting mix of insight and dumb (particularly the suggestion that Kafka missed a trick by not having Gregor Samsa use his newfound insect-powers to fight crime).

Though he mentions his love of Doctor Who there's not much about his comics work (nor his Telos novella that was close to contract when the Beeb pulled the plug). However, DWM editor Sheila Cranna is described as a "risk-taking woman with taste". I'm not sure that this is how I'd characterise her run on the magazine myself, but it's nice that she gets a shout-out.

I don't remember ANY era of DWM being in particularly good taste (risk-taking on the other hand...yeah, they were risking their LIVES constantly telling me how LUCKY we were to have all these lovely books and audios...). When was her reign?

1985-1988.

Reading the notes to 'The Crimson Hand', I'm a bit disappointed to find that amoral green-skinned reptilian companion/criminal Majenta Pryce (who at one point redesigns the universe in her own image) is not at all an homage to amoral green-skinned reptilian nun/criminal Tyranny Rex (who at one point redesigns the universe in her own image) from 2000AD. Or if she is then they don't mention her, which is a bit of an omission in a series of articles that otherwise mentions many nods to other comic strip nonsenses. (Shamefully the artists were ordered to tone down the homage to Will Eisner in 'The Deep Hereafter', allegedly because DWM readers wouldn't "get" it! Tch!)

I occasionally wonder why Tyranny's creator John Smith has never been given a crack at writing the Who strip, given how peppered with references to the series his work is (and he is also well-named for the job). Then I recall that his typical body horror shtick makes Cronenberg look like Niles Crane, and stop wondering.

Shamefully the artists were ordered to tone down the homage to Will Eisner in 'The Deep Hereafter', allegedly because DWM readers wouldn't "get" it!
Yee, gods and little fishies!

Why did they think the readers needed to 'get' the homage?

True homages are intended to be recognized (unlike swipes ;-), but if the story works without recognizing the homage what's the problem?

That being said, I think the one Doctor who would work really well in an Eisner/Spirit homage would the Second Doctor. He already has the rumpled suit. ;-)

Following the recent kerfuffle over how few women have written for the new series, I thought I'd sit down and work out how many female writers there've been on the Doctor Who comic.

Now, granted there are quite a few comics where the writer is completely unknown, particularly the annuals put out by World Distributors from the 60s to the 80s (and World did employ female writers of the Who annuals - Mae Broadley, Brenda Apsley and Leslie Scott among them). But they're mainly concentrated in the pre-Marvel era, which you'd expect to be male dominated.

Even so, it's a bit of a shock to realise that the first Doctor Who comic to be definitely written by a woman was Kate Orman's 'Change of Mind' in DWM starting in 1994, almost exactly 30 years after the first Who strip was published!

Orman never returned to the strip. Jacqueline Rayner did one for Doctor Who Adventures, Leah Moore co-wrote a one-off for IDW and Carole Barrowman wrote a Torchwood strip - but the best hit-rate is for Doctor Who: Battles in Time, which has a handful of strips by editor Claire Lister. And unless you count the "Writers' Comics" on the BBC website (which has Rayner again and a couple of others) - that seems to be it.

Percentage-wise I don't this isn't much better or much worse than the TV series but it's still slightly surprising to me. I thought there'd be more.

A couple of years ago, I reviewed Panini's first seventh Doctor comics collection 'A Cold Day in Hell!' and expressed the opinion that its contents represented the nadir of the DWM strip. The newly-published second volume, 'Nemesis of the Kil-Mechs' (whoops! I mean 'Nemesis of the Daleks'), doesn't challenge this impression but its still a curious ragbag of material, and the problem here is the selection process in 2013 rather than anything that went on at Marvel UK in 1989/90.

'Nemesis of the Daleks' is a book in three parts. The first part assembles the DWM strips from the end of 1989 and start of 1990 when the comic finally began to pull itself of the nose-dive in quality that had begun two years earlier.

Two serials in particular were lauded at the time: 'Nemesis of the Daleks' saw the title monsters first proper comics appearance for almost a decade, and also marked the first time that the Doctor crossed paths with Abslom Daak, the chainsword-wielding Dalek Killer who had appeared in various backup strips in Doctor Who Weekly (and Monthly) back in 1980. This was lavished with reader praise (especially for Lee Sullivan's art, which is a taste I've never acquired though he is clearly doing better than most Who strip illustrators of this period) and led to a flurry of interest in Daak that culminated in the publication of an 'Ablsom Daak' graphic novel (that reputedly no bookshop could shift) and the release on CD of the soundtrack to a non-existent Daak film. A flexi-disc sampler was taped to the front cover of DWM in late 1990; Daak was that ubiquitous.

The problem here is that Daak's actually a terribly derivative character who works in the context of the DWW backup strips because he's like nothing else appearing in that title at that time. He's a bog standard grim action movie psycho who does and says nothing to make him stand out from every other character cut from the same cloth. Put him in 2000AD and he'd be weak tea. The DWM letters pages throughout 1990 was rife with speculation about who could play Daak in any putative movie version. Dolph Lundgren was a popular choice - that seems to say it all.

Nor does 'Nemesis' give him much to do. The Daleks are doing something boring to a planet of boring noble savages. The Doctor and Daak stop them, at the cost of the latter's life. The most interesting thing here is the killing-off of Daak's supporting cast on the first page, a decision that writer John Tomlinson admits is a mistake, and was reversed a couple of years later in Paul Cornell's far better 'Emperor of the Daleks!'

The second acclaimed DWM strip is 'Train-Flight'. In a sign of things to come - both in comics form and on TV - this unites the 7th Doctor with Sarah Jane Smith for a one-off adventure, which again turns into a bog-standard sf adventure strip distinguished only by John Ridgway's art (and even he's phoning it in, with Sarah's clothing mysteriously changing mid-cliffhanger between the first and second episode!)

Also from DWM in this period is... well, that's almost it. There are two one-offs that first appeared there: 'Stairway to Heaven', which was Paul Cornell's first professional Who work and is the best thing collected here; and 'Doctor Conkerer!' in which the 7th Doctor saves Saxon children from invading vikings and invents conkers in the process. It's an ok-ish but unmemorable juvenile strip that wasn't intended for DWM at all.

The second part of the book, taking up nearly as much space as the DWM content, comprises the 12 strips published in the children's comic The Incredible Hulk Presents in the autumn of 1989. 'Doctor Conkerer!' had been due to appear in Issue 13 but found a home in DWM after IHP was axed. The initial plan (conceived without DWM editor John Freeman's knowledge) was that the IHP strips would be reprinted in DWM strips in between those commissioned by Freeman. This would have made interesting reading as the DWM strips, despite their shortcomings, were clearly aimed at fans while IHP is very much a kids comic. In fact the only strip to reappear in DWM was the most-DWM-like IHP strip, the two-part 'Hunger from the Ends of Time!' Most DWM readers didn't notice the difference - unsurprisingly as IHP wasn't mentioned anywhere in DWM's pages until almost a year after it had been cancelled - but might have had a shock if the more obviously juvenile strips like 'A Switch in Time!' or 'Slimmer!' had appeared instead.

For most readers, the IHP strips will be the highlight of this volume, if only because they're so unfamiliar. Four more IHP stories were reprinted in 'Doctor Who Classic Comics' in 1994, but the entire second half of the run has been unseen for almost a quarter of a century. And while it would be nice to claim this was a shame it isn't really. The stories are mostly dismal, with even the intriguing premises of 'The Sentinel' and 'Nineveh' going to waste. Apart from Ridgway and the fabulously cartoonish Geoff Senior (whose work is unlikely to be appreciated by the average Who comics reader) the art is uniformly dire. This particularly affects the best of the IHP stories: Simon Furman's 'Who's That Girl!', which manages to include a proper story with characters and twists and everything, but is rendered in the same over-inked 1980s style as Stephen Baskerville's later 'Seaside Rendezvous' (about which I complain above).

The third section reprints the original Abslom Daak backup strips, and its here - rather than in 'Nemesis' - that you can begin to see Daak's appeal (if you squint). Steve Moore's scripts are drawn by Steve Dillon and David Lloyd - early work for both of them, but you can see their distinctive styles beginning to emerge, particularly the former's.

But...

Why are these strips at the back of the book? Wouldn't it have made more sense to put them at the front, ahead of 'Nemesis'? Similarly the IHP strips are jammed in the middle of the DWM run, between 'Stairway to Heaven' and 'Train-Flight' rather than a) presented as a separate section, b) published chronologically before 'Stairway', or c) packaged together in a run with 'Doctor Conkerer!', all of which would have been more logical.

There's another problem with the Daak backup strips and it happens in the penultimate episode. This is the most memorable instalment of all the Daak strips, in which the amoral Vol Mercurius plays chess with a genius robot he's created on the top of a ruined castle besieged by... Kil-Mechs.*

As is well known, in 1980 the DWM got into a panic when they discovered that they had been publishing Dalek stories without observing niceties such as a) paying Terry Nation or b) telling him what they were doing. (They had thought this came part of a package with the rights to the series.) Mercurius's castle was supposed to be under siege by Daleks, but some hasty revisions expunged the Daleks in favour of all-new non-copyright Kil-Mechs (catchphrase: "Eradicate the fleshy ones!"). The legal tangle had been sorted out by the next issue and the Daleks were allowed to appear for the conclusion.

In 1990 the artwork was restored for publication in the collection 'Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer' (which sold so badly that Marvel/Panini didn't put out another Doctor Who graphic novel for 14 years). That's the definitive version. So why does this book have the version with Kil-Mechs in it? OK, it's of historical interest but wouldn't it have made more sense to publish the uncensored pages in the collection proper then reproduced the Kil-Meched pages (all four of them) as part of the notes?

If this volume had been produced to the same standard as the earlier ones then that might well have happened but the notes have an element of haste to them that's not apparent even in those for 'A Cold Day in Hell!' Elementary mistakes slip in. The Kil-Mech incident described above is referred to as happening when DWM was still weekly (you'd think the caption '...more next month' would be a bit of a giveaway). The DWM stories are reasonably well covered but the notes for the IHP ones are perfunctory, even insulting. 'Slimmer!' probably isn't worth more than a paragraph, but would it have killed them to have dedicated that paragraph to asking co-writer Mike Collins about it rather than just telling us that Collins has written/drawn some other Who stories?

And the Daak section is feeble, especially compared to the exhaustive investigation of the character in 'Vworp! Vworp!' Issue 2. This includes, among other things, a detailed discussion of Steve Moore's plans to revive the character in his own series in the 1990s, which isn't even mentioned here. The same fanzine also included a fully realised version of an unpublished 'Star Tigers' story written by Moore in 1980 - this gets mentioned but would it have killed them to find some way to reprint it here. Similarly, when artist Gerry Dolan is interviewed about his Doctor Who work he mentions the abortive newspaper strip 'Terror from the Deep' (completed pages from which appeared in DWM in 1990). Why isn't that reprinted here? Similarly, where is 'The Infinity Season' (from DWM 151), Freeman's first attempt to plug the hole in the DWM strip budget by running text stories instead? Or 'Between the Wars', another prose piece that fills in the gaps between 'Star Tigers' and 'Nemesis of the Daleks'? This volume was always going to be a ragbag, so why not make it the fullest ragbag they could manage?

It's a shame in a way that this volume couldn't have been combined with 'A Cold Day in Hell!' It climaxes at the end of a transitional period for the strip, where Starkings and later Freeman were casting around for new directions to bring the strip closer in spirit to the TV series. Freeman would partially solve this problem through new writers including Dan Abnett and Paul Cornell (both seen doing early work here), Warwick Gray and most particularly Andrew Cartmel, whose infleunce is going to shape the rest of the 7th Doctor volumes. And, for all its flaws, it's perhaps a good thing that 'Fellow Travellers' - Cartmel's first Who story, and as radical a calling card as anything seen in Doctor Who in any medium - doesn't have to jostle up against the likes of 'The Enlightenment of Ly-Chee the Wise'.

On the other hand, it will just a few pages away from Gary Russell's 'Party Animals'...

(* It's not hard to imagine that this image was an influence on 'Nightmare in Silver'. However, I somehow doubt that Neil Gaiman was aware of the consecutive IHP comics 'Slimmer!' - set on an asteroid that's actually a trap for unwary travellers set by a hungry monster that lives everywhere - and 'Nineveh', with its graveyard of dead TARDISes...)

DWM 352: The Doctor surmises that the Cybermen of the far future are invading 21st century Earth because humans in their own time are too genetically diverse to be Cybernised. So they didn't see 'Nightmare in Silver' coming...

The IHP strips mentioned above give the seventh Doctor some very odd dialogue. Samples:

"Great heavens, man - the arrogance!"

"My dear fellow, what's wrong? You've gone quite pale!"

"Great scott, old girl, just where do you think you're materializing this time?"

and best of all:

"By the left-handed blivet of Rama..."

Sadly I'm not in a position to upload potential entries for the "Who Can Draw the Worst Likeness of Sylvester McCoy?" competition, but I'd like to note the second panel on the final page of 'Who's That Girl!', in which the artists give up and resort to depicting him as a weird gangling silhouette.

'Nineveh!' also sees the Doctor chased through a TARDIS graveyard by a pointless monster that spouts bad poetry... It's terrible but at least it's over in 5 pages.

the release on CD of the soundtrack to a non-existent Daak film.

Sorry, WHAT?

Why are these strips at the back of the book? Wouldn't it have made more sense to put them at the front, ahead of 'Nemesis'?

Wouldn't it have made more sense NOT TO PUBLISH said book in the first place?

This volume was always going to be a ragbag, so why not make it the fullest ragbag they could manage?

They were losing the will to live? Rather like I am, just READING about this...thing.

The IHP strips mentioned above give the seventh Doctor some very odd dialogue. Samples:

"Great heavens, man - the arrogance!"

"My dear fellow, what's wrong? You've gone quite pale!"

"Great scott, old girl, just where do you think you're materializing this time?"

Obviously you're mistaken. It's almost impossible to tell who's supposed to be who in the comics, so no doubt this is actually the Third Doctor. Wearing a question-mark sweater or something.

'Nineveh!' also sees the Doctor chased through a TARDIS graveyard by a pointless monster that spouts bad poetry...

Ah.

"Sorry, WHAT?"

There was a soundtrack of album of music from the movie. There wasn't an actual movie - that only ever existed in the heads of fevered Doctor Who fans, speculating about it in the DWM letters page.

"Wouldn't it have made more sense NOT TO PUBLISH said book in the first place?"

Well it's nice to see the IHP strips collected at last and they take away from the sense of over familiarity elsewhere: almost everything else in this book was previously in the 'Abslom Daak' and 'The Mark of Mandragora' collections.

"Obviously you're mistaken. It's almost impossible to tell who's supposed to be who in the comics"

Kasgi should have gone with that instead of the old "I'm really the Doctor but I've regenerated into a woman" gambit. "Yes, I know I'm six feet tall and have longer hair and boobs but trust me - I am actually just a very badly-drawn Sylvester McCoy!"

Dolph was famous for not saying much during his time at university. All fellow students in neighbouring rooms could hear was the clinking of his weights.

Someone has kindly posted a lot of late Pertwee strips online. I'm working my way though them gradually, usually drawn on more by the art rather than the stories.

'The Disintegrator' (1974) stands out so far because it has surely the most perfunctory ending ever. The Daleks are up to no good on the moon, so in the final episode the Doctor travels to the moon, infiltrates their base and plants a neutron bomb, then leaves before it blows up. All this takes place in the space of three panels. What it lacks in substance it more than makes up for in ruthless efficiency.

My only real contact with Doctor Who comics were the coloured issues that Marvel Comics published in North America, back in the early 1980's (I tended to ignore the comics in the magazines).

These comics started with the Tom Baker Doctor, because he was so well known over here. They ran with him for about 15 issues, then switched over to Peter Davison. Because of rights issues, they couldn't use any TV Companions (except K9). So they made up their own Companions.

Although sales were good, they just weren't good enough, and Marvel cancelled the series after 24 issues (part of the problem was that they could only be found in certain comic books shops, so it's possible a lot of comic readers didn't even know about them).

Unlike the magazines, that I chucked in the bin years ago, I still have all my Doctor Who comics. They're safely stashed away, sealed in air proof plastic bags. Someday I'll break them out and read them again.


***if I got any facts wrong, I leave it up to Nitcentral's resident comic book expert, Keith Alan Morgan, to correct me***

"These comics started with the Tom Baker Doctor, because he was so well known over here."

Well, actually they started with Tom Baker because he was the Doctor when they acquired the comics licence.

And they probably acquired the license because he was the first Doctor to become so well-known over there.

It was certainly a factor that the strips could be repackaged for the American market after 1978, but the licence was primarily for the UK*. Doctor Who was at the all-time peak of its British popularity when Polystyle relinquished the comics rights in 1979. Lots of publishers would have been after it, even if there wasn't a US market to exploit.

(* And don't forget that it took over three years for the US Doctor Who comic to appear after the strip was piloted in 'Marvel Premiere' in 1980-1.)

Someone has kindly posted a lot of late Pertwee strips online.

An unusual definition of the word 'kindly'.

Doctor Who was at the all-time peak of its British popularity when Polystyle relinquished the comics rights in 1979

I always thought the all-time peaks of its British popularity was around the time of early 60s Dalekmania and around the time of Stolen Earth?

Tim - if I got any facts wrong, I leave it up to Nitcentral's resident comic book expert, Keith Alan Morgan, to correct me
Thanks for the compliment, but Kate knows way more about Doctor Who comics then I do.

As for the fourth Doctor's popularity in the US that was probably in part because of Time-Life's syndication of the show and the accompanying publication of books & novelizations about the character.

I never saw Time-Life's syndication package, but I did see lots of books about Doctor Who at that time.

"I always thought the all-time peaks of its British popularity was around the time of early 60s Dalekmania and around the time of Stolen Earth?"

If popularity is measured by the number of people who watch - and it's hard to think of any better measure we could apply - then the series peaked in October 1979, coincidentally the exact month that 'Doctor Who Weekly' was launched.

The series also got enormous ratings around the time of 'The Web Planet' (Zarbi-mania!) without quite reaching the heights later attained 'Destiny of the Daleks' or 'City of Death'.

New Who's peaks have generally been Christmas specials ('Voyage of the Damned' holds the record for 21st century Who, I believe) but regular episodes have rarely gone over 9 million viewers, which is small beer compared to 1965 or 1979.

Someone has kindly posted a lot of late Pertwee strips online.

Mmmmm, perhaps kindly posting a link here would be appropriate? I'd certainly appreciate it.

If popularity is measured by the number of people who watch - and it's hard to think of any better measure we could apply - then the series peaked in October 1979

Well, I tend to measure it not by viewing-figures-when-ITV's-on-strike but by the fact I'm suddenly no longer part of an oppressed minority - everyone in the country is discussing MY Doctor. Which means the week between Stolen Earth and Journey's End. Plus, as far as I can gather, some time around The Daleks/Dalek Invasion of Earth. (I'll quietly ignore what you said about The Web Planet cos my brain just can't process it.)

Anecdotal evidence can be misleading. Plus, the ITV strike is an explanation for why the ratings were so large, it doesn't actually change the numbers involved. You might as well say 'Voyage of the Damned' doesn't count because it was on at Christmas.

"Mmmmm, perhaps kindly posting a link here would be appropriate? I'd certainly appreciate it."

http://whopix.wordpress.com/

Much obliged

Apparently IDW has lost its licence to publish Doctor Who comics in America.

I'm sure the Americans will survive. Somehow.

'The World Shapers' collection: This assembles all the Doctor Who Magazine strips from Issues 108-129, effectively the second half of Colin Baker's run. Two things need to be said about this: first, these stories are far, far better than anything that was on TV at the time; and second, I find that I am (not entirely inexplicably) fond of this book, perhaps moreso than any other Doctor Who comics collection.

Partly that's nostalgia. These were the strips running when I first started reading DWM regularly. But partly also there's a sense that these are good strips that remain undiscovered. They come wedged between Steve Parkhouse's lengthy, lauded but over-familiar run as regular writer and the descent into shonkiness of the early McCoy comics. (The later McCoy comics are technically better but pompous, a trait that blossoms into the bloated smugness of the eighth Doctor's interminable comic strip afterlife.) Parkhouse and his predecessors have been rightly praised but from 1986 onwards DWM dispensed with the idea of a regular writer, and consequently these stories lack a single focal point or consistent voice.

What they do have is John Ridgway, surely one of the definitive Doctor Who comics illustrators, who handles every story here. His work is perhaps less consistent than in the previous volume, 'Voyager'; later episodes are inked by Tim Perkins, who isn't bad as such but the effect seems somehow plainer than Ridgway's earlier work. And the glossy paper of this volume suits the art less well than the stock on which it was originally published - but even so, for a generation of Doctor Who fans, this is what comics are *supposed* to look like.

There are stories from five different writers altogether, one of whom will go on to become a very big name indeed. The weakest strip - apart from Simon Furman's single-part Alice in Wonderland pastiche 'Salad Daze' - is the opening three-part Cyberman story by Alan McKenzie and it's actually his best work for 'Doctor Who'. It's also extremely peculiar, with an opening episode that seems almost like a stand alone prologue before the Cyber-shenanigans begin proper in part two. When the Colin strips were truncated for reprints in the Golden Wonder 'Adventure Comics' in 1986, the first episode was omitted completely - as was Peri! - and the story read just as well. This instalment sets up a promising storyline (Cybermen skulking around a Ruritanian castle is just one of the themes that seems to have been swiped for 'Nightmare in Silver', cf the 'No-Win' planet-bombs in 'Nature of the Beast!') that then fizzles out in the finale.

This wasn't, in fact, the plan. McKenzie planned this as a longer story but incoming editor Sheila Cranna balked at having to pay for the rights to the Cybermen only to find that only one had appeared by the end of episode two, and ordered Ridgway to produce a truncated single episode climax instead!

Of the other major stories, 'The Gift' is a fun romp that's perhaps one episode too long to justify its running time. 'Profits of Doom!' is just as much fun but ends very abruptly in a conclusion that seems to be setting up a major new villain who a) appears not to have encountered the Doctor before then apparently has later on the same page and b) is never seen or referred to ever again! This is a shame as the eponymous monsters (capitalist-pirate slugs called the Profiteers of Ephte) are hilariously brilliant.

'Nature of the Beast!' and 'Time Bomb' are both great puzzle stories whose twists are guessable but still no less satisfying when they come. The latter is possibly the bleakest and most fatalistic 'Doctor Who' strip ever, with an entire civilisations casually wiped out by vast cosmic ironies. As this is a nit-picking site I'll point out that it involves yet another explanation for the origins of humanity that contradicts all the other contradictory versions Doctor Who has ever shown us. Perhaps one day we can lock them in a room and let them fight it out.

For many the most interesting strips will be the two by future comics superstar, Grant Morrison MBE. Unlike Alan Moore's desultory 'Doctor Who' strips, its rather easier to draw a clear line of development from 'Changes' and 'The World Shapers' to the work that made him famous. 'Changes' is the lesser of the two. It does a journey to the centre of the TARDIS rather better than the TV series managed this year, but revolves around the presence of an alien shapeshifter that a) doesn't actually do much and b) is disposed of fairly quickly in an abrupt conclusion. I get the impression that Morrison was far more fascinated by the idea of setting a story entirely inside the ship than any of those trifling things like plot.

'The World Shapers', on the other hand, is bonkers. If you know anything about Doctor Who comics then you'll know why. If you don't, this is the story you've probably heard of in which it turns out that the Voord mutated into the Cyberman while Jamie appears as a crazy old man who dies in battle. It's exactly the sort of story that Doctor Who fans, trapped in the tired old cliches about "continuity", are guaranteed to hate but it does so with such zest that you can forgive it anything.

And while it may play out the law of diminishing returns, its first episode may be the single most perfect Doctor Who comic ever. When the Doctor namechecks the Fishmen of Kandalinga (from the first Doctor Who Annual 1965) there is a real sense that - unlike Parkhouse, who loathes Doctor Who - unlike Moore, who was cribbing his references from Jeremy Bentham at the local pub - this writer knows and loves Doctor Who and isn't ashamed to show it. And that's just one of the reasons why this is the one comics collection that all Doctor Who fans should own.

This assembles all the Doctor Who Magazine strips from Issues 108-129, effectively the second half of Colin Baker's run. Two things need to be said about this: first, these stories are far, far better than anything that was on TV at the time

You know, I might actually BELIEVE that.

As this is a nit-picking site I'll point out that it involves yet another explanation for the origins of humanity that contradicts all the other contradictory versions Doctor Who has ever shown us.

Alright *sigh* what is it THIS time?

Aliens who are trying to create a perfect society bundle up all their genetic impurities in one easy-to-manage package then dispose of it in a dematerialisation device. Unbeknownst to them, this actually zaps it back in time to primeval Earth, and said impurities ultimately evolves into the human race. (The Doctor's main involvment is getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and messing up history completely. The story ends with a too-horrible-to-be-even-bleakly-amusing ironic payoff, with the aliens all being wiped out by literally brain-dead religious zealots.)

But I'm not sure why you're asking about this given that in the same post I mention the story where *the Voord evolve into the Cybermen!!!*

But I'm not sure why you're asking about this given that in the same post I mention the story where *the Voord evolve into the Cybermen!!!*

Because someone-or-other was kind enough to break THAT particular piece of 'news' to me a few years ago. I've had time to - well, if not get used to it, at least to stop shrieking hysterically over it.

'Minatorius' in the 1981 Doctor Who Winter Special is a peculiarity in the Doctor Who strip canon. During most of the 1980s, Marvel kept their original DW strips confined to the pages of Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly/Magazine. There were a few specials, but their strip content was either reprint or non-fiction. The 1981 special is unique in presenting original material that's directly connected to the TV series* - 'Minatorius' and the second half of a Zygon back-up strip that had begun in the most recent issue of DWM.

* The 1982 Doctor Who Summer Special has two backup strips that proved baffling to neophyte readers such as myself, because both are based around characters introduced in 1981's 'Doctor Who and the Free-fall Warriors' and had no connection to anything seen on screen!

'Minatorius' is also probably the rarest Marvel strip from this period. It's the only backup strip - and indeed the only Marvel-created Doctor Who strip prior to 1991 - never to have been reprinted. Even Alan Moore's Time Lord trilogy got a second outing in 'The Daredevils', even if their writer put the kibosh on later printings. (They're also readily available online for anyone who wants to go digging.)

So what have we been missing? The answer is, tragically, not much. It's the tale of a junior Time Lord who visits an alien civilisation, breaks the laws against intervention in order to prevent a galactic catastrophe, but he fails and dies boringly. It's not entirely clear what he's achieved/failed to achieve in the story so there's a helpful explanatory caption at the end that makes things even less clear.

Even John Stokes's bold, ink-heavy artwork seems a bit dull in this one. He's given nothing interesting to draw and there's even a flagrant bit of photostatting on the penultimate page: a technique often used for effect but here flagrantly deployed as time-saving.

Two things are worthy of note: first, the chief elder of Minatorius has the name of a famous 20th century playwright, but looks like Moses and does nothing as scurrilously shocking as his namesake. Second, the Time Lord hero (I can't be bothered picking up the mag to check his name) is accompanied for no readily apparent reason by a wise-cracking robot which also dies boringly at the end. Given that the Doctor Who connection amounts to a few familiar words sprinkled through the dialogue, I began to speculate that it was actually a cut and paste job, and that the strip was originally based on the 1970s TV version of 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century'. At this point I began to imagine Buck and Twiki messing up and dying foolishly on the final page, and the whole thing became a lot more enjoyable.

Elsewhere the Winter Special gives us probably the first ever officially available listing of what's still in the BBC Archive (or was back in 1981) plus the only picture I can remember seeing of Andrew 'Full Circle' Smith. Yay!

So what have we been missing? The answer is, tragically, not much.

I'd hardly call that a TRAGEDY. Being deprived of Who for TSLABYOD - THAT'S a tragedy. What's happening in the Central African Republic - THAT'S a tragedy. Discovering that a Doctor Who comic strip isn't very good - THAT'S perfectly normal.

It's the tale of a junior Time Lord who visits an alien civilisation, breaks the laws against intervention in order to prevent a galactic catastrophe, but he fails and dies boringly.

Actually, I *embarrassed cough* rather like the sound of that. Amongst all those thousands of Time Lords who fled Gallifrey, why SHOULDN'T there be some who just didn't make the grade, and died before they turned into Crazy Renegades?

'For all their freakish wrongness, there's something oddly appealing about these comics. Indeed, Gareth Roberts has twice nicked plot concepts from Troughton-era issues of TV Comic for his Doctor Who episodes' - TARDIS Eruditorum. He's WHAT! WHERE??

The Carrionites are basically the Witches from the 1967 story 'The Witches!' The following year the Quarks attempted to take over the universe with giant wasps, and were left quite despondent when the Doctor thwarted their plans.

The Carrionites are basically the Witches from the 1967 story 'The Witches!'

Was there anything specific about the Witches that made the Carrionites related to THEM instead of, say...just TRADITIONAL witches with the inevitable they're-really-aliens touch?

The following year the Quarks attempted to take over the universe with giant wasps

*Sigh*

"Was there anything specific about the Witches that made the Carrionites related to THEM instead of, say...just TRADITIONAL witches with the inevitable they're-really-aliens touch?"

Er... they look quite similar. This story was also reprinted in DWM in 2001, so it would have been comparatively fresh in the production team's mind as well.

Panini's 'Voyager' collection is an odd beast. All of their DWM reprint volumes are named after one of the stories contained therein, but this is the only one which feels like it's called 'The title strip + other stuff you don't care about'. No other collection is so completely dominated by one serial, not even 'The Glorious Dead' (twice as long as 'Voyager' but infinitely less epic).

Stretching things a bit, 'Voyager' actually describes a long story arc (of sorts) comprising 'The Shape Shifter (originally in DWM issues 88-89), 'Voyager' itself (90-94), 'Polly the Glot' (95-97) and 'Once Upon a Time-Lord...' (98-99). This is the first year's worth of sixth Doctor strips and the final year of Steve Parkhouse's regular (and feted) run of writer, which had begun back in the spring of 1981.

It's oddly prophetic at times. It begins with the Doctor talking about being threatened by the BBC and ends - in a climax from the first DWM to be published after the cancellation crisis erupted - with the Doctor being cut loose by his writer/creator and facing an uncertain future.

This is the year in which the strip goes meta. Astrolabus, who is either a legendary Time Lord renegade known as "the Thief of Time" or a revered astrologer of a mythic, lost Alexandria or both or neither, is really Steve Parkhouse. This becomes apparent in 'Once Upon a Time-Lord...' in which he bamboozles the Doctor into a fantasy story-land for the amusement of a child audience and starts messing about with the strip's form until the Doctor literally cuts loose his own puppet strings. In the first episode, we have the celebrated sequence where the strip drops comic strip convention and takes on the form of a 'Rupert Annual' story for three pages. In the second episode, we have the equally celebrated sequence where Astrolabus hopes to escape the Doctor by fleeing across a blank page. Never a huge Doctor Who fan, Parkhouse represents himself as Astrolabus, a half-mad, half-frustrated, half-terrifying storyteller-magician at the end of his tether.

It doesn't quite work, because at this stage we need some kind of resolution to the ongoing story and there really can't be one, or at least not one that makes sense, because nothing here makes sense. 'Voyager' itself is a dream story. Astonishing ideas and images are thrown up on the page and then denied or forgotten - the Poe-like frozen Sargasso Sea of the opening episode, the automaton powered by a human soul, the lighthouse in the sea/space at the edge of the world/universe. Most obviously there's the backstory of Alexandria, which the Doctor promptly tells us can't possibly be real because he knows Astrolabus is a fraud. But it's not clear if the Doctor's explanation - that Astrolabus is a Time Lord and the lighthouse is his TARDIS - is any less provisional (Parkhouse handles this sense of equipoise far better than Andrew Cartmel would do a decade later in 'Warhead').

The entire story is effectively a dream, dictated by dream-sense rather than story-logic. We've seen this before in Parkhouse's work, notably in 'The Tides of Time' but there it felt like indulgent padding. Here it's the essence of a story that isn't so much read as experienced. What Parkhouse is essentially doing is lobbing lots of astonishing images at incoming artist John Ridgway (who bats them away effortlessly, of course). Voyager himself is an ultimately meaningless character - he looks impressive and is called some impressive things (he's a "Lord of Life" to the Doctor's "Lord of Time") - but in the end that's all he is. And when the story is dictated by dream-sense that means there can be no satisfying resolution. 'Once Upon a Time-Lord...' ends with sound and fury. It's not entirely clear what the Doctor has achieved, or how, or even if he was trying to achieve it at all (Voyager tasks him with recovering the charts that Astrolabus has stolen but the Doctor does nothing about this, and Voyager simply turns up at the end to deal with it himself).

Does it signify nothing? Not quite. It signals the end of Astrolabus, which is all that it needs to really. He's a diminished figure in the later stories, all too easily slipping into the caricature of a garrulous Gadzooks!er without the depth or the terror that he displayed in his debut. His presence in 'Polly the Glot' is particularly incongrous - given that it's a 2000AD-style fluffy romp featuring the return of Dr Ivan Asimoff and his scheme (such as it is) feels more like an attempt to give the Doctor something to do than anything serious. Which of course it is. It does, however, feature the majestic scene in which he turns into a planet and swallows Colin Baker whole.

The real weak link in Parkhouse's run is probably 'The Shape Shifter', which introduces Frobisher but doesn't give him a name or a familiar shape. He becomes a penguin in 'Voyager', where this seems perfectly rational for once. (Later, Alan McKenzie will add Peri to the strip, and also vary the format by having Frobisher become a Conan-lookalike in 'War Game', a strip which might have done better to keep his more familiar but incongrous form.) His introduction is fairly low-key though. It seems to set up a sequel to the final fifth Doctor strip 'The Moderator', with Josiah W. Dogbolter still hunting for the Doctor and the TARDIS, and the Doctor determined to avenge Gus's death in the earlier strip... but then it doesn't quite happen as the Doctor and the shape shifter team up to pull off a minor scam instead (and Dogbolter himself barely appears.)

But this is the only Parkhouse-scripted story in this volume to feel so perfunctory or short on imagination. However, once McKenzie takes over as writer (sometimes under the pseudonym "Max Stockbridge") the strip definitely becomes more ordinary. The four-parter with no overall title that concludes this volume is a case in point. The Doctor gathers various allies to fight the Skeletoid menace over the first three episodes. They're given a lot of build up, especially in the second episode - which focuses on guest character Abel Gantz and omits the Doctor almost completely - and there's a lot of blather about champions and prophecy. But it doesn't go anywhere. The Skeletoids are an unimpressive enemy and they're defeated by the Doctor and chums breaking into a building and then blowing it up.

It's also replete with continuity references - Daleks, Cybermen, Draconians and Davros all cameo - which was apparently a deliberate fan-pleasing tactic on McKenzie's part. His first strip, 'War-Game', also revolves around the Draconians, but also shows up the flaws of this approach. The whole of the first episode is essentially padding before the splash-page cliffhanger-reveal. It looks amazing (as does all of Ridgway's work in this volume) but it hamstrings a very basic two-part story. The most interesting aspect is the Draconian warlord's recruitment of the Doctor because he will be able to execute a daring rescue plan with a minimum of bloodshed. But this is never fully developed as a theme - instead it's clumsily compared to the Doctor's game of chess with Frobisher in the opening scenes - so it's rather unsatisfying that the story concludes with a room full of corpses.

'Funhouse' is also underdeveloped, and compares poorly to similar 11th Doctor TV stories (notably 'The Doctor's Wife'). It begins promisingly with the Doctor trapped in a nightmarish house that is actually a living creature trying to parasite from the TARDIS - but the second half is confined almost entirely to the TARDIS and any promise the opening episode held is squandered as the Doctor defeats the menace by doing technobabble things. This also causes him to revert back through his previous incarnations - but we've seen this before, in Doctor Who Weekly's 'Timeslip', where it felt like a genuinely new and daring thing to do. By 1985 such continuity-tapping had become commonplace, both on the page and the screen.

McKenzie's strips aren't bad exactly. They're just ordinary, which is an accusation that could never be levelled at the far superior run that preceeded them. Perhaps it's simply the case that once the Doctor had severed mad Astrolabus's strings, his lives *could* only ever become less interesting.

The impression that I got from Parkhouse's work was that he really didn't want to write about the Doctor. Notice that in his stories, it's his original characters that do most of the heavy lifting, not the Doctor. You get the impression that if given a choice, Parkhouse would happily ditch the Doctor and make the story about his characters instead.

we have the celebrated sequence where the strip drops comic strip convention and takes on the form of a 'Rupert Annual' story for three pages.

THAT is CELEBRATED??

(Parkhouse handles this sense of equipoise far better than Andrew Cartmel would do a decade later in 'Warhead').

This sense of WHAT?

'Funhouse' is also underdeveloped, and compares poorly to similar 11th Doctor TV stories (notably 'The Doctor's Wife'). It begins promisingly with the Doctor trapped in a nightmarish house that is actually a living creature trying to parasite from the TARDIS - but the second half is confined almost entirely to the TARDIS

Wow. I hadn't realised Doctor's Wife was so unoriginal. Presumably the comic could afford more of the TARDIS than some corridors and the console room, so maybe it didn't compare so poorly, after all.

"THAT is CELEBRATED??"

Yes. Go and look at your copy. It's lovely.

"This sense of WHAT?"

Uncertainty between two alternative and mutually incompatible states. Cartmel does it plonkingly in 'Warhead' where he tries to pass off the Doctor as a magic super-wizard.

"Wow. I hadn't realised Doctor's Wife was so unoriginal. Presumably the comic could afford more of the TARDIS than some corridors and the console room,"

Funnily enough, no.

I have an idea.

Every week I get an ad from a comic book store(I think I once ordered something from them off E-Bay).

Each ad also has some reviews of new books.

I've seen a current Who comic show up at least twice in recent months(to very good reviews(at least 9 out of 10 both times)).

How about someone talk about these--rather than wasting time picking apart reprints of old smeg that most people have forgotten (or never knew (or cared)) about????

By the way Emily, this might be the way to increase the posts here--talk about something relevent!!!!

"I've seen a current Who comic show up at least twice in recent months(to very good reviews(at least 9 out of 10 both times)).

"How about someone talk about these--rather than wasting time picking apart reprints of old smeg that most people have forgotten(or never knew(or cared ))????"

Good idea. What's stopping you?

THAT is CELEBRATED??"

Yes. Go and look at your copy. It's lovely.

I have a copy?

"This sense of WHAT?"

Uncertainty between two alternative and mutually incompatible states. Cartmel does it plonkingly in 'Warhead' where he tries to pass off the Doctor as a magic super-wizard.

Oh!

Actually Cartmell's magic-super-wizard scene would have been brilliant, if only a) it hadn't been directed at Ace (who'd never believe he's-not-really-a-time-traveler for ONE MICROSECOND, she's been travelling in the TARDIS with him for YEARS) and b) Ace hadn't believed it, burst into tears and run away.

"Wow. I hadn't realised Doctor's Wife was so unoriginal. Presumably the comic could afford more of the TARDIS than some corridors and the console room,"

Funnily enough, no.

*Sigh*

I have an idea.

Every week I get an ad from a comic book store(I think I once ordered something from them off E-Bay).

Each ad also has some reviews of new books.

I've seen a current Who comic show up at least twice in recent months(to very good reviews(at least 9 out of 10 both times)).

How about someone talk about these

Fine.

YOU talk about these.

--rather than wasting time picking apart reprints of old smeg that most people have forgotten (or never knew (or cared)) about????

I completely fail to see what earthly difference it makes if we're discussing old smeg or new smeg. They're COMICS - they're ALL smeg (or cruk, to use a more Who-related term).

By the way Emily, this might be the way to increase the posts here--talk about something relevent!!!!

The current policy (of not forbidding people to discuss vast amounts of a fifty-year-old programme on time travel on the somewhat spurious grounds that certain material is OLD) is doing just fine, thank you. The comics have been unbelievably and undeservedly blessed with 214 posts.

Well, 215 now.

Kitten - Cartmel does it plonkingly in 'Warhead' where he tries to pass off the Doctor as a magic super-wizard.
Stardust??? 8-o

Still the idea of someone ripping off Fletcher Hanks and turning it into a Doctor Who story is oddly amusing. ;-)

Oh, and one actual nit: in 'The Shape Shifter' (SPOILERS) the Doctor and Frobisher scam Dogbolter by pretending to hand the Doctor over for a big reward. However, it's really Frobisher in disguise and at a crucial moment he shifts into the form of one of Dogbolter's guards. In the confusion he zaps the real two guards with a stun gun and escapes.

Which is fine, but where did the stun gun come from? He can't have it with him as a) "the Doctor" is a prisoner and likely to have been searched for concealed weapons and b) clearly wasn't holding anything before? Or is the implication that Frobisher can actually morph body parts into working machinery - in which case why does he never display such useful skills again and why is he stuck in such a dead-end detective job?

Also, he stops being the Doctor when one of the two guards has turned his back to open a big door. So while it's a surprise moment for the guards, they should at least be able to work out that the one *still standing by the door* can't be the prisoner! Or am I over-estimating the intelligence of guards in the Doctor Who universe?

Not a story nit as such, but worth mentioning: In 1986 Golden Wonder crips ran a Doctor Who promotion giving away 'Doctor Who Marvel Adventure Comics' that reprinted abridged versions of the early Colin Baker strips. The only problem was that they numbered them in a peculiar order that must have made no sense to anyone reading them for the first time, including putting 'Once Upon a Time-Lord...' before 'Voyager Dreams of Eternity' (a cut down version of the last two episodes of 'Voyager') and - most baffling of all - making 'The Shape Shifter' No. 5 even though it introduces a character who appears in every other issue!

Or is the implication that Frobisher can actually morph body parts into working machinery

Probably not, but he could morph some sort of hidden pouch or cavity in which to conceal a weapon until he needs it. Or he could use Captain Jack's technique as illustrated in Bad Wolf

Or am I over-estimating the intelligence of guards in the Doctor Who universe?

It's VERY hard to UNDER-estimate the intelligence of guards in the Doctor Who universe.

"he could morph some sort of hidden pouch or cavity in which to conceal a weapon until he needs it"

That would make sense, but he'd need to have the right type of gun or it would immediately be obvious that he was the impostor.

It's VERY hard to UNDER-estimate the intelligence of guards in the Doctor Who universe.

Oh, you snob! What are YOU gonna say the next time a guard asks 'What do you think of the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes?'

Ok, so there's at least one sharp pencil in the box.

*Desperately wracks brains to think of one more smart guard in the Whoniverse*

*Fails*

Emily:The current policy (of not forbidding people to discuss vast amounts of a fifty-year-old programme on time travel on the somewhat spurious grounds that certain material is OLD) is doing just fine, thank you. The comics have been unbelievably and undeservedly blessed with 214 posts.

While I agree with the policy as you state it--it doesn't seem to work here(magazines also suffers the same problem).

Here you and Kitten provide 90% of the words talking about stories that not only do I not have, but that I most likely can't get(long out of print) as you rip them to pieces.

Kitten seems to be putting in a solid(and undercommented on) effort to review these old stories--and I respect her for that.

You on the other hand seem to be here merely to restate your total contempt for these comics--we've all heard it--how many times do you need to restate it.

Othere only post here once in a while.

I saw a review for a brand new Who comic and mentioned it in hope to liven things up a bit here.

By the way,today I recieved the latest ad from the store I mentioned--it includes an review of Doctor Who Prisoners of Time #9.

It received a good rating(9 out of 10),sounds like a good story building on Whos more recent past.

Kitten: Good idea. What's stopping you?

There are 2 or 3 things stopping me.

First off--i've pretty much stopped cpllecting comics(the only new books I can think of this year are Negima 35, Gunslinger Girl Finale, and the graphic novel Star Trek Countdown Into Darkness(I will admit to buying a couple of Marvel Complete Collections 40+ years of old comics o as PDFs on DVD(Don't trust them they're not always complete.))

Second--of the local comic stores I know of one is in a mall that's almost dead, and the rest are a pain to get to(the ones mentioned above are all off E-bay).

Third--the story features the Eccy-Doc. Without knowing more there's no way I'm going in.

And last of all--I've been waiting to see what the "True Who Fans" had to say on it.

So far--I'm still waiting.

(As an aside:the only thing that caught my eye in magazines was a reference in DWM 225 to a deleted line of dialogue which seemed to support something I said here long ago--find it if you care.)

"Here you and Kitten provide 90% of the words talking about stories that not only do I not have, but that I most likely can't get(long out of print) as you rip them to pieces."

All the Panini and IDW collections that I've reviewed on here are still in print and easy to obtain. The only OOP Panini collection is 'Endgame' (which I've not reviewed) and even then it would not be a huge challenge to track down the original issues. There are very few Doctor Who comic strips post-1979 that can't be located with a bit of patience.

"Third--the story features the Eccy-Doc. Without knowing more there's no way I'm going in.

"And last of all--I've been waiting to see what the "True Who Fans" had to say on it."

It's not hard to find fans talking about the IDW comics online on, for example, Gallifrey Base, or general information about what they put out. 'Prisoners of Time', for instance, is a well-publicised 12 issue Golden Anniversary series running alongside IDW's regular 11th Doctor title. Each issue features a different Doctor, so Issue 9 naturally features Eccleston's.

As you'll see above, I've not been impressed with much of IDW's output so have not been pursuing them with any particular urgency. Their Doctor Who licence is about to expire anyway, so it's ironic that you should champion them over older (but readily available) strips that you regard as obsolete.

The fact of the matter is that - fairly or not - a lot of Doctor Who fans are going to regard the DWM strip as the core of the Doctor Who comics. Inevitably, they're going to be discussed more frequently than the output of other publishers.

"(As an aside:the only thing that caught my eye in magazines was a reference in DWM 225 to a deleted line of dialogue which seemed to support something I said here long ago--find it if you care.)"

Ace being a slapper?

The only Doctor Who comics I have are the ones Marvel Comics published here in North America, back in the early 1980's. I supposed someday I'll break them out and read them again. When that happens, I'll post some comments here about them.

So, following the recent discussions about the relevance of talking about Doctor Who comics of a certain age, I thought I'd sit down and take stock a) of what's out there and b) how available it is.

I'm going to try to do this in three parts as the history of Who comics fits neatly into that many phases: the basically ephemeral stuff put out since 1964; the near-monopoly that Marvel/Panini have over the form from 1979; and the proliferation of new comics outlets since 2006.

I'm not going into detail about individual strips. For that I'd recommend the Altered Vistas website, which includes everything that appears in print media (though not webcomics, etc.) or Paul Scoones's 'The Comic Strip Companion', of which only volume 1 (1964-1979) has appeared to date.

Ground rules: 1) I'm talking about licensed pro-comics only. 2) No parodies or humour strips, e.g. 'Dr What and His Time Clock', 'Dr Who?' etc or we'd be hear forever. 3) Only outright Doctor Who (or Dalek strips), so e.g. no Torchwood, or novel/audio spinoffs like Faction Paradox or Miranda.

PART 1 - pre-Marvel Doctor Who and Dalek strips (mostly 1964-1979)

1a. Polystyle Publications

Known as TV Publications until 1968, Polstyle Publications were the first publishers to licence the rights to a regular Doctor Who comic, and they put it out more or less uninterrupted for every week between November 1964 and May 1979.

Mostly this was in TV COMIC, with the Who strip initially running until February 1971. At this point it was transferred to appear in a new title called COUNTDOWN. This became TV ACTION + COUNTDOWN in the spring of 1972, then simply TV ACTION from early 1973, before being cancelled in August of the same year.

At that point, Doctor Who returned to TV COMIC where original strips continued until June 1978. (TV COMIC went through a number of variant titles in his period, most notably as MIGHTY TV COMIC from September 1976 to November 1977, but for the sake of simplicity I'll stick to calling it TV COMIC throughout.)

In addition, Polystyle put out various specials and annuals that featured original Doctor Who strips. Doctor Who was popular enough to warrant a couple of its own Holiday Specials in 1973 and 1974, both of which featured new comics.

By Doctor, Polystyle's comics output is:

Hartnell:
TV COMIC #674-783
TV COMIC HOLIDAY SPECIALs (1965 & 1966)
TV COMIC ANNUALs (1965 & 1966)

Troughton:
TV COMIC #784-936
TV COMIC HOLIDAY SPECIALs (1967-1969)
TV COMIC ANNUALs (1967-1969)

Pertwee:
TV COMIC #944-949
COUNTDOWN/TV ACTION + COUNTDOWN/TV ACTION #1-13, 15-104, 107-112, 116-120, 123, 125-129, 131
TV COMIC #1133-1203
TV COMIC HOLIDAY SPECIAL (1970)
TV COMIC ANNUALs (1970 & 1974)
COUNTDOWN ANNUALs (1971 & 1972)
TV ACTION ANNUAL (1973)
DOCTOR WHO HOLIDAY SPECIALs (1973 & 1974)

Tom Baker:
TV COMIC #1204-1385
TV COMIC ANNUALs (1975-1978)
TV COMIC HOLIDAY SPECIAL (1977)

From the mid-1970s onwards, Polystyle began cutting corners by reprinting older strips (mostly Pertwee ones from TV ACTION and the 1973-1974 TV COMIC run) with the art partly redrawn to replace the old Doctor's likeness with Tom's. These appear in the MIGHTY MIDGET DOCTOR WHO COMIC (a freebie with the first MIGHTY TV COMIC in 1976), the DOCTOR WHO WINTER SPECIAL of 1977, TV COMIC HOLIDAY SPECIAL of 1978, and ultimately replacing original strips in the weekly TV COMIC from #1386-1430. The last of these reprints appeared in May 1979, ending Polystyle's association with the series.

Availability:

The Polystyle strips were basically ephemeral and are interest mainly as curios or for the ultra-completist. Occasionally there's talk of a collected edition, but it seems unlikely to me that they'd appear or that they'd have any commercial value.

Because of the sheer volume of material, and the likelihood that the majority of copies won't have survived from the 1960s and 1970s, the chances are that anyone mental enough to go looking for a complete collection are will have to spend a lot of time and money tracking them down. Individual issues are probably easier to come by, but the Doctor Who connection has driven up the prices far beyond what they're worth.

A decent, though far from complete, selection of Polystyle strips were reprinted in Marvel UK's DOCTOR WHO CLASSIC COMICS (27 issues, 1992-1994) and if you want a decent sample my best recommendation is to track these down. A word of warning: for commercial reasons, the mainly black-and-white strips were colourised for this publication, often unsympathetically.

By common consent the COUNTDOWN/TV ACTION strips are head and shoulders above the rest of Polystyle's output, and luckily DOCTOR WHO CLASSIC COMICS collected the entire weekly run. Sadly the specials from this period and the latter TV COMIC Pertwee strips (which retained the excellent COUNTDOWN artist Gerry Haylock) weren't reprinted, though as I posted earlier this year, a lot of this material is available online.

The Hartnell and Troughton TV COMIC strips are reasonably well-represented (and a couple of other Troughton strips were reprinted in DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE in 2001), Pertwee and Tom not so much. However, all the Tom strips by Haylock and his short-lived replacement Martin Asbury were reprinted (as was the John Burns-illustrated strip from the first Tom-based TV COMIC ANNUAL).


1b. The TV CENTURY 21 Dalek strip

The Daleks had their own full-colour weekly strip that appeared in Issues 1-104 of TV CENTURY 21 between January 1965 and January 1967. You'll probably have seen bits of these as they were reprinted all over the place between 1973 and 1994. They're probably the best-regarded Doctor Who comics of the 1960s (not that there was much competition!)

Availability:

Marvel UK collected the entire TV CENTURY 21 run in a one-off special titled THE DALEK CHRONICLES in 1994, which is now quite well-sought-after.

If that's too hard to track down, DOCTOR WHO CLASSIC COMICS reprinted all but the first 17 issues, which had previously been collected in their entirety in DOCTOR WHO WEEKLY in 1980 and in DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE in 1991-1992. (The DWW version reproduced them in black-and-white.)


1c. Doctor Who and Dalek annuals

For every year from 1965 to 1985 (except 1971), World Distributors (later World International) issued a DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL in the traditional British format - i.e. heavily illustrated, large format hardcovers. Most but not all of these strips featured either one or two strips.

(One oddity to bear in mind here is that British annuals are usually dated for the year *after* publication, e.g. DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL 1974 was actually published in September 1973! Adding to the confusion, not all the annuals bore a date on the cover)

By Doctor, the annuals that feature comic strips are:

Hartnell - the second (of 2) volumes, published in 1966.

Troughton - all three volumes, published from 1967-1969

Pertwee - DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL 1974 (published 1973) and DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL 1975 (published 1974)

Tom Baker - all seven volumes, published 1975-1981, i.e. from DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL 1976 onwards: the final volume in this series (which includes some Davison text stories, but a single Tom comic) is undated on the cover.

Davison - only the first volume, published in 1982. (The same year World issued their one and only K-9 ANNUAL, but thankfully this included no comics.)

The Daleks also got in the act, initially with three volumes from Souvenir Press & Panther Books: THE DALEK BOOK (1964), THE DALEK WORLD (1965) and THE DALEK OUTER SPACE BOOK (1966). These have considerably more comics content than the other annuals, though the latter has several filler strips with no Dalek/Doctor Who connection at all!

World also issued four volumes of TERRY NATION'S DALEK ANNUAL between 1975 and 1978 (cover dated from 1976-1979 of course). Only the first and last of these have original Dalek comics, the others relying on TV CENTURY 21 reprints.

An annual-like book called DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS OMNIBUS (1976) has another original Dalek puzzle/strip story.

Availability:

These have very rarely been reprinted. The World DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL comics are probably the least loved of all Doctor Who strips. The 1960s Dalek books have a rather better rep, but have been overlooked in favour of the TV CENTURY 21 strips. A few of these have been released in PDF format on DVDs, but in other cases you'll have to track down the original books.


1d. Miscellaneous 1960s and 1970s strips

* In 1965 the Chad Valley toy company issued a set of 16 comic strip slides for their toy projector. As toys go this is highly collectible, but as comics it might be easier to see if you can track them down online. They've never been properly published anywhere.

* The Dr. Who and the Daleks film was adapted as an American comic book in 1966 by Dell Publishing. This is comparatively rare and much in demand, so your best bet might be to try to find DOCTOR WHO CLASSIC COMICS No. 9, which reprinted the whole thing.

* Radio Times previewed Colony in Space Episode One in 1971 with a comic strip adaptation of the opening scenes. This was the only Who comic by the great Frank Bellamy, who contributed many more illustrations based on the series to Radio Times up until his death in 1976. If you can't find the original issue or the collection TIMEVIEW: THE COMPLETE DOCTOR WHO ILLUSTRATIONS OF FRANK BELLAMY, then the Colony in Space DVD reproduces it as a PDF.

NEXT: The Marvel age, true believer!

PART 2 - the Age of Marvels [and Paninis] (1979-now)

In 1979, Polystyle's Doctor Who comics licence expired and the rights were sold instead to Marvel UK, the British division of the American comics giant. This led to

the creation of the publication known today as DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE. Marvel UK was bought out by Panini Publishing in the mid-1990s. Panini retained Marvel as an imprint for several years but dropped it at the very end of 1999.

At the time of writing, DWM is up to Issue 465 and the comic strip has been a regular feature from the very start. It's the pre-eminent Doctor Who comic strip, and had a near-monopoly on Who strips for most of the 1980s, 1990s and up to 2005. The only other major Doctor Who comic during this period was the short-lived Radio Times strip (1996-1997), discussed below. But for a lot of Who fans, the Marvel/Panini strip is the definitive version.

In addition to DWM, Marvel/Panini have issued numerous other Doctor Who publications featuring comics, and occasionally featured Doctor Who strips in their other titles. This is a lot of ground to cover, so I'm going to deal with them in three sections.

2a. DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

First published in October 1979, DOCTOR WHO WEEKLY ran for 43 issues before shifting to a monthly schedule in August 1980. The monthly ran under various titles in the early 1980s - DOCTOR WHO: A MARVEL MONTHLY, DOCTOR WHO MONTHLY, and THE OFFICIAL DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE - before settling on DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE. (I'll refer to it throughout as DWM for the sake of simplicity!) Since the summer of 1990 it's been published to a four-weekly schedule.

As a weekly DWM was very obviously a comic but the ongoing Doctor Who strip was retained long after the shift to monthly presaged its reformatting as a largely factually-based magazine. Only a handful of issues have featured no comic at all (#151, 163, 261 and 354) or had to substitute reprinted material (#86, 157-158, 181, 182, 184 and 307). The strip has generally featured the current Doctor, beginning with Tom Baker's, followed by Davison (from #61), Colin Baker (#88) and Sylvester McCoy (#130). Beginning with Issue #212 in 1994, thee strip changed format to feature different Doctors in each fresh serial. Following the TV Movie in 1996, it shifted, featuring Paul McGann's Doctor from #244, followed by Eccleston (#355), Tennant (#365) and Smith (#421). There are some slightly complications. The first episode of the seventh Doctor strip 'Emperor of the Daleks!' (#197) takes advantage of the form to feature the sixth Doctor and Peri instead, while McCoy's Doctor also crops up in a not-very-good 10th Anniversary New Adventures special in #305, briefly interrupting McGann's run. Three issues of the regular strip omit the Doctor completely to focus on other aspects of the Doctor Who universe (#183, 277 and 311), though the latter two are collected in the books I'm going to mention below. 'Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time' (#243) isn't a Who story proper but a comic strip *about* the TV show.

Availability:

These strips have seen lots of reprints, including reprint volumes such as VOYAGER (1989, not to be mistaken with the Panini book of the same name mentioned below) and THE MARK OF MANDRAGORA (1993). Long-standing American fans may recall the US reprints in MARVEL PREMIERE #57-60 (1980-1981) or the 23 issue American-format DOCTOR WHO comic (1984-1986), which between them collected all of the Tom strips and most of the Davison run. More recently IDW has been reprinting Marvel strips in various series DOCTOR WHO CLASSICS, most of which have been rapidly collected as books. These reprints are all with added colour - with a couple of exceptions, the DWM strip was printed in black-and-white prior to #300 in 2001.

But the quasi-definitive collections are the uniform but so-far incomplete set that Panini has been putting out since 2004. To date, Tom's entire run has been collected in THE IRON LEGION and DRAGON'S CLAW, though for some reason the two-part 4th Doctor story 'Timeslip' (#17-18) turns up in the solo Davison volume THE TIDES OF TIME instead. Colin's strips are complete in two volumes, VOYAGER and THE WORLD SHAPERS. To date there have been only two McCoy volumes: A COLD DAY IN HELL and NEMESIS OF THE DALEKS - but the run from #164-243 remains uncollected as does the later McCoy strip from #305. The plan does seem to be to bring them into print eventually. (#164-172 have previously been reprinted along with earlier McCoy strips in THE MARK OF MANDRAGORA collection from 1993.)

McGann's Doctor's adventures cover four books - ENDGAME, THE GLORIOUS DEAD, OBLIVION (the first collection of colour strips) and THE FLOOD. This is where things start to wobble a bit as Panini have allowed ENDGAME to go out of print and it's now very, very difficult to track down (finding the original issues would probably be easier and cheaper!) This is a particular shame as all the volumes from the McCoy year onwards have detailed notes sections and some of the colour books even have specially-created pages of additional art inserted into their stories. Christopher Eccleston's run also presents a problem as his entire (brief) run was assembled in a DWM Special Edition titled THE NINTH DOCTOR COLLECTED COMICS rather than a book proper; speculation that they might turn up in a future volume seems to be just that. Having said that, the collection is rather easier to come by than copies of ENDGAME.

Later Doctors are more straightfoward. Tennant's run appears in three collections - THE BETROTHAL OF SONTAR, THE WIDOW'S CURSE and THE CRIMSON HAND. Smith's has had three to date - THE CHILD OF TIME, THE CHAINS OF OLYMPUS, and HUNTERS OF THE BURNING STONE - the latter taking us up to mid-2013. But if Panini can fill in the gaps and sort out the availability issues of the McGann/Eccleston strips then this would be ideal.

And that would seem to be that, except...

*

DWM has also run "back-up" strips complementing the regular one. These were originally a dedicated part of the weekly and continued in DWM for around 18 months after it went monthly. Beginning with the Daleks, then the Cybermen, then the Sontarans, etc. they focused on aspects of the Doctor Who universe without the Doctor's intrusive premise (almost, he "narrates" most of the strips, and turns up as a supporting character in the K9-o-centric episodes in #12 and #48). The backup strips appear in #1-38, 40-51, 56-59, 61 and 64. However, 'Skywatch-7' in #58 is only part one of the story, which continues in the 1981 Winter Special (see section 2b), though both parts were reprinted to plug a gap in the publishing schedule in #85.

Since then, DWM has not mainly stuck to a single regular strip with two exceptions in the mid-1990s, both one-page strips inspired by 'The Daleks' from TV CENTURY 21. 'The Cybermen' appeared in #215-238 (1994-1996) while a direct continuation of the Dalek strip turned up in #249-254 (1997), with further instalments curtailed only by the death of artist Ron Turner the following year (completed but unlettered pages from the sequel turned up as a part of a tribute to him in 1999). DWM had two sustained runs of TV CENTURY 21 reprints in 1980-1982 and then in 1991-1992, but has otherwise preferred original comics material.

Availability:

None of these have been collected and if you want to see mid-1990s strips you will have to go for the original issue. Though the prospect of a backup strip collection at some point would appear to be a slam-dunk, Panini have apparently ruled it out. Apart from the original issues, the most complete assemblage of the original backup strip is the Marvel US DOCTOR WHO comic from 1984-1986, which has a few omissions (most obviously the 3-part Time Lord trilogy by Alan Moore, which was vetoed by the Bearded One himself).

But that's not quite everything...

*

There's also a ragbag of occasional comics material from DWM for which you *will* have to go to the original issues. These include fragments of incomplete or abandoned projects (notably the 7th Doctor newspaper strip 'Terror from the Deep' in #167-168 and an unused 8th Doctor Radio Times episode in #272), single page adaptations of the opening scenes of 'The Masque of Mandragora' (#161) and 'Terror of the Autons' (#164) and even advertising strips for the TARDIS Tuner radio ('Dr Who and the Turgids') and the 'Genesis of the Daleks' soundtrack LP, both of which appear in multiple issues of DOCTOR WHO WEEKLY. Some of these have appeared elsewhere, but they are probably not worth tracking down for their own case.

However, the one ragbag DWM strip you should immediately seek out is Gareth Roberts & Roger Langridge's 'How Much for Just the Planet?' (#301). OK, this is technically a humour strip but if you squint you can imagine otherwise. And you don't have to pay for it as it's reprinted in its entirety at the Altered Vistas site. Go see it now: http://www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/doctorless.html


2b. Doctor Who specials

Marvel/Panini have published dozens of special editions of DWM, but surprisingly little has had any original comics. Most of the comics-orientated specials published in the 1980s were all-reprint and increasingly the tone turned to non-fiction. In fact there are only two 1980s specials with original comics: DOCTOR WHO: A MARVEL WINTER SPECIAL (1981) and DOCTOR WHO SUMMER SPECIAL (1982). The former had two original backup strips, the never-reprinted 'Minatorius' (so you'll have to find this issue if you want to read it, but read my review above and don't bother) and part 2 of the aforementioned 'Skywatch-7'. The summer special is even more tenuous as both strips feature characters introduced in 'Doctor Who and the Free-Fall Warriors' (DWM #56-57) but have no connection to the TV series proper. Despite this, both were reprinted in the Marvel US series of the 1980s.

However in the 1990s, Marvel/Panini reorganised their DWM specials to include one or two strips in each issue. Here they pioneered the multi-Doctor approach later adopted by DWM (though McCoy's Doctor crops up more often than not in the earlier titles). Original comics appear in various DWM SUMMER SPECIALs (1991-1995, the 1992 volume properly being a 'Holiday Special') and DWM WINTER SPECIALs (1991, 1992 and 1994) and even a solitary DWM SPRING SPECIAL (1996), featuring the only original Cushing Doctor comic. They also revived the annual format as the DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK series for 5 volumes between 1991 and 1995 (but retaining the annoying British dating convention described in my last post), all with comics. And there were two full-length comics magazines: DOCTOR WHO CLASSIC COMICS AUTUMN SPECIAL (1993) published 'Evening's Empire', a strip planned for DWM in 1991 that was abandoned after only the first episode had appeared (#180); and the Colin Baker-scripted DOCTOR WHO: THE AGE OF CHAOS (1994), which was originally intended as a 4-issue American format miniseries.

None of these strips have been reprinted, though its a reasonable assumption that they could find their way into future Panini DWM collections. For the moment, you'll have to go for the original magazines.

Following the success of the new series, Panini published the DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL 2006 (in 2005 of course). With the BBC launching their own 'official' annual the following year this became the DOCTOR WHO STORYBOOK for the four subsequent volumes based on the Tennant Doctor. These featured one strip each, with the first reprinted in THE NINTH DOCTOR COLLECTED COMICS and the various 10th Doctor strips spread between the Panini 10th Doctor collections.


2c. Doctor Who in other Marvel publications

DWM strips have occasionally been reprinted in other Marvel comics, e.g. the early McCoy strips reappeared a few months later in something called THE MARVEL BUMPER COMIC. But the only other Marvel UK title to run a regular original Doctor Who strip was THE INCREDIBLE HULK PRESENTS, which managed 12 weekly issues featuring the McCoy Doctor in 1989. All are reprinted in Panini's NEMESIS OF THE DALEKS collection.

The McCoy Doctor has also run into Marvel UK character Death's Head on several occasions, beginning in DWM #135 in 1988. Subsequently he has twice made proper full-blown guest appearances in Death's Head's own comics, in DEATH'S HEAD #8 (1989) and THE INCOMPLETE DEATH'S HEAD #12 (1993). The latter is the final issue of a reprint series, with the Doctor appearing in new framing material. Neither have seen reprints in Doctor Who-specific titles, and its not clear if they would appear in any future Panini volume. The former has appeared in Death's Head collections though the latter is - to the best of my knowledge - unreprinted. On the plus side, the original #12 seems to be quite easy to obtain in the States (though less so for those of us who'd have to pay airmail postage rates.)


2d. Doctor Who in RADIO TIMES

The only substantial Doctor Who comic strip of the 1990s not published by Marvel/Panini was the weekly 8th Doctor strip that appeared for 32 issues of the BBC's listings magazine RADIO TIMES between May 1996 and March 1997. (They're in #3775-3816, but no one has ever referred to RADIO TIMES by its issue numbers!) There is occasional talk of a collected edition, but your best hope of finding them is tracking down the original issues, or finding if someone has posted them online. The attraction is mainly in seeing Lee Sullivan's popular (if not to my tastes) artwork, and also marvelling that despite all the impressions to the contrary these are very far from being the worst Doctor Who comics to be written by Gary Russell.


2e. Miscellaneous 1980s and 1990s strips

So total was Marvel's dominance that even these have DWM connections:

* DWM humourists Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett got to release two separate Doctor Who joke books in the late 1980s. The first of these was THE DOCTOR WHO FUN BOOK published by W.H. Allen & Co in 1987. This included the peculiar two-part "straight" strip 'The Tests of Time' alongside the comedy items. Unless someone has put them online this is its only outing. It is quite obscure for something that can claim so many comics first - first strip based around a non-contemporary Doctor, first proper multi-Doctor strip, first strip set before 'An Unearthly Child', first comics appearance of the TV version of Susan... (see my review above for more details.)

* Fleetway's 1991 COMIC RELIEF COMIC was a jam session uniting various writers, artists and characters for charidee. A two-page sequence, apparently masterminded by the then-DWM team, saw all seven Doctors to date and various companions helping Dan Dare to persuade the Mekon and various Doctor Who monsters to cough up for Comic Relief. (Not the Daleks though - Terry Nation was too stingy for that.) This borderline humour/"straight" strip turns up occasionally online, which is probably a good thing as the original comic is rare and collectible, and the charity status of the strip means that the chances of it ever being formally republished are near to zero. And its better than 'Dimensions in Time'.

NEXT: 2006 and after

PART 3 - The new series, and after (2006-present)

The appearance and success of the new series shook up Doctor Who's spinoffery, and no area more so than the comics. The proliferation of new outlets for different strips, aimed at wildly different audiences, has taken apart the notion that there's a singular definitive Doctor Who comic, no matter how much fan inertia (and, let's be honest, quality) attempts to locate that in the DWM strip.

DWM has kept going strong through this period of course, but at one point we had no fewer than four different versions of a Doctor Who comic appearing from different publishers - five if you count the 'Torchwood' comics that appeared between 2007 and 2010. Things have settled down in recent years and it seems that in future the two main strands of the comic will be the one in DWM and the radically different one in DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES...

3a. DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES

DWA began in late March 2006 as a fortnightly, then switched to a weekly in December 2008 (but reverted back to a fortnightly schedule earlier this year). The issue I checked on the Co-op shelves this morning was No. 331. Every issue to date has featured a comic strip, all illustrated by John Ross (thus giving the entire run a visual consistency rare in Doctor Who).

Like the other comics of the boom period, it begins with Tennant's Doctor - Eccleston departed too soon to escape beyond the reaches of DWM - with the eleventh taking over in 2010 from No. 160 onwards.

The 'Official' Doctor Who Annual launched in 2006 (but cover-dated 2007, naturally) and appearing every year since then has also featured at least two Ross-illustrated strips per year (though one of those in the first volume was a reprint from DWA #2). Irritatingly, the Altered Vistas site (which splits up the 10th and 11th Doctor strips into publishers) mixes these in with the DWM section rather than the DWA ones.

DWA seems to have become the barometer of Doctor Who's TV fortunes - squarely aimed at the kiddie market, its editors are said to have been vocal about the impact of the series' off-TV years on its sales. It connects to the general audience in a way that the more compact, fan-orientated DWM doesn't.

Availability:

In some ways this is a situation akin to TV COMIC in the 1960s and 1970s. DWA is basically a disposable publication designed the entertain kids before being thrown away. The difference now is that most people, even the kids, will know that these things are collectible, so it should be much easier to track down extant copies but much harder to find people flogging them off cheap in ignorance of the fact that they might be worth anything.

And the original issues are the only place you will find the DWA comics. Comics fans have speculated about the possibility of reprint volumes, but unlike the DWM strips (which even in the early days were conceived of as something that could be reprinted) their very ephemerality makes it seem unlikely that any such volume will appear. And while they boost far superior art and (in some cases) writing to the TV COMIC strips, in other ways they are more rigidly restricted and formulaic in their scope.

The viability of a DWA reprint collection is one of the great unknowns of the current Who comics scene. It might be a bad sign for the programme if one should ever appear, signifying that for a generation of readers the attraction of New Who is no longer novelty but nostalgia.


3b. DOCTOR WHO: BATTLES IN TIME

Around the time that DWA appeared, the early test issues of the fortnightly gaming magazine BATTLES IN TIME were being published as a regional try-out. Deemed a success, the magazine proper was launched in September 2006 and ran for 70 issues concluding in May 2009. Each issue featured a 10th Doctor comic strip (illustrated by John Ross initially but mainly Lee Sullivan), none of which have been reprinted anywhere.

Availability:

You'll have to go for the original issues, with the caveat that a magazine specifically designed as a collectible partwork is going to present unique challenges for anyone trying to track down every issue. The fact that the series is now concluded and that there's enough BATTLES IN TIME strip material to fill one or two comfortable makes me feel that reprint books are more viable than they are for DWA, but still not terribly likely.


3c. IDW

A mere 30 years after Doctor Who got popular in the US, the BBC licenced an original American comic book in the traditional US format. They have recently unlicenced it so this sequence is on the verge of shutting down. Under the terms of the agreement, these are not for sale in the UK, though British readers can track them down readily enough via specialist comics shops. I've already mentioned the DWM reprints, so this will focus on their original comics.

Two things strike one about the IDW comics. First, compared to the demented-wedding-cake evolution of DWM, the IDW series seems to be neurotically schematic in its separation of its output into series, mini-series and specials. Second, almost everything that IDW puts into print as singleton comics is already pre-collected, the product of an era when rather than books assembling the pieces that seemed worthwhile from among the ephemera, the floppies are instead loss-leaders for the collections. Availability is not an issue for IDW comics, though it will be once the licence expires.

Keeping track of what they've published can be a bit of a nightmare, especially as their output is comparatively. They began in 2008 with a 6-issue mini-series titled just DOCTOR WHO (collected, and reviewed above, as AGENT PROVOCATEUR) followed by DOCTOR WHO: THE FORGOTTEN in the same format. Both of these were 10th Doctor stories, though the latter contains embedded mini-adventures for all 9 previous Doctors. 2009 saw the launch of a series of six individually titled comics (later assembled in DOCTOR WHO: THROUGH TIME AND SPACE, again see above for my comments), and while these were still appearing they launched an ongoing monthly comic book series that ran for 16 issues, expiring in the autumn of 2010. This comprises the entirety of IDW's ongoing 10th Doctor seires, along with the strips in DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL 2010 (which was really was published in 2010 - possibly a sign that colonials are less willing to tolerate temporal ambiguity than us Brits.)

Phew! Got that? Don't panic, but it gets worse...

For the 11th Doctor, IDW relaunched their ongoing DOCTOR WHO from scratch with #1 in late 2010. Once again this series ran for 16 monthly issues (this is the run with Kevin the Dinosaur for the curious). Smith's Doctor also got a separate 4-issue miniseries, DOCTOR WHO: A FAIRYTALE LIFE in early 2011 and further strips in DOCTOR WHO ANNUAL 2011 later the same year.

One 11th Doctor strip that hasn't been reprinted, and will presumably a collectors' nightmare in future is the DOCTOR WHO CONVENTION SPECIAL, which was published for the 2011 San Diego Comic Con; only a few copies snuck out to other retailers.

Then we have the 8-issue mini-series/crossover abomination STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION/DOCTOR WHO: ASSIMILATION2, which was published through 2012 and has art that will make your eyes bleed. As this was winding down, IDW came out with DOCTOR WHO SPECIAL 2012 (presumably retitled to avoid confuse readers with entirely logically-dated annuals) and a third ongoing DOCTOR WHO series, again starting from #1. Throughout 2013 this has been joined by a 12-part maxi-series, DOCTOR WHO: PRISONERS OF TIME, which celebrates the 50th anniversary by featuring a different Doctor in each issue.

Which is where we came in....


3d. BBC graphic novels

One area that has remained comparatively unexploited until recently is the idea of an original graphic novel based on Doctor Who. THE AGE OF CHAOS came closest, but even that was intended for serialisation and only released in one go (in magazine format) by an accident of publishing. The recent 11th Doctor hardcovers DOCTOR WHO: THE ONLY GOOD DALEK (2010) and DOCTOR WHO: THE DALEK PROJECT (2012) represent ambitious attempts on BBC Books' part to change that situation, but the fact that we've only seen two such books to date suggests that there are still practical problems, not all of which can be pinned on Justin Richards commissioning himself yet again. But with IDW out of the picture and DWA aimed securely at the juvenile market, this might still blossom into a more substantial range.

Availability:

Both volumes are still in print.


3e. Miscellaneous new series comics

* In the spring of 2008, the Doctor Who website launched a comics creator portal that allowed users to build their own Doctor Who stories out of clipart. They promoted this by getting 10 Who-related people, including Paul Cornell and Jacqueline Rayner, both of whom had Doctor Who comics form, to put together their own DOCTOR WHO WRITERS' COMICS and published them online at a weekly rate. This feature is now defunct and the strips - which to the best of my knowledge have never been properly printed anywhere - have vanished. The numerous home-made strips put together by fans users are beyond the scope of this post, even - sadly - my own effort in which David Tennant makes a nervous but heartfelt declaration of erotic love to a stoic Ood Sigma.

* THE BRILLIANT BOOK 2012 includes 'Planet of the Rain Gods', a three-page adaptation of the unrealised opening scene from 'The Doctor's Wife'. The book is still available and well-worth getting for both Who and Neil Gaiman/Mark Buckingham comics completists alike.

Have I missed anything out?

I wouldn't know, but this is awesome research.

You should get an account at the Grand Comics Database and help fill in their incomplete info on Doctor Who comics.

Oh, and apparently one can purchase a copy of the convention special on eBay for $25.

Here's a bit of a milestone for me... I've finally read every single Doctor Who or spinoff strip published by Marvel or Panini before 2013!

This is not such an amazing feat as most of their Who material is easy enough to track down at a not unreasonable price, moreso since Panini began its uniform reprint collections ten years ago. But one strip, unlikely to be reprinted in any Doctor Who tome, has always eluded me until now. It's the Doctor's guest appearance in the 12th and final issue of the maxi-series 'The Incomplete Death's Head', cover dated December 1993.

This was a basically a reprint series with new framing material, built around the Marvel UK comic's character 'Death's Head', a mildly world-weary time travelling cyborg mercenary who had first appeared in the late 1980s but by now had gone through a couple of fashionable reboots and was effectively an entirely different character. The original version had waltzed through various Marvel UK titles in what seemed like a sustained but ultimately diffuse attempt to create a Marvel UK universe in imitation of (and intersecting with) the byzantine continuity of its American parent. The Doctor was roped into this occasionally, and had in fact first met Death's Head in a one-off DWM story in 1988. The following year, he returned the "favour" by showing up as a guest character in an issue of Death's Head's own comic, in which evil capitalist frog Josiah W. Dogbolter hires DH to whack out the Doctor once and for all. (It doesn't work.) Both of these stories had been reprinted in earlier issues of 'The Incomplete Death's Head', as was the DH-free but apparently related 'Keepsake' from 1988.

This final issue wraps up the framing story but is built round two reprints: an adventure of 'The Sensational She-Hulk', plus the DWM strip 'Party Animals' (1991), here rendered in garish colouring that flatters the likeness of neither Sylvester McCoy nor Sophie Aldred. Nor indeed Nicholas Briggs, the Audio Visuals Doctor who makes his first BBC sanctioned appearance here (and his last unless you count the time that Shayde spent several months disguised as him in 1998).

'Party Animals' was one of Gary Russell's first Doctor Who stories and it shows a thematic consistency with his later work in the sense that its an incoherent mess that chucks in whatever ideas the author had at the time. Here at least that applies to an eight page romp that's basically about a punch-up at a party and is vaguely tolerable on that basis. Death's Head is present only as one of several familiar characters from Doctor Who (various familiar TV monsters including two kissing Daleks [!], Beep the Meep, Abslom Daak, the Free-fall Warriors, Shayde, Dr Ivan Asimoff, Tom Baker, that family of tiny penguins who used to follow Frobisher around...) and elsewhere (Klingons, Sapphire & Steel, Bart Simpson, Steed and Mrs Peel, Patrick McGoohan, the Mekon...) It's less a story than a shopping list - a very stupid shopping list, but at least an inoffensive one.

The She-Hulk reprint is of passing Doctor Who interest, being an example of early artwork from the new series' future conceptual artist Bryan Hitch. It's very early 1990s Marvel in style, which makes everyone look squat and stocky but is better than anything else in this issue, particularly the framing sequence which is unfortunately sub-Rob Liefeld, lots of muscles and scowls and blades and contempt for basic anatomy. (Penciller Simon Coleby went onto better things, as did writer Dan Abnett, though the script betrays none of the corny wit that marks his better comics work - including for DWM in the same period.)

But it's the framing material that's of most Doctor Who interest featuring as it does a surprise original appearance by the seventh Doctor. It's so much of a surprise that they don't bother to mention it on the cover (but we are told that this issue is "guest starring the Sensational She-Hulk"!) In fact the Doctor's appearance is fairly perfunctory. He turns up at the end to turn off the plot (such as it is - it seems to involve an ex-Dogbolter employee with a grudge working it off on Death's Head sidekick, described by Altered Vistas as "a woman with very large hair who dresses like a stripper from the 1980s"). Coleby's likeness of McCoy is as unfortunate as everyone else's from this era. The Doctor appears in the background of the splash opening page, seemingly about seven foot tall with mighty thews. It doesn't improve from there.

More interestingly this sequence ties up an ongoing story thread that ran in DWM between 1988 and 1991 that we all thought had been tied up already in 'Party Animals'. For the first three years of his comic strip life, the seventh Doctor was shown trying to get to the swamp planet Maruthea for his friend Bonjaxx's birthday. In 'Party Animals' he finally gets there, except Maruthea is now a space station (there's a line in this very issue that explains this, or at least pretends to) and Bonjaxx turns out to be a Daemon (Azal was a really big liar).

Except in this issue we discover that the Doctor's secret purpose for coming here was Death's Head-related and he was actually manipulating our hero's history for some entirely obscure reason. It's a fine example of the gaping chasm between the McSmurf seventh Doctor of his early years and the entirely incompatible "player of games on a thousand boards" concept that was thrust upon him later on. If The Incomplete Death Head No. 12 does nothing else, it exposes the sheer depth (or shallowness) of inanity that underpinned this particular development in Doctor Who's conception of its lead character. Unfortunately it's still not very good.

One final mystery: no one seems to know what this comic is called. It's been referred to as 'Mind-Meet!' (apparently the title of an earlier issue that became appended to the framing sequence as a whole), 'The End... Yes?' (actually the closing caption for this issue), while the cover plumps for 'The Final Chapter!' It would be hard to care about any of this except that there's always been something faintly charming about the original Death's Head, and mildly intriguing about having him face off against the Doctor. Which is why it's such a shame that they barely interact in this story at all. DH has no dialogue in 'Party Animals' and gets zapped unconscious just as the Doctor makes his entrance into the framing sequence. And that's a bit of a shame, yes?

Here's a bit of a milestone for me... I've finally read every single Doctor Who or spinoff strip published by Marvel or Panini before 2013!

I'm not sure what's in order here - congratulations or commiserations? A bottle of champagne or a psychiatrist?

most of their Who material is easy enough to track down at a not unreasonable price

ANY price for THIS stuff would be unreasonable! THEY should be paying YOU!

in which evil capitalist frog Josiah W. Dogbolter hires DH to whack out the Doctor once and for all.

I know that name!

How do I...

...Oh. He appeared in the Maltese Penguin audio, didn't he.

Nor indeed Nicholas Briggs, the Audio Visuals Doctor who makes his first BBC sanctioned appearance here

Jeez. THESE days if you so much as put an Adipose knitting pattern up online the BBC threaten to sue. But THEN they not only ignored Briggs having the unmitigated cheek to CALL HIMSELF THE DOCTOR for 27 (26. Whatever.) cassettes, they REWARDED him for his INCREDIBLE CHEEK as well? (Um, not that it's necessarily a reward to have your face in a comic-strip. In fact, I'm astonished anyone recognised it.)

(various familiar TV monsters including two kissing Daleks [!]...It's less a story than a shopping list - a very stupid shopping list, but at least an inoffensive one.

INOFFENSIVE?!

I for one find kissing Daleks VERY OFFENSIVE INDEED.

The She-Hulk reprint is of passing Doctor Who interest, being an example of early artwork from the new series' future conceptual artist Bryan Hitch.

We obviously have a different definition of the word 'interest'.

But it's the framing material that's of most Doctor Who interest featuring as it does a surprise original appearance by the seventh Doctor. It's so much of a surprise that they don't bother to mention it on the cover (but we are told that this issue is "guest starring the Sensational She-Hulk"!)

Poor darling Sylvester must have put up with a LOT of insults over the years, but THAT must take the biscuit.

The Doctor appears in the background of the splash opening page, seemingly about seven foot tall with mighty thews.

Thews?

It's a fine example of the gaping chasm between the McSmurf seventh Doctor of his early years and the entirely incompatible "player of games on a thousand boards" concept that was thrust upon him later on. If The Incomplete Death Head No. 12 does nothing else, it exposes the sheer depth (or shallowness) of inanity that underpinned this particular development in Doctor Who's conception of its lead character.

Oi!

Surely it's the initial Seventh Doctor character (or lack thereof) that's the problem, not his (admittedly rather abrupt) metamorphosis into the intriguing carver-of-bones-into-chess-pieces we all know and love.

Thews?

What barbarian warriors have instead of legs.

Not sure if anyone is interested in this or if it's USA only, but a site called Humble Bundle is offering electronic collections of IDW's run of Doctor Who comics.

Only recently heard of Humble Bundle, apparently it started off selling video games, but has recently started offering comics offered by companies like Image & now IDW. Never used it myself, so I couldn't say what their service is like.

So, how do we feel about the TV series canonising Abslom Daak?

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT! When! WHERE??

A picture of him appears on a screen along with various other Doctor Who characters in the trailer for next week's one.

You're ******* KIDDING me.

How the hell would you RECOGNISE him from those godawful comics, anyway??

Here's a breakdown of what we saw in the trailer:

http://tardismusings.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/time-heist-cameos.html

They really should have taken the time to make a proper mug shot of the guy, the BBC I mean, with a real actor. How hard would it have been to find someone who looks enough like him to be recognized as Abslom Daak, once given adequate makeup and garb?

But that would have involved employing an actor and photographer, designing a costume and make-up, etc. just for a split second throwaway gag, in a series that's been a bit strapped for cash lately and is run by a dour penny-pinching Scot...

Here's a breakdown of what we saw in the trailer:

Omigawd!!! Slitheen! Captain John! The...TRICKSTER?! This is fantastic!

They really should have taken the time to make a proper mug shot of the guy, the BBC I mean, with a real actor.

Hey, if the Time Lords of Gallifrey (glowy-eyed more-powerful-than-Our-Hero period) thought that badly-drawn mugshots were good enough for the DOCTOR...

I've said it (or similar) before. Just because his image appears onscreen doesn't mean all those stories are canonized any more than the onscreen apperance of each Doctor canonizes their comic strips. Even if the name Abslom Daak appears onscreen, it only means that someone named that and who looked like that is in the universe, but not necessarily those stories.

Let's face it: Moffat or someone just thought it'd be funny.

Is IT funny. But whether we like it or not (and I don't), every such event chips away further at the nothing-but-TV-is-canon position. Because you can't use the excuse of 'what a staggering coincidence that the books/audios/comics/short stories just happened to foresee Abslom Daak/Sally Sparrow reuniting the Doctor with his TARDIS/the Doctor destroying Gallifrey in a Time War/the Doctor disguised as a 1910s history teacher falling in love with Joan Redfern, etc etc' FOREVER...

But that would have involved employing an actor and photographer, designing a costume and make-up, etc. just for a split second throwaway gag, in a series that's been a bit strapped for cash lately and is run by a dour penny-pinching Scot...

Then they could have outsourced it to the cosplay community, made it a contest or something. There would have been no lack of people who would have done them that little favor just for the glory and the bragging rights.

Even I would draw the line at dressing up as Abslom Daak Dalek Killer.

But of course you're quite right.

I've recently had the misfortune to read 'The Dalek Project', which has most of the same flaws as 'The Only Good Dalek' but manages to be even more awful, with less story (to the extent that it begins with a lengthy near-future sequence that seems almost entirely unrelated to the main story, which is told in flashback). Such story as there is seems mainly to exist as an excuse for lots of double page spreads of Daleks doing trench warfare.

Famously, this was supposed to be the first BBC Doctor Who graphic novel, featuring the 10th Doctor, but was postponed by the advent of Matt Smith and more specifically by the advent of 'Victory of the Daleks', which has a very similar premise and - astonishingly - is more entertaining.

It's hard not to suspect that a lot of work was done before the plugged was pulled on the initial publication, not least because of the many inventive ways Mike Collins comes up with to disguise the Doctor's features throughout. A lot of the time Matt Smith is reduced to an indistinct squiggle or a silhouette, giving the overall effect of those TV Comic reprints of the late 1970s that hastily plastered Tom Baker's face over art that had originally featured Jon Pertwee. It's over 100 pages in before we come to a page that looks like it was put together with Matt Smith's likeness there from the start.

This is about the only distinctive thing about the art, apart from a page of Gavrilo Princip in 1914 which makes him look about twice as old as he actually was. (The story tastelessly floats the idea that Princip was a Dalek agent and glosses over the botched circumstances of the Sarajevo assassinations.) Collins can do a lot better than anything we see here, but then he isn't given much interesting to draw beyond double page spreads of the Daleks in battle. Justin Richards remains an entirely inappropriate writer for these comics, the only aptitude for it being his amazing ability to commission himself. The book feels less like a comic and more like one of his more forgettable novels that's been leadenly translated into a different medium, rather than conceived for it from the get-go. Having the Doctor tell the story in flashback reinforces this sense that we're looking less at a graphic novel and more at a shonkily-illustrated storybook.

The overall effect is of a series that has already settled into a comfortable rut and has no intention of budging from it so long as sales hold up. After just two books that's almost an achievement.

There are (curiously) two official Doctor Who calendars for 2015. One of them is comics themed but features a lot of specially commissioned art done in a kind of overheated mid-1970s Marvel style that resembles no comic that Doctor Who has ever been in.

And so another TV Comic story is canonised!

WHAT! Where?

SPOILERS!!!

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/A_Christmas_Story_%28comic_story%29

Plus, the Doctor has multiple grandchildren... like John and Gillian!

Oh. Dear.

Look, I'm sure it's an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT and TOTALLY NON-CANONICAL Father Christmas from the one in The Real Thing.

I guess we'll have to wait and find out.

IBOOKWYRME in Companions: Original Series: Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart thread: You read the novels; you listen to the audios. What have you got against the comics?

There's just something about stupid bubbles coming out of the mouths of badly-drawn figures that I just don't see the point of.

Of course, I'm not PREJUDICED. I love When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs. I love DWM's The Lodger and that farewell-to-Donna strip and the one where all the Doctor's enemies kill themselves before he arrives. It's just that an even HIGHER percentage of comics are rubbish than novels or audios.

Have you tried the newer IDW or Titan comics? They are at least as good as the audios!

Nope, I only read the abom- er, critters in DWM. The Nitcentral Comics thread is kept nicely full by losers - um, I mean martyrs - like Kate who are actually prepared to read the things and even have opinions on them that don't just consist of 'bury me now' so there's no hurry for ME to plunge into any IDW or Titan comic things (whatever they are) just yet.

http://titan-comics.com/c/108-doctor-who-the-twelfth-doctor/

There are also Tenth & Eleventh Doctor tales out.

They are at least as good as the audios!

You're not over-selling them here...

Nope, I only read the abom- er, critters in DWM.

And those are the good ones...!

You're not over-selling them here...

True, that.

I enjoy them a great deal more than the audios, but then, I like comic books.

I like comics too, but comic versions of TV shows & movies usually suffer because comics are a static medium of words and pictures while TV & movies are moving, and you have sounds and actors can emote and all these things can provide a distraction to a weak story whereas a comic with a weak story is far more noticeable. ;-)

Don't know if any shops in England will be celebrating it, but one of the Gold offerings* for Free Comic Book Day will be the Doctor Who Special from Titan comics.

* Gold offerings are available at all participating shops for FCBD, unlike Silver offerings which are harder to find.

It will feature 3 new stories with the 10th, 11th & 12th Doctors (separately, apparently.)

While I know it will never happen the mental image of Emily standing in line amongst comic geeks and the Not-we waiting for her copy just amuses me. ;-)

And now, Nine is getting a post-"The Doctor Dances" five issue miniseries with Rose and Jack. Hello, comic store!

The Daft Dimension is a series of comedic comic strips published in DWM.

#481:
Pretty funny strip involving Rusty and his contribution to Christmas.

Hey, Titan Comics is having a contest connected with Free Comic Book Day.

I'll just repost the info from the Tumblr page.

"This Free Comic Book Day, May 2, Win Doctor Who Prizes For You and Your Local Comic Store!

All you need to do to be in with the chance of winning a bag full of Doctor Who comics, including rare collectible covers, signed items and merchandise, including SDCC and NYCC items, is send us a picture of yourself holding up a copy of the FCBD Doctor Who edition outside your local comic store.

Entries can be submitted via Twitter and must include the Titan Comics Twitter handle @ComicsTitan

One winner and their local store will be picked after the submission deadline: Midnight EDT, Saturday May 2 and both will receive a bundle!

Please follow @Comicstitan on Twitter as the winner will be contacted directly via Twitter."

I can just see Emily now salivating over this contest. ;-)

Good luck to anyone who participates.

I can just see Emily now salivating over this contest. ;-)

ABSOLUTELY. Just as soon as I've a) discovered where my local comic book store is, b) restrained myself from fire-bombing it, and c) worked out what the hell a FCBD Doctor Who edition is, I will SO be winning this thing...

The FCBD Doctor Who edition.

Sadly, neither of the two shops I hit had the Doctor Who comic amongst their offerings.

The Daft Dimension (DWM #482):
Fun comic with Clara asking the Doctor about the significance of the blackboard and with what the latter does with it in the presence of familiar enemies around.

*Whips out copy of 482*

Ooh, that's just MEAN. Even the Daleks don't deserve that fingernails-down-the-blackboard sound...

(posting this here too as it's important) I always planned if I ever wrote a comic the the most evil, ruthless and intelligent super-villain, the man every single hero dreads having to face would be Dr Gordon Moffatt and would be a very polite middle aged man you plots world domination while wearing a sweater and comfortable shoes.

Emily in the magazines thread:

The Black Legacy comic may not quite have got the hang of Cybermen: 'It is indeed awesome, Cyberleader Maxel...almost frightening!' 'If only Loktar could be here to see THIS!' 'What? Who...NO! Blood of my ancestors, NOOOOOOOO...'

It might have been better if another race had been used.

Still, this was a creepy little tale. I loved the ending in which the Sontarans land on the planet, and the Apocalypse Device creature is watching. You get the sense that it's all going to happen again. Kind of like the end of a slasher movie.

Space Helmet for a Cow: 'In TV Comic, John and Gillian's granddad suddenly got a new [face], without any explanation whatsoever. But they didn't seem to mind; the message appeared to be: Kids, if a complete stranger turns up claiming to be your grandfather and tries to bundle you into a box, just go with it.' -

Dalek Second Empire
http://www.cg-lair.co.uk/daleks/secemp-index.htm
(I haven't forgotten Emily).

Rich ComixBlogs
http://comics.shipsinker.com/downloads/
1.The Ten Doctors. Anniversy special.
2.The Stalker of Norfolk. 3rd Doctor

Dalek Second Empire
http://www.cg-lair.co.uk/daleks/secemp-index.htm
(I haven't forgotten Emily).

Alright, I SAID I'd do it (dammed if I can remember how you tricked me into THAT) - might as well get it over with *sigh*

Why have so many Daleks got silly little grills on their backs?

Daleks have 'first captain's and 'general's?

YTTRAL? XENOL? MR ZALLOXIZ? Now they have NAMES? Who the hell d'they think they ARE, the Cult of Skaro?

And they say things like 'He has not summoned you half way across the galaxy for the pleasure of your company' 'Afraid to get mud on your fender' 'Son of a Thal! The Emperor must be exterminated!' 'Are you comfortable with your new travel machines' 'It is time to go get covered in glory' 'Run away! Run away!' 'Can you make me some copies of your Xeno - Alien Princess vid-chips' 'May the fates be with you'?

New travel machines that all but run themselves, that soon won't need a Dalek inside them? That's a bloody good point. Why DO the casings need those bubbling lumps of hate?

They have Sanitation Daleks to clean their rooms? Why not use a lesser species?

OK, that's the first hundred pages. THAT'S a fair trial. There are more than six hundred to go and frankly life's too short.

I love how one strip wrote ‘space age tea-maker’ to remind you that he is from space. even though to him and John and Gillian it wouldn’t be anything special.

"yes yes I’ll be right there but first I am going to make space tea in my space tea maker out of space tea leaves collected from space planets"

Don't forget the space water. Wonder if he uses space sugar lumps?

Well, the Gold Sponsor books have been announced for the next Free Comic Book Day (May 7, 2016) and one of the offerings is... (drumroll)... Titan Comics Doctor Who: Four Doctors Special.

Yes, I can just see Emily marking her calendar, for we know how much she loves her comics.

Oh, she's probably planning which alien to dress up as for when she camps out in front of a participating comic shop so she can be first in line.

I would suggest a Yeti costume to fight off the cold and the hilarity that would ensue if you wore it using the underground. ;-)

Well, the Gold Sponsor books have been announced for the next Free Comic Book Day (May 7, 2016) and one of the offerings is... (drumroll)... Titan Comics Doctor Who: Four Doctors Special.

What, they're having to give it away for free cos NO ONE will buy it?

Makes sense.

I would suggest a Yeti costume to fight off the cold and the hilarity that would ensue if you wore it using the underground. ;-)

I can TOTALLY promise you that if I'm camping in front of a participating comic shop I WILL be dressed as a Yeti.

What, they're having to give it away for free cos NO ONE will buy it?

Free Comic Book Day is a marketing thing. Bring in non-comics buyers and hope the free issue will be good enough to keep them coming back for future issues.

Not unlike drug dealers, give them a free sample, get them hooked, customer for life. ;-)

I can TOTALLY promise you that if I'm camping in front of a participating comic shop I WILL be dressed as a Yeti.

One of us! One of us! One of us! ;-)

The operative word being 'if', aka NEVER IN A BILLION YEARS.

One of us! One of us! One of us!

What does "I Robot" have to do with this?

I don't remember THAT from the book?

Isn't it a reference to 'Freaks'?

I don't remember THAT from the book?

It's from the Will Smith movie. He tracks a fugitive robot to a factory where it hid in that day's new batch or robots, and when he asks them which one is the one he seeks, they all answer together "One of us!"

Isn't it a reference to 'Freaks'?

Possibly. The I Robot movie is the first thing that popped in my mind.

'Titan Comics have announced that Doctor Who TV spinoff Torchwood is back, in an all-new ongoing comic series starring the daring Captain Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper.

The series is written by Captain Jack himself – John Barrowman – and Carole E. Barrowman' - NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Just because we all love Captain Jack more than life itself is NO REASON TO PERMIT HIM TO WRITE ANYTHING EVER AGAIN HAVEN'T YOU PEOPLE READ EXODUS CODE?!

On the plus side: it's a comic.

You mean, at least it's not a PROPER book he'll be ruining? Fair enough.

Doctor Who: Free Comic Book Day (2016)

Robo Rampage (Twelfth Doctor)

Osgood phones the Doctor because there's a giant robot rampaging through London, the robot, K2, is a duplicate of Kettlewell's robot from Robot. (The government figured that as technology had advanced since then they should be able to control the living metal now.)
1. Why use Kettlewell's robot design for the experiment? Why not test it on a design with an off switch?
2. K1 went crazy because it was ordered to do things that went against it's programming. No explanation for K2's 'kill all humans' attitude is given.
3. The K1 was only a giant because the Brigadier used a disintegrator ray on it. Why was K2 giant-sized?

No explanation for K2's 'kill all humans' attitude is given.

It's annoyed about being named after a mountain?

"I wanted to be called Everest, but noooooo, they had to name me after the second tallest mountain! That's it you're all dead!"

The comics could have had a female Doctor.

It's just as well they didn't.

Being forced to laud the comics would have had a bad effect on my soul. Or digestion. Or SOMETHING.

Weirdly, The Incredible Hulk Presents did exactly this storyline a year later without anyone getting upset (possibly because no one read it and it got cancelled after 12 issues).

The Incredible Hulk met two future Doctors? 8-o

I tried looking up The Incredible Hulk Presents at the Grand Comics Database, but couldn't find anything by that title.

It was a weekly anthology aimed at children published for 12 issues over the autumn of 1989. More details of it, and its Who strips, here:

http://www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/seventh_doctor.html#Hulk

And the Incredible Hulk didn't actually meet the Doctor, just presented him.

Mike Collins in DWM: 'When I first worked on Doctor Who comics in the 80s, John Freeman said we should try to do things the TV show never could - stuff that was too big in scale and expensive and just not possible to put on screen. But a lot of that stuff is now possible...The TV show can almost do more than the comic now...They're sort of in competition - who can do the wildest, maddest thing?' - yeah, maybe you comic people should just admit YOU'VE LOST and...go away?

(Though to be fair, at least some comic strips have actually been produced this year, which is more than you can say for the Real Thing.)

Oh, and apparently 36 years after the DWM editor promised an irate letter-writer that the extermination of Abslom Daak's beloved means that 'The happy ending is merely delayed until later, Chris, so all is not lost!'...Daak is STILL waiting for his happy ending...

Second Empire Episode 3:
Interesting to see Daleks talk in the aftermath of a battle.
Interesting cliffhanger as a Dalek ship fires a gun.

Second Empire Episode 5:
The vat scene reminded me of the scene with the mutants in Genesis of the Daleks.
Interesting on the Emperor explaining how he knows the way Xenol thinks in his planning.

Doctor Who In Lilliput:
Doctor Who In Lilliput is a story on the Give-A-Show Projector released in the 1960s and is included in The Chase DVD release.
Doctor Who In Lilliput has the First Doctor and his two companions visit a world where everything is much bigger than them.
This is undoubtedly a retelling of the First Doctor TV story Planet of Giants and it very quick enjoyable retelling of that story.

Dr Who On The Aqua Planet:
A story from the Give-a-Show Projector included in The Chase DVD release.
Fascinating little story in which the Doctor and his companions arrive on the said Aqua Planet and battling a monster in the sea.

Dr Who Meets The Watermen:
A story on the Give-A-Show Projector included in The Chase DVD.
This is not much of an adventure because while the Doctor does meet the Watermen, it however has the Doctor fixing the Watermen’s spaceship and the Watermen then make their way to wherever their journey takes them.

HARTNELL's a spaceship-repair-man since WHEN!

Yeah it would have been such a sight seeing Hartnell doing that for real.

Second Empire Episode 9:
Penultimate episode.
Funny how James Bond as well as The Prisoner references got inserted here but not with them being said references within the narrative as I don’t think the Daleks have seen the allusions concerned.
Also funny is the singing of the Daisy Daisy song but as Lazy Lazy.
There is also a reference to 1701 and that is the number of the starship Enterprise.
Not bad the appearance of the Mechanoids here.

Not bad the appearance of the Mechanoids here.

In that case it must be the FIRST not-bad appearance the boring creatures had...(Sixth Doctor audio The Juggernauts tried to liven them up by having Davros shove human body-parts inside them for no reason I can remember. Failed.)

Dr Who and the Nerve Machine:
A story from the Give-A-Show Projector included in The Chase DVD.
The Doctor gets psychically controlled by the Daleks through the said Nerve Machine.
Intriguing little story on this premise in which the Daleks’ power on the Doctor with this machine gets overcome thanks to Ian’s efforts in removing the Doctor from this control.

Escape from the Aquafien:
A story from the Give-A-Show Projector included in The Chase DVD.
The time travellers encountered the sea creatures the Aquarien.
The Aquarien are very menacing as the TARDIS crew barely got away with their lives.

According to Vworp Vworp Issue 3, comics writer Grant Morrison attempted to replace the eponymous wheezing groaning sound effect with something dull and full of "h"s. Sacrilege!

To be fair, the TARDIS has never made a sound remotely resembling 'Vworp Vworp'.

So perhaps he shouldn't die for his blasphemy, just lose a limb or two?

Where Diamonds Are Worthless:
A story included in the Give-A-Show Projector included in The Chase DVD.
The time travellers land on a planet when Ian found lots of diamonds.
However the Doctor says that they are worthless as they disappear in the TARDIS once she takes off.
Finding diamonds and not able to collect them hardly makes for an exciting story and a bit off to what is now generally known about Doctors and their companions as they are hardly treasure hunters.

Why the hell did the diamonds disappear?

And bear in mind that not all Companions are rabidly unmaterialistic. Harry quite fancied pocketing some of that Vogan gold...

According to Vworp Vworp Issue 3, Gary Russell doesn't like Abslom Daak much. I don't either. Which means I agree with Gary Russell on something, and now I need to scrub myself thoroughly to remove the taint.

Now, now. Not liking Abslom Daak is just one of those things that the whole of humanity has in common. Even ACE was only pretending to fancy him and we all know what the NA-Ace was like...

On The Planet Vortis:
A story included in the Give-A-Show included in The Chase DVD.
This is a re-telling of The Web Planet with the Doctor and his companions arriving on the Planet Vortis.
Enjoyable little prologue of what was happening just prior to the arrival of the time travellers.
It seemed that On The Planet Vortis was told as Part 1 of a two part story with the second part being The Zarbi Are Destroyed.
Interesting way to tell the beginning of a two-parter here.

This is a re-telling of The Web Planet with the Doctor and his companions arriving on the Planet Vortis.

Why gods, WHY? We have NOVELS returning to Vortis (Twilight of the Gods), we have AUDIOS returning to Vortis (Return to the Web Planet), now we have COMICS returning to Vortis...honestly, I have no objection to the occasional mention of the Isop Galaxy or a CGI spider bumping into the camera in tribute, but surely SOME lines have to be drawn EVENTUALLY...

But the Doctor returned to Vortis in comics before he did in any other medium (in TV Comic No. 693, published during the week after the final episode of 'The Web Planet' was broadcast).

And the Chad Valley comic strip-style slides were released in 1965 as well, before even 'Doctor Who and the Zarbi' was published.

Look, I don't care who did what when - time-wimeyness makes it irrelevant - I just want it to STOP.

I mean, THAT excruciatingly tedious story gets endless sequels whilst NEVER ONCE have we learnt how Swampie society coped after its god went splat...

Emily - Why the hell did the diamonds disappear?

There's a bad old time travel trope (well, actually there are quite a few of them, but I'll just focus on this one) where time travelers pick up an object in one time period and it stays in that time period.

It doesn't show up so much these days, probably because people pointed out that the time travelers didn't stay behind in their time period when the time machine originally left, so there's no good reason why objects from other time periods would stay behind as well.

I've just found a hilarious reference book called 'Graphic Novels: A Bibliographic Guide to Book-Length Comics' (1995) by one D. Aviva Rothschild. It's hilarious on account of the entries for 'Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer' and 'The Mark of Mandragora', which assume that the seventh Doctor was an incarnation created specifically for DWM and never appeared on screen.

On the other hand, Rothschild clearly never had to sit through any of Sylvester McCoy's performances, so perhaps the last laugh is on us.

OI! There is NOTHING WRONG with McCoy's performances (OK, except in Time and the Rani, of course, in which every single thing is an abomination unto the Lord). Perhaps the writer just didn't recognise our beloved Seventh Doctor's adorable features in the badly-drawn comic-book nonsenses?

Second Empire Short 2 – The Blue Box:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll7Z2o2pGto

Amusing piece of a Dalek seeing what the said blue box as well as getting a hint a certain occupant in it.

Second Empire Short: Outpost Delta:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=borsBAk1wSc

Interesting piece about the request for reinforcements at Outpost Delta.

Second Empire – Enterprising Daleks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjqagWdpYrU&index=2&list=PLbu6fw7aAHg8d9lO3YVBUqka8u7MObeO4

The word enterprising isn’t used here for nothing as it emulates the introduction of the Enterprise in Star Trek (2009) only here it is with the Daleks.
Quite cheeky fun this was.

Sonic Sleuth:
Sonic Sleuth is a Eleventh Doctor comic strip story published in 2014.
Also featuring Amy Pond and it is nice to have a story with just the Eleventh Doctor and Amy as I always there were too few of these stories with just the two of them in the TV series.
In this story the Doctor misplaced his sonic screwdriver.
What ensues is amusing turn of events as the Doctor searches for it.
Funny where the sonic screwdriver turned out to be and culminating in a funny ending.

The comics where ahead of their time. More than twenty years before Mickey and Martha, they gave the Doctor a black Companion, a young woman named Sharon.

With the most enormous breasts in the universe.

You KNOW I'm not the sort of person to notice that sort of thing but BLOODY HELL they were big.

Still, Sharon's appearance in 1980 beat the TV series by twenty-seven years in regards to a black Companion.

Of course, I'm not counting any Novel or Audio Companions that may have been black during those years (since I don't have said Novels or Audios).

Still, Sharon's appearance in 1980 beat the TV series by twenty-seven years in regards to a black Companion.

You don't get bonus points, in my view, for being anti-racist whilst being blatantly sexist. Sharon's Chest was especially distasteful given that she was, technically speaking, a child who suddenly got aged several years for reasons I can't remember, so god knows how she coped with those...unorthodox protuberances (as some robot or other referred to Lucie Miller's breasts in The Cannibalists audio).

Sharon also ends up marrying a black guy - not that there's anything wrong with that per se but an interracial marriage would have been braver, oh, and (depending on how long she's been travelling with the Doctor) she might still, mentally, be ten years old or whatever.

Of course, I'm not counting any Novel or Audio Companions that may have been black during those years (since I don't have said Novels or Audios)

Roz Forrester was black. Anji Kapoor was brown. Erimem was an Egyptian royal who seemed to vary from black to white depending on which audio/novel you were listening to/reading. C'rizz was a chameleonic lizard.

With horrible inevitability, JODIE! is to have her own comic strip, coming out in September and therefore presumably (wailings and gnashings of teeth) in advance of her REAL appearance.

Comic-hater though I am, I have to admit that the sight of her surrounded by the severed heads of her previous male selves is remarkably...pleasing.

Well, better than Dimensions in Time managed this sort of thing, anyway.

To be fair her first REAL appearance was on TV back in December...

Yeah, but her first real real appearance...

Was going through the book Science fiction Comics: The Illustrated History and saw a listing for Dr. Who And The Daleks an adaptation of the movie by Dell Comics in 1966. The art was by Dick Giordano & Sal Trapani.

Things I have only just noticed: Trapani went on to be co-creator of Howard the Duck.

Now if we could just combine them into... Ducktor Who.

;-)

or a mallard with a cold: Sickth Doctor

A few of the Marvel Comics Doctor Who's brief run, in the early 1980's, include Steve Parkhouse's lumbering, plodding story, The Tides Of Time.

Reading it, and I'm not the only one to pick up on this, it's clear that Mr. Parkhouse only included the Doctor because of contractual obligations. If he could have, he would have happily ditched the Doctor and made this about his own characters. The story is full of Parkhouse's Gary Stu characters and the Doctor, who should be the main focus, comes across as an incidental character in his own story.

If you can't tell, I really didn't like this story.

Oh. There are hideous rumours that Big Finish is adapting at least one comic story, let's hope it's not that one.

Yeah, I agree. When I read a comic called Doctor Who, I want the Doctor, not a bunch of Gary Stu's.

I always found Black Legacy a creepy little tale (it's one of the stories that was reprinted in the limited run of the North American comic that Marvel did in the 1980's).

The story opens with a group of Cybermen arriving on the planet Goth.

Goth was once the home of a race called the Deathsmiths, who were masters at making weapons of all kinds. However, a few centuries before, their civilization vanished, literally overnight, and no one knew why.

The Cybermen have come to Goth in order to find any weapons that the Deathsmiths had left behind.

One of the Cyberman, Loktar, says that he had been plagued by dreams about being stalked by a nightmare creature. Maxel, the Cyberleader, says that Cybermen don't dream, and thinks that Loktar is malfunctioning. Loktar is left behind, while the rest of the Cybermen explore a nearby ruined city. Soon, Loktar is attacked by an unknown creature.

When Maxel and the other Cybermen return, they find Loktar rotting away, and nothing can save him. Regardless, Maxel decides to keep searching the planet.

Soon, he finds a container that contained something called an Apocalypse Device and is determined to find it. During the search, the Cybermen notice that the Deathsmiths seemed to have destroyed all their own spaceships for reasons unknown.

Anyway, the Cybermen are picked off, one by one, by the unknown creature, until only Maxel is left. Arming himself with all the weapons of the Deathsmiths, Maxel challenges his unknown foe that nothing will stop him from finding the Apocalypse Device.

Then a chilling voice replies that the Apocalypse Device has found him. The creature that had been killing the Cybermen was said device, the greatest creation of the Deathsmiths. This creature carried all kinds of diseases, could telepathically induce visions of terror, and was totally indestructible. The creature says that it had destroyed the Deathsmiths, when they could no longer control it.

After throwing all the weapons at the creature, and none of them having any affect, Maxel high tails it back to his ship. He is puzzled as to why the creature didn't stop him, then he realized why. The creature is trapped on Goth, and that is why the Deathsmiths destroyed all their ships, to keep the creature from getting off-planet and rampaging across the galaxy. Maxel then follows their example and blows up his own ship (with him in it) rather than set the Apocalypse Device loose in the universe.

However, the story has a grim ending. Some time later, some Sontarans arrive on Goth, in search of weapons. The Apocalypse Device watches from the shadows, this time determined to escape the planet.

Now for the nits:

-these Cybermen were VERY emotional (blood of my ancestors, NOOOOOOOO. I think another race should have been used.

-since when do Cybermen have names?

-should the Doctor be worried. Sooner or later, the Apocalypse Device is gonna get off that planet.

since when do Cybermen have names?

Tenth Planet. Ever since then they've thought better of such nonsense.

I still think Tegan should have said "But, it's wrong to hurt people!" instead of "that's sadistic" in Earthshock. Might have made more impact.

MIGHT HAVE MADE MORE IMPACT?

What, the Cybermen would have turned round and said 'Oh, I hadn't realised it was wrong to hurt people, we'll take up flower-arranging instead'...??!!

As I said, Black Legacy should have used a different race. This story called for lots of fear and terror, something the Cybermen are NOT noted for.

Oh. There are hideous rumours that Big Finish is adapting at least one comic story

No, they're doing 'The Iron Legion' and 'The Star-Beast', adapted by Alan Barnes, and presumably picked because Pat Mills has an in at Big Finish and has never had any compunction about recycling his material, as anyone who's sat through weeks of recapping at the start of any new book of 'Slaine', 'Flesh' or 'The ABC Warriors' will attest.

Well, The Iron Legion wasn't bad...for a comic...and the Star Beast, um, has Sharon and Beep the Meep, right? Is that the one where Sharon grows five years and the most enormous pair of - um, that is to say, does Sharon mature in Star Beast or a sequel?

Star Beast, um, has Sharon and Beep the Meep, right? Is that the one where Sharon grows five years and the most enormous pair of - um, that is to say, does Sharon mature in Star Beast or a sequel?

No, that happens in the story The Time Witch.

Oh thank gods.

the Star Beast, um, has Sharon and Beep the Meep, right? Is that the one where Sharon grows five years and the most enormous pair of - um, that is to say, does Sharon mature in Star Beast or a sequel?

Nope, that all happened because of a change of writers. Pat Mills - who was co-writing(ish) the strips with John Wagner - created Sharon as a kind of mirror image of the typical Who companion by making her poor, black, Northern and smart.

However, Mills and Wagner were very expensive and when DWW started slashing costs in the post-Season 17 sales slump, they were the first to go. Steve Moore took over the writing of the main strip and he was not at all keen on having to writing for a kid character, so he had her aged into a young woman in his first story, then wrote her out completely later in the year.

So that is why that happened.

Mind you, I wasn't aware of DWM at the time I was collecting the DW comics.

I donlt usually read the comics but after finding this out I needed to verify it. In the comics the Time Lord Master is a creepy little girl that regenerates? back into John Simm.
Stories: Judas Goatee, The Organ Grinder, Kill God, Outrun, The then and the Now, and Fast Asleep.

Scan Daily The Eleventh Doctor #2.12 - "Kill God"

Tardis Files wiki Mster page

They got it the wrong way around.

Oh, good grief. I was just at the Grand Comics Database and there are 14 covers for the first issue of the Thirteenth Doctor comics. (As I type this there are 12 cover scans waiting to be approved for display, which may or may not be up when you check the link.)

Not a record number mind you, when Marvel did Star Wars #1 they had something like 50 variants, not counting reprints and store variants, so it's only a less insane number of variant covers.

Well, at least there is some there.

On the other hand, at least Titan isn't one of those publishers who put out risque, nude, or worse, covers.

Still variants are a plague designed to appeal to the collector rather than the fan who just wants a good story.

Well, the books for the May 4, 2019 Free Comic Book Day and one of the offerings will be Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor.

Will Emily be so desperate for a new Jodie story in 2019 that she'll actually find a participating comic shop to get a copy???

Yeah, right.

Second Empire Short: Summoned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKgHE6PpTro

Surprisingly this featured the Cult of Skaro set something before their appearance in the Doctor Who TV series.
Certainly interesting meeting that goes on here with the Cult.

The Audios should, IMO, adapt Black Legacy, which I posted my thoughts about on July 23, 2018.

The only change I would make is replace the Cybermen with another race, because the Cybermen in BL were WAY too emotional!

Wasn't Black Legacy written by Alan Moore? A man who has frequently expressed his disdain of adaptations of his stories?

Yeah, he did write it (according to TARDIS Wiki). Man, he's one scary looking guy.

However, I don't think he'd much care about this as:

1. It's not one of his major works, it's back up comic story.

2. It's not based of a property that he himself owns, but rather he was just writing for an established franchise. And why'll the Apocalypse Device is his, the Cybermen, for example, belong to the Kit Pedler estate.

Of course, BF would still have to write a check to Mr. Moore if they ever decide to adapt Black Legacy.

It's not based of a property that he himself owns

I haven't noticed that affecting his disdain.

Yes, but this is not a big budget movie adaptation of something that was his baby right from the get-go (yes, Watchmen, I'm looking at you).

This would be an adaptation of a five page backup, from a property his doesn't own (or have emotional investment in) for an Audio series that the Not We probably don't even know exist.

Hardly the same thing here. He'd get his cut, but that's probably all he'd really care about here.

I'd love to sew BF adapt the Second Doctor "they've exiled me to Earth but i haven't been forcibly regenerated yet" period from TV Comic that culminates in "The Nightwalkers".

He'd get his cut, but that's probably all he'd really care about here.

Wow. I don't think you've read much about Alan Moore.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this point.

I can see why he'd be mad about the Watchmen movie. As I said, that was his baby, he created it and owns it.

That does not apply to Black Legacy.

But I guess we do disagree here.

and owns it.

Well, the contract gave him ownership when DC stopped publishing Watchmen, but they've made sure to keep the graphic novel in perpetual print, so they don't lose the rights. Sleezy, to be sure.

I think these people should make a reappearance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_Gillian

Why?

2. It's not based of a property that he himself owns, but rather he was just writing for an established franchise. And why'll the Apocalypse Device is his, the Cybermen, for example, belong to the Kit Pedler estate.

Marvel's reprinting of 'Black Legacy' and 'Business as Usual' in the mid-1980s US Doctor Who comic without his permission was one of the major factors in his refusing ever to work for Marvel again.

I can see why he'd be mad about the Watchmen movie. As I said, that was his baby, he created it and owns it.

He wasn't mad about the Watchmen movie. He just didn't want anything to do with it (or any other adaptation of his work for the screen).

And he doesn't own Watchmen, which is much more of a sticking point for him.

Marvel's reprinting of 'Black Legacy' and 'Business as Usual' in the mid-1980s US Doctor Who comic without his permission was one of the major factors in his refusing ever to work for Marvel again.

Really? As I said, if this had been something he was involved in shaping, like Watchmen, I could see him getting mad (and rightfully so).

But a couple of back-up features in a comic of a franchise he has no stake in!?


And he doesn't own Watchmen, which is much more of a sticking point for him.

Keith alluded to this in his post yesterday.

Well, the contract gave him ownership when DC stopped publishing Watchmen, but they've made sure to keep the graphic novel in perpetual print, so they don't lose the rights. Sleezy, to be sure.

It's not remotely sleazy. Most writers would kill to have a publisher who'd keep their work in print for over 30 years.

Moore fell out with DC while Watchmen was still being serialised in comic form. I tend to think that he has a set of objections to DC's actions that are basically right and principled, and an entirely separate and risible set of objections based on the notion that DC are evil and trying to persecute him. Keeping him on the best-seller list for decades falls into the latter category.

But a couple of back-up features in a comic of a franchise he has no stake in!?

Marvel reprinted his work without his permission. That's the point.

(Mind you there wasn't any fuss when DWM reprinted 'Business as Usual' as a filler in 1992 but that's possibly because he didn't notice.)

This is one of the articles that led to my conclusion. Points 4 and 2 specially deal with Who & Watchmen.

They are broadly correct but I don't see any grounds to colour DC's keeping Watchmen in print as "sleazy". They're a publisher, if they have a book that sells they're going to keep it in print. Any writer who doesn't grasp this fact is in the wrong business; any writer who thinks this is a form of punishment needs his or her head examined.

The article mischaracterises some things though: the idea of a comic (or collection of comics) staying in print wasn't new in the mid-1980s, and in any case 'Watchmen' is clearly written to be re-read. It has permanence in mind.

In any case, the article wrongly attributes to the split to 1989 but Moore was falling out with DC in 1986/7. His initial gripe was over the fact that DC were supplying free Watchmen badges to retailers, who were then selling them on - and he thought he should be getting a cut of that. His second gripe was over a proposed ratings system that he felt was tantamount to censorship but didn't happen because of creative opposition. He walked away from DC long before the collection first appeared in December 1987, and long long before it was clear that it was selling well enough to have a long publishing life.

So, I've had reasons - not good ones, but still reasons - to revisit a lot of Doctor Who strips from TV Comic recently and I have some speculative thoughts.

For anyone unfamiliar with the set-up here's the basics: Between 1964 and 1979, the rights to publish a regular Who strip were owned by Polystyle Publications (originally TV Publications). For most of this time the strip ran in a weekly title called TV Comic, except for a two-and-a-half year gap in 1971-3 when it was transferred to another weekly - Countdown, later known as TV Action - only to be switched back when this was cancelled.

The Countdown/TV Action strips are widely considered the highlight of Polystyle's Who output. TV Comic's reputation by contrast - and not undeservedly - is poor.

What's interesting though is that there's a bit of an overlap between the two. For most of its run the TV Comic strip was dignified with excellent art - often in colour - by Gerry Haylock, probably the finest regular artist on the Who strip prior to 1979. When TV Action was cancelled and Doctor Who returned to TV Comic, Haylock went with it. He stayed with the strip for roughly 18 more months, illustrating the remainder of the third Doctor's run and the first fourth Doctor serial. His art was now in black and white and less lavish than before but still far superior than anything that had been seen before or since in TV Comic.

Mostly, this meant the prolific John Canning, who had handled the Doctor Who art chores from 1966-71, then returned in mid-1975 for the remainder of Tom Baker's run (in some cases this meant drawing Tom Baker's face over Haylock's art for reprinted third Doctor strips, when Polystyle got too cheap to pay for anything new). Canning's work is usually damned with faint praise as "scrappy but enthusiastic". What's interesting is that for about his first year of Tom Baker strips, it's a lot better than it had been before, though it quickly degenerates towards the end of 1976 for reasons I'll come to shortly.

Nevertheless, Canning has a bit of a bad reputation and that's tended to obscure some of the virtues of his run of Baker stories, particularly from 1975-76. Look past his familiar art - with its association of mindless, illogical, jingoistic Troughton-era adventure - and there are some surprisingly sophisticated stories there. This is obviously a comparative use of the phrase "sophisticated", but I could easily imagine stories like 'The Space Ghost!', 'Counter-Rotation' or 'Hubert's Folly' appearing in Countdown/TV Action. 'Treasure Trail' has a remarkably similar plot to 'Timebenders' or 'Who Is the Stranger' from the earlier comic. But we don't tend to notice these because of TV Comic's bad rep.

(And possibly also Canning's bad rep - it's noticeable that Doctor Who Classic Comics in the 1990s managed to reprint every single Polystyle 4th Doctor strip by other artists and not one by Canning, though this seems to have been by accident rather than design!)

Anyway, this got me thinking: if Gerry Haylock came over from TV Action, perhaps the TV Action writers did as well. And this seems to be borne out by some of the patchy information we have to hand of the writers from this period.

It's long been established that Countdown/TV Action editor Dennis Hooper wrote at least one TV Comic strip - 'The Wreckers!', the third Tom serial, which featured monsters from an earlier Countdown strip. Hooper was a big fan of Doctor Who, established a good relationship with the production team and wrote most of the Countdown/TV Action strips himself (the others being by his assistant editor Dick O'Neill).

Paul Scoones' Comic Strip Companion adds a couple of other credits, identifying the second Tom strip 'Return of the Daleks!' on the grounds that the artist Martin Asbury recalled that all his Who strips were from scripts by Hooper. (Scoones curiously doesn't extend this to the 3rd Doctor strip 'The Disintegrator', even though he identifies it as Asbury's work rather than Haylock as had hitherto been believed.) Scoones also tentatively attributes the first post-TV Action strip - 'Children of the Evil Eye' - to Hooper, plus the 1976 4th Doctor serial 'Virus' on the basis of its use of certain familiar plot elements. I've also seen the first Baker strip credited to Hooper though can't recall where off the top of my head.

If all of these are correct then Hooper wrote the first of the new TV Comic strips in 1973, at least one in 1974, the first three Tom serials in 1975 plus at least one further Tom serial a year later. Three of the four serials I mentioned as being TV Action-like post-date 'Virus' and I'd be prepared to bet that Hooper wrote these as well. So I'm hypothesising that Hooper stayed as principle writer on Who post-TV Action from 1973 to 1976.

Is there any evidence to contradict this? Yes, three things though none of them are conclusive:

1) Arnold: 'Children of the Evil Eye' introduces a new non-TV companion for the Doctor in the form of a boy from the future. He's short-lived though, appearing in only one subsequent serial in its entirety before being unceremoniously returned to his own time in two panels at the start of the next.

This to me has the whiff of a character being introduced by one writer and then hastily written out by a subsequent author who didn't want to be hamstrung by someone else's idea. See, for instance, how quickly Sharon was written out in 1980 or the abrupt departure of Olla the Heat Vampire in 1988: both established instances of new teams throwing out old baggage. If Hooper created Arnold, it might have been a later writer who chucked him out...

...but equally it could have been an editorial directive (from Polystyle or the Beeb), Hooper may have lost interest in the character, or maybe he was never intended to have a long run. This isn't conclusive.

2) We know that towards the end of its run in TV Comic, the Doctor Who strip was scripted by a writer called Geoff Cowan. His earliest known serial for the weekly is 'Dredger', which appeared at the very end of 1976 and he appears to have written all subsequent weekly strips.

It could easily be that Cowan replaced Hooper as regular writer but we know that Cowan was working for the Who strip earlier than late 1976 because he's credited with the TV Comic Annual story 'Woden's Warriors', which was published around August/September 1975. And annuals have long lead-in times, which implies that he was working on the strip much sooner. This doesn't mean that he was the regular writer but it is suggestive.

What is notable about the serials Cowan wrote is that they're not particularly distinguished. The most interesting about them is how well-characterised Leela is during her 6-month run int he strip ("well-characterised" in the sense that we can recognise who she is by her speech patterns and behaviour, which is not always a given with TV companions in Doctor Who strips in this era... and some later ones). The stories themselves are mostly functional, occasionally primitive adventure stories.

So while it's not impossible, I'm still inclined to identify Hooper - not Cowan - as the author of the strips I identified earlier. There are also a couple of "pure" historicals in 1975/76 ('The Emperor's Spy!' and the aforementioned 'Treasure Trail'), which is a type of story atypical of Cowan's work on the series but did crop up occasionally in Countdown/TV Action.

However, there is one strip during this run that I don't think fits this conclusion:

3) 'The Dalek Revenge!', which appeared at the end of 1975/start of 1976, is a very basic adventure serial unlike any of the Dalek stories attributed to Hooper. I feel this is much likelier to be Cowan's work but it comes bang in the middle of what would otherwise be a near unbroken run of "obviously" Hooper-scripted stories.

But we know that Dick O'Neill filled in for Hooper on Countdown/TV Action so Cowan could easily have been fulfilling this role here, before stepping up as regular writer in his own right a year later.

So if my hypothesis is correct we have a regular Hooper run from 1973-76 with occasional fill-ins by Cowan, after which Cowan takes over the regular gig at the end of 1976.

So when does the handover take place? I'd speculate that Cowan was already regular writer when TV Comic reformatted itself as "Mighty TV Comic" in 1976. This blatant cost-cutting move saw the comic expand to tabloid size, while slashing the page count drastically. The Doctor Who strip was halved from two to one page per week and there is a sudden drastic plunge in the quality of the writing and the art. It is just about conceivable that the first two Mighty TV Comic strips - before Cowan's first acknowledged serial 'Dredger' - are Hooper dumbed down but I'm inclined to think not.

The week before "Mighty TV Comic" hit there was a one-off Who strip in which the Doctor and Sarah trick a miser into giving to charity by pretending to be aliens. This may have been created as a simple filler before the relaunch but it feels to me weirdly like one of those plotless two-page stories that TV Comic had run under the Doctor Who banner in their Holiday Specials in the 1960s. This is the last regular appearance of Sarah in TV Comic, though bizarrely she reappears in 'Dredger'.

Given the throwaway nature of the two-pager, her last regular strip is altogether more intriguing: the four-part 'Mind Control'. This begins very much like it could be a comparatively tough TV Action strip, with Sarah having to take charge when the Doctor's mind is taken over by hostile aliens: not only does she have to pilot the TARDIS herself one subplot involves her having to steal the Doctor's "corpse" from a hospital before it can carry out a postmortem!

This is not typical TV Comic stuff, so it's all the more peculiar that the story ends with the aliens being tiny goblin-like creatures of the kind that had been pestering the 2nd Doctor in the more innocent days of 'The Jokers' and 'Operation Wurlitzer!' There's a huge lurch in tone here, so I'm going to speculate that Hooper started off writing it but Cowan finished it!

I'd further suggest that the first two scrappy Mighty TV Comic strips might have been rewrite jobs on Hooper scripts and that Sarah's sudden disappearance and reappearance in 'Dredger' might have arisen from confusion that arose from an abrupt change of writer mid-stream, just at a time when the comic itself was undergoing a drastic downsizing.

Of course, this is totally speculative and might be complete rubbish. I'm not even sure if Hooper or Cowan are still alive and might be able to enlighten us. And in the end it doesn't matter, except in so far as there's a brief run of Doctor Who comics in the mid-1970s that don't get as much attention as they ought to and are surprisingly better than their reputation suggests.

Ah, excellent detective work, pity the subject isn't more worthy of such attention.

the Doctor and Sarah trick a miser into giving to charity by pretending to be aliens

The Doc isn't PRETENDING to be an alien.

Unless you believe telemovie-McGann, and even then...

Good article, Kate.


I'm not even sure if Hooper or Cowan are still alive

TARDIS Wiki has scant information on both men, not even birth (or death) dates.

Someone over there has clearly dropped the ball.

The Doc isn't PRETENDING to be an alien.

He's definitely pretending to more alien than usual, as this picture of him (and Sarah) in disguise demonstrates:

http://alteredvistas.co.uk/html/fourth_doctor_part_one.html#Hoaxers

(This is possibly a hangover from the late 1960s TV Comics strips wherein Troughton's Doctor is forever bursting into the console room dressed as a Dalek, Cyberman, Taran wood beast, etc. in order to terrorise his grandchildren and provide a striking opening for a serial.)

Bring back John and Gillian. Maybe Gillian ends up in Squeak/Adele Silva's lad mags career ;)

John and Gillian's final fate was revealed in an issue of DWM in the 1980s, reproduced at the end of this entry: http://alteredvistas.co.uk/html/second_doctor.html#TrodosAmbush

To bring back any original comic character, they would have to pay the writer (or the estate of said writer) that created said character.

Maybe they just don't want to fork over money for characters that most Who fans probably don't even know about.

Nope. Marvel UK bought out the rights to all the Polystyle strips in the early 1990s, and in fact DWM has already brought back John and Gillian for their 40th anniversary strip in 2003.

John and Gillian were almost certainly editorial creations - and therefore owned by TV/Polystyle from the get go - but in any case the notion of creator's rights was almost entirely unknown in British mainstream comics publishing in 1964. The writer who created them would not have owned them nor expected to own them.

And no one knows who wrote the earliest Doctor Who strips in TV Comic anyway!

And no one knows who wrote the earliest Doctor Who strips in TV Comic anyway!

No one kept any records or files? Odd.

Totally normal for comics in this period.

Paul Scoones has done an excellent job in excavating the files for the early comic strips but wasn't able to find writer credits for the earliest comics. It's possible that the writer from the start was one Thomas Woodman, who seems to have written a lot of the very earliest (i.e. 1964-66) scripts but he's so obscure that Scoones initially misidentified him as his much better-known contemporary Tom Tully (who, to the best of our knowledge, never wrote for Doctor Who).

Totally normal for comics in this period.

Yeah, who'd want to put their name to a COMIC? This is one of those rare occasions when what was going on in the 1960s actually makes more sense than what's going on today.

Comics have their uses. Without "The Night Walkers" there'd be no Troughton adventures after The War Games and before Spearhead from Space...

Doctor Who: Free Comic Book Day Issue, 2019 #0

The Doctor mentions she met Ray Bradbury and he was disappointed when she showed him what Mars was really like.

1. I'm not sure Bradbury felt he was writing reality with his Mars stories. Also I'd think actually seeing the surface of an alien planet would overwhelm any disappointment one might feel, at least, at first.

2. In the Whoniverse, Mars would seem more interesting than the Mars in our reality. What with Ice Warriors running around, pyramids built by Osirans, and the Flood.

The Doctor and company end up at an alien carnival and the Doctor uses psychic paper to gain admission. Ryan wonders if she could get them into Disney with it & she admits that that is where she met Bradbury.

1. Does he mean Disneyland, Disneyworld, EuroDisney, Disney Studios, Walt Disney, etc., etc.?

2. The use of psychic paper would seem to limit when the Doctor met Bradbury from the 9th Doctor onward as I don't believe any earlier Doctor ever used it.

Without "The Night Walkers" there'd be no Troughton adventures after The War Games and before Spearhead from Space...

See Terrance Dicks' Past Doctor Adventure World Game.

The use of psychic paper would seem to limit when the Doctor met Bradbury from the 9th Doctor onward as I don't believe any earlier Doctor ever used it.

And again...see Terrance Dicks' Past Doctor Adventure World Game.

It was the comics back in the sixties that first invented the "Exiled to Earth, But Not Yet A Change of Appearance". With the Troughton Doctor's base of operations at London's swanky Carlton Grange Hotel

I'm not sure Bradbury felt he was writing reality with his Mars stories.

I take it this is a reference to The Martian Chronicles. Yeah, those were written in the late 1940's and early 50's. Mr. Bradbury no doubt knew he was taking liberties.


Mars would seem more interesting than the Mars in our reality. What with Ice Warriors running around, pyramids built by Osirans, and the Flood

Well, the Ice Warriors left Mars long ago.


Mind you, Supergirl has Mars inhabited by two Martian races, and all our probes just....missed them.

It was the comics back in the sixties that first invented the "Exiled to Earth, But Not Yet A Change of Appearance"

Ah, I SEE, I never knew that, I always just assumed that poor fans were forced to come up with this rubbish if ingenious idea thanks to the Two Doctors fiasco.

Mars would seem more interesting than the Mars in our reality. What with Ice Warriors running around, pyramids built by Osirans, and the Flood

Plus Victorian soldiers and human and Ambassador spacepeople, of course.

(Well, it's arguable as to whether some of these actually rendered Mars more interesting.)

Well, the Ice Warriors left Mars long ago.

Nonsense, they were just oversleeping like every other race ever...Empress of Mars happened whether we like it or not.

Mind you, Supergirl has Mars inhabited by two Martian races, and all our probes just....missed them.

Well, Sarah Jane shuts down NASA Mars probes before they can spot anything interesting (Vault of Secrets) though hopefully this is irrelevant because the Whoniverse DOES NOT HAVE SUPERGIRL. (Or maybe it does, after Mysterio all bets are, tragically, off.)

though hopefully this is irrelevant because the Whoniverse DOES NOT HAVE SUPERGIRL. (Or maybe it does, after Mysterio all bets are, tragically, off.)

Supergirl would not exist in the Whoniverse, because the Doctor would OBVIOUSLY have prevented the explosion of that version of planet Krypton.

Sarah Jane shuts down NASA Mars probes before they can spot anything interesting

And who the heck appointed her Grand Poobah of what we are and aren't allowed to see!?

Besides, we'd only forget about it the following week.

Seven years ago I wrote: I occasionally wonder why Tyranny's creator John Smith has never been given a crack at writing the Who strip, given how peppered with references to the series his work is (and he is also well-named for the job).

This evening, while randomly browsing, I came across this thread wherein he claims he came close to writing for the TV series: https://forums.2000ad.com/index.php?topic=29085.30

...which is the first I've heard of it.

Missed it by that much.

John of "John and Gillian" fed chocolate to a dog in one of the TV Comic strips. Better inform those animal rights fanatics ;)

---

quote:

James Gould:
Just finished the Pertwee run of TV Comic/Countdown/TV Action etc comics. Overall a very solid run. Excellent artwork on the whole (once Canning stopped doing it, anyway) and the stories took a big step up in terms of plot. I actually think I enjoyed them more than the Pertwee era on tv! Helped that he was usually companionless I think, he had nobody to tell how dumb they were. Although a lot of the stories did seem to revolve around humans stuffing everything up and being very stupid which was hard to take.

---

There was almost a comic book crossover of Doctor Who and Doctor Strange.

Whatever attraction that might have as a general prospect, I can't help but think that Cartmel and the seventh Doctor would have been the wrong choices for it.

Fans of the comic strip might be interested in checking out 'Masters of British Comics' by long-term DWM artist David Roach. Quite a few Who artists are well-represented and it also comes up with a decent account of why Marvel UK imploded in the mid-1990s (nearly taking DWM with it).

The biggest thing I didn't know: Dougie Braithwaite, whose early work included one of the ugliest Who strips of all time (1989's 'Time and Tide') is now a huge American superhero comics star. Everyone has to start somewhere...

Huge comics star? It looks like he's been working for Valiant since 2014. I think the usual reaction to hearing Valiant's name is, "Oh, are they still printing?"

From the Doctor Who Facebook page:
"Get The Thirteenth Doctor’s first comic adventure for FREE from @titancomics! Download it using the code 'DOC13' from comiXology here: https://bit.ly/sitt-thirteenthdoctor1"

Huge comics star? It looks like he's been working for Valiant since 2014.

The book features his art from various Marvel projects, which I presume is where he earned his reputation.

I don't recall hearing his name, although he did bounce around a few American publishers in the '90s. I'm guessing the book Masters of British Comics is an older book.

It was published last month.

Huh? Guess I'm just out of touch with who's hot in comics. Glancing at some of the cover scans I just lumped him into the okay, but nothing special category. Then again compared to some of the 'artists' Marvel has working for them...

Never heard of him.

In one comic strip, the Troughton Doctor says "Die, hideous creature, die" while shooting a creature. I don't think that's quite in character LOL

Still haven't gotten around to reading my old Who comics yet.

I will, someday, though.

If you can't cope with Marc you won't be able to cope with John and Gillian...

The Ninth Doctor and Rose in Time Lord Victorious: Monstrous Beauty:
https://www.doctorwho.tv/news/?article=ninth-doctor-time-lord-victorious&fbclid=IwAR3R1EAyGSgQF2oHkue7VQ69fvWcMmZgFRW_00Su9euBJVXMZnMj4pRnDuA

If you can't cope with Marc you won't be able to cope with John and Gillian...

I don't have any of the John and Gillian ones.

My collection is the run that Marvel Comics did in the mid-80's. They started with Tom Baker and then went to Peter Davison.

The run was cancelled due to poor sales, before they could get to Colin Baker.

Here's something odd: https://andreworton.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/a-guide-to-the-blakes-7-comics/

This site alleges that the 1982 Blakes 7 Winter Special featured a comic strip called 'Mutoid', which included the Daleks.

Which would obviously be a big thing except a) the 1982 Blakes 7 Winter Special can be found without too much difficulty online and contains no comic strips, b) nor does Time Screen's detailed guide to British Telefantasy Comics (1995) make note of such a strip, and c) it's been 38 years but somehow Who fandom has managed not to notice it.

So it sounds like this site has either fallen victim to a hoax, or this is a story from a fanzine (it certainly sounds like one) that's somehow been confused as an official licensed strip. (The B7 magazine was published by Marvel who were also doing DWM at the time, and they'd had their fingers burned by using Daleks without permission before.)

But if anyone has evidence to the contrary I'd be delighted to see it.

Incidentally, our comics-hating mod will no doubt be thrilled to learn that in 42 years 'Blakes 7' has managed to wrack up fewer pages of comic strip than 'Doctor Who' had by the end of the Hartnell era. Would that we Who fans were so blessed!

Reading through the rest of the article, it looks to me like this story (and the equally non-existent 'Liberation' cited under the 1982 Summer Special) are fake strips hidden among the real ones to trip up unwary lazy researchers relying on second hand sources*.

Which is a shame because the presence of the Daleks in the B7 universe suggests that the Federation could have been brought down in 90 minutes if only the Doctor had shown up.

(* This might also apply to the contention that Martin Geraghty's very average art on 'Blockade!' - and way too many DWM strips since the mid 1990s - is somehow superior to Ian Kennedy's.)

Incidentally, our comics-hating mod will no doubt be thrilled to learn that in 42 years 'Blakes 7' has managed to wrack up fewer pages of comic strip than 'Doctor Who' had by the end of the Hartnell era. Would that we Who fans were so blessed!

Well, Blake's 7 only had four seasons. Doctor Who, both series combined, has had 41.

Reading through the rest of the article, it looks to me like this story (and the equally non-existent 'Liberation' cited under the 1982 Summer Special) are fake strips hidden among the real ones to trip up unwary lazy researchers relying on second hand sources*.

So deliberate Fake News, basically. And for what? People who don't want to read comic strips aren't LAZY, they are just...SENSIBLE.

Well, Blake's 7 only had four seasons. Doctor Who, both series combined, has had 41.

We have FORTY-ONE SEASONS?

WHERE??

26 seasons Classic Who, 15 seasons Modern Who = 41.

Where are our fifteen seasons of New Who?

The Gap(ing Chasm of Despair) Year doesn't count, and I'm not counting Moffat's half-seasons twice...

Well, Blake's 7 only had four seasons. Doctor Who, both series combined, has had 41.

But imagine if they went 11 years without publishing a Doctor Who comic strip and then didn't publish another one ever again (currently 25 years and counting).

For our mod it would be the Thirty-Six Long and Blissful Years of Relief!

*Wistful sigh*

I was counting the actual years, 2005 to 2020.

This is terribly late reporting but Hartnell's Doctor and the TARDIS pop up for one panel each in the non-fiction comic history 'Alice in Sunderland', due to the police box being invented there.

Better late than never.

Also terribly late, but Batman spinoff 'Knight & Squire' features a thinly-disguised homage to the Cybermen as a West Country superhero team called "The Cidermen", who speak entirely in quotes from Pigbin Josh.

And we know this is deliberate because Paul Cornell wrote it.

Paul Cornell is truly the most...variable of Who writers.

Visual proof here: https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Cidermen

MY EYES! MY BEAUTIFUL EYES!

Cidermen. There has to be one or two jokes in there somewhere.

Other Cider Men.

though hopefully this is irrelevant because the Whoniverse DOES NOT HAVE SUPERGIRL

Oddly, DC did look into acquiring the comics rights to Doctor Who in the early 1990s, but I don't imagine that they would have mixed him into the DC universe. (Unlike Marvel who had him visit the Fantastic Four's HQ and tried to pair him off with Doctor Strange.)

They WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!

Oddly, DC did look into acquiring the comics rights to Doctor Who in the early 1990s, but I don't imagine that they would have mixed him into the DC universe.

Too bad, he would have been a natural.

I should NOT have enjoyed that so much...

You're welcome.

The Doctor and Superman would have made a great team.

Judging by Dr Mysterio they would have made an embarrassing team.

I think the Doctor would get exasperated by how much he'd be expected to rescue Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, though. ;-)

On the other hand a Lex Luthor/Master team-up while they secretly plot to betray each other would be fun.

While Dr. Mysterio was Superman-inspired he wasn't Superman. Supes was usually written a lot more competent. Even in the World's Finest team-ups with Batman where Supes intelligence was downplayed to make Bats seem more of an equal partner he was still better than Dr. Mysterio.

While Dr. Mysterio was Superman-inspired he wasn't Superman.

Dr Mysterio was the Doctor. The Shadow was the stupid superman-nanny-creature. I think. Can't be bothered to check. (GODS 2016 was a bad year. Dr Mysterio and Class. Say what you like about 2020 and 2021 at least they had/promised they will have a PROPER series of Who-y goodness.)

Sorry. I've only seen the episode once and forgot Doc had his own superhero name.

I didn't actually realise it was PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE to watch a Who story just once.

Though if I HAD, Mysterio would definitely have been a candidate...

Superman and the Doctor VS Lex Luthor and the Master.

How cool would that have been!

Lex and the Master would spend the whole time trying to out-do each other's schemes, sarcastically pointing out how the other somehow hasn't killed their nemesis yet, and generally being a PITA to each other.

Oh, also, the never-pass-up-the-chance-for-a-disguise Master would 100% spot that Clark Kent is Superman, and casually drop this info to Lex in the middle of an argument.

It was actually canon that people not named Lois Lane or Lana Lang saw the resemblance and tried to prove it. By the end of the stories Superman "proved" he and Clark were two different people and those other people accepted it.

Of course, there are dozens of people on Earth who share a remarkable resemblance to Clark/Superman.

Post-Crisis Luthor, on the other hand, refused to believe Clark was Superman on the grounds that someone with god-like power would never demean himself by pretending to be a weak human.

I guess Post-Crisis Luthor would probably have trouble believing that a super-advanced Time Lord would take on a human identity and serve as a scientific advisor to UNIT. ;-)

After logging off last night I remembered that both the Master and Superman have super-hypnosis. Not sure how it would be used in this imaginary crossover, but it'd have to come up at some point. ;-)

Thankfully, in the upcoming CW show, Lois knows full well that Clark is Superman (they're married and have kids).

So this whole "keeping the secret from Lois" shtick has been ditched.

The Shadow was the stupid superman-nanny-creature. I think. Can't be bothered to check.

The Ghost. If he'd been called the Shadow, the BBC might have been sued.

So this whole "keeping the secret from Lois" shtick has been ditched.

Wasn't it ditched back in 1991? Or did that get Timelesschildrened out of existence?

Entirely coincidentally, I stumbled upon this today: https://www.misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics685.html

But he's considerably less famous than the Shadow and I imagine the trademark has expired now.

The Shadow was the stupid superman-nanny-creature. I think. Can't be bothered to check.

The Ghost.

I definitely consider it a reflection on The Return of Dr Mysterio rather than myself that I got the name wrong.

Timelesschildrened

An EXCELLENT new verb!

Kate - Wasn't it ditched back in 1991? Or did that get Timelesschildrened out of existence?

Yes and no.

Clark did tell Lois before their marriage, but DC Comics reset continuity with The New 52 so that Clark and Lois were never married then after a while they had a weird bit in DC Rebirth where the current Superman and Lois merged with an alternate universe Superman and Lois who were married with a kid, and... uh... yeah... I believe Clark & Lois are still married.

And people complain about a few Timeless Children...

Things like this make me not regret my decision to drop DC Comics, thirty-five years ago.

And people complain about a few Timeless Children...

Superman's actually an interesting comparison at this point because no matter how often he gets married, dies, turns blue & electrical or grows a mullet, eventually someone points out how stupid it is and he reverts back to something approximating the silver age model.

In much the same way that the Timeless Children will one day end up in the same landfill as "The Doctor is half-human!"

I never minded Lois knowing that Clark is Superman. Always seemed silly that putting on a pair of glasses totally fooled her and everyone else.

I myself started wearing glasses full time, back in the 90's, but everyone still recognized me.

40 plus years of trying to prove Clark is Superman says the glasses DID NOT fool her, Tim.

Good point.

If I suspected someone of being a Kryptonian, it wouldn't take me forty years to verify it, one way or the other.

I'm sure our Mod will be heart-broken that the DWM strip is going on hiatus.

I'm actually quite shocked.

Say what you like about the DWM comic strip, it enables you to get through the mags a lot quicker than you would otherwise...and it's a really bad sign if they can't AFFORD it...

Why is it going on hiatus?

it's a really bad sign if they can't AFFORD it

It's the most expensive part of the magazine and has faced the chop before in lean times, but they've usually managed to hang on... though looking at how peculiarly the strips were handled from late 1989 to early 1991 suggests it was a close call.

It's the most expensive part of the magazine

"Should we hire someone from Fiver?"
"No! No! No! That's above our budget!"

;-)

Few things are US$5 on Fiverr.

????????

Second Empire Episode 14:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3AaDWPmFro

Davros is with his Daleks but the Daleks debates what to do with him including the option of him as a disembodied brain.
Funny at one point a Dalek offering a discount.

Few things are US$5 on Fiverr.

????????

'Fiverr' is just a name of the company. I don't know if things were originally intended to be that inexpensive or not, but I've used the service several times, and I don't think I ever once paid only USD5, though I have seen some. Those are usually students trying to get a foot in their field and something to put on their resume. I paid $90 for one, but I've seen some servives there with four-digit prices.

Another belated thing: in the 2010 Judge Dredd parody strip 'Doctor What?', Doctor Troughton Watt is shown to be living in Graham Norton Cul-De-Sac.

This wasn't too long after the second Norton Invasion, so obviously the pain was still raw.

They TAUNTED us over our Graham Norton...issues?

Judge Emily: Crime: Interrupted Doctor Who. Penalty: DEATH!

;-)

Let me make it clear: I in no way blame Graham Norton for EITHER fiasco. But I absolutely think he should be sacrificed to the gods to appease whatever problem they obviously have with him.

An interesting couple of articles here about the BBC's abortive 'Robot' comic of the late 1990s, which was due to feature a Doctor Who strip:

https://downthetubes.net/?p=125634
(link to the second part at the foot of this one)

...though sadly nothing on how this might have affected DWM.

I particularly liked the focus group respondent who said "Doctor Who? That’s gone now – it’s too old" (though obviously these weren't the brightest sparks, as evidenced by one whose response to being presented with a dummy for the comic was "If I picked that up, I’d think it were a comic").

I also can't help but notice that Lee Sullivan's new incarnation of the Doctor was going for the "pillock in a frock coat" style that the TV Movie seemed to set in stone (until Eccleston's casual look thankfully blew it away).

There's nothing wrong with frock coats!

The abolition thereof has resulted in such abominations as bow ties, normal ties, fezzes, clown trousers...

...GODS what wouldn't I give to see JODIE! in a nice frock coat.

"I preferred my Doctors when they dressed like a different type of pillock."

Well...

...Yeah.

I would take offense at the pillock characterization, but he does describe himself as an idiot with a box, so.....

An idiot with a box and a screwdriver, if you don't mind.

I stand corrected.

If anyone's been hankering to read a comic strip in which Peter Davison* is attacked by a pig, this is your lucky day:

https://britishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Buddy?file=DavoBuddy.jpg

* Not the Fifth Doctor being attacked by a pig, the actor Peter Davison being attacked by a pig. Obviously.

Oh-kay.

I guess my life is now complete.

Well, more like chased by a pig as Peter was over the fence before the pig was close enough to harm him.

By the way, would a pig biting an actor be cannibalism? ;-)

I thought it was police officers who were called "pigs".

Though in the case of Peter Davison, it would definitely be cannibalism, wasn't he a Hitch-Hikers Guide pig?

Actors are sometimes called "hams".

Didn't realize it was such a tall joke.

Vworp Vworp 4 is a thing of beauty that, among other things, has managed to track down loads of hitherto unknown writers/artists of the 1960s and 1970s strips... with one annoying exception.

It also contains a massive nit as a whole paragraph of Paul Scoones' article on TV Comic gets reprinted immediately after its first appearance in prominent text on its introductory spread.

And said exception is?

The illustrator of 'Who's Who' in the 1974 Doctor Who Holiday Special. All three new strips in the special were by fill-in artists; 'Perils of Paris' was identified a few years ago as the work of Malcolm Stokes but VV has turned up the artist of 'Doomcloud' at long last as well.

The previous year's 'Secret of the Tower', long attributed to "Alex Badia" is also outed as Jorge Badia Romero - younger brother of the somewhat more famous Enrique Romero - whose reputation has been boosted recently by a collection of some of his work for Misty (https://downthetubes.net/?p=111779)* and thus makes him yet another of those incredibly interesting, successful comics artists who did a couple of bits for Doctor Who under the radar.

* Though his best-known work is the surprisingly sexy - given that it was done for an audience of pre-teen girls - 'Supercats' for Spellbound.

There is also a brief interview with Len Deighton, in which he mentions neither Doctor Who nor any of his books.

Sadly this issue does nothing to resolve my speculation above about the writing of the Tom-era TV Comic strips. Geoff Cowan is interviewed but the feature is a bit vague on what he actually wrote (though he does turn out to be the son of Ted Cowan, creator of Robot Archie, which more than makes up for this).

One oddity is no mention of 'Beeb', Polystyle's short-lived BBC themed comic that arrived the year after TVC was cancelled. Doctor Who only appeared in a non-fiction in issue 2 but if Marvel hadn't already nabbed the comics rights you can bet it would have shown up here. Instead we got The Tripods with great John Burns art... and which was so faithful to the TV show that they cancelled it without warning halfway through an ongoing story.

Of the three comic strips herein, the Hartnell one is probably the most visually faithful to the original TV Comic strips (though with a more inventive twist than anything they would have come up with); the Troughton one leans a little too hard into tongue-in-cheek freak-pointing* at the expense of the largely terrible strips its apeing; and the Pertwee one doesn't quite capture the Haylock art style of the TV Action + Countdown strips despite a laudable attempt at doing a paint effect for the big panel - also someone desperately wants Romola Garai to be a Doctor Who companion.

* The opening of the Hartnell story, with the TARDIS crew celebrating at blowing up a planet in the background, is much more fun - though a bit more typical of the Troughton strips.

There's some excitement that the Treasury of British Comics will be reprinting the Badtime Bedtime Stories from Monster Fun next year, but it looks like it will only include strips by Leo Baxendale and therefore not the classic spoof 'Doctor Poo' from 1976. Fortunately you can read the whole thing online here: http://www.greatnewsforallreaders.com/blog/2018/3/3/on-this-day-6-march-1976-monster-fun

Not strictly Who related (though the presence of Angus Allan and Arthur Ranson does provide a Doctor Who/The Daleks comics connection) but the long-awaited limited edition collection of Look-In's Robin of Sherwood series is now available to pre-order: https://spitefulpuppet.com/product/robin-of-sherwood-look-in-annual-collectors-edition

Dave Gibbons' graphic autobiography will apparently have Who stuff: https://www.comicsbeat.com/dave-gibbons-confabulation-autobiography-dark-horse/

Isn't it bad enough that they write comic-strip nonsenses without them writing books ABOUT writing comic-strip nonsenses?

DWM: 'After the gay kiss in 2003's Oblivion, reader Russell T Davies was moved to write in, describing it as: "A very marvellous thing, and important (maybe more than you know)...[it] will be remembered for decades to come"' - don't tell me we owe our glorious Nine/Captain Jack kiss to some comic-strip nonsense...?

I suspect Russell T Davies would have managed to get a gay kiss into Doctor Who even without the example of some godawful comic strip nonsense to inspire him.

It's so memorable btw that it took me a minute to remember who it involved.

I suspect Russell T Davies would have managed to get a gay kiss into Doctor Who even without the example of some godawful comic strip nonsense to inspire him.

Hear, hear!

It's so memorable btw that it took me a minute to remember who it involved.

Oblivion is obviously well named...

So, I recently happened upon an issue of Marvel UK's Star Wars Weekly that featured 'Doctor Who and the Turgids'. For those not in the know, this was a one-page comic strip produced to advertise the TARDIS Tuner produced by Shortman Trading in - according to the Transcendental Toybox - 1978. As readers of the Completely Useless Encyclopedia will recall, this was a toy radio so thrilling that in the strip it helps the Doctor defeat the evil Turgids* by sending them to sleep.

* Who only ever appear in one panel and that's a picture of them being zapped by the Tuner, so we have to take it on trust that they're evil.

The strip makes its first Star Wars Weekly appearance on the back cover of Issue 55 (cover dated 14 March 1979). There are definitely no earlier appearances in SWW, though given there's an odd - probably strike-induced - four week gap between it and the previous issue it might have been meant to appear sooner. What's interesting is that this places it well over seven months before it first shows up in Doctor Who Weekly Issue 2 in late October. In fact the regular Who strip was still running in TV Comic at this time (albeit in the form of reprints of old Pertwee strips with Tom's face slathered crappily over the original art).

I doubt that there was any conflict of interest over Marvel running a Who strip at this time, nor that this is foreshadowing them taking over the license a few months later. As advertising strips go it's quite sedate compared to the creepy dead-eyed clown Mr Kalkitos who attempted to flog his transfers to kids on the back of most SWW issues around this time. (Long term DWW readers may remember that Mr Bellamy's liquorice was Who's traumatic advertising of choice in this period.)

I imagine that the strip appeared in other comics around this time though I'd be surprised if it turned out to be much earlier than this SWW issue. If the radio was issued in 1978 that might suggest that it was aimed for the Christmas market, but quite a few comic publications were delayed by print strikes in the run up to Christmas 1978. So it may be that the launch campaign was stymied by circumstances as the TARDIS Tuner couldn't be properly advertised until the New Year. But this is pure speculation on my part.

One thing is clear though - this is now definitely the first comics appearance by Mary Tamm's Romana, and not the two Doctor Who Annual strips she crops up in in the 1980 volume (published in late August/early September 1979). Which is a claim to fame of some sort.

Doctor Who Free Comic Book Day 2022

The Fugitive Doctor (before she became a fugitive and was working for the Division) enters a kids' clubhouse, scans the four kids, before turning her scanner on four apparent toys on the table and calls the leader Monstario the Devourer.
Ummmmm... if she knew his name wouldn't she know what he looks like? I really don't see what purpose she had in showing herself to the kids. She could have waited for them to leave, then come in and got the aliens.

Now you'd think if she was after evil aliens she might have some sophisticated, super-scientific restraining/containment device to keep them from attacking her, but noooooo... she stuffed them in a big sack and threw it over her shoulder. Yeahhhhh...

Also the bravery of the kids fighting the aliens is what led her to regard Earth as more than just a backward planet.

When she gets in her TARDIS and leaves it resembles a blue police box.
Which is odd as the clubhouse was in a wooden area so you'd expect the chameleon circuit to take a shape that blends in with the surroundings.

A year later the TARDIS materializes in an area surrounded by trash bags, which doesn't really look that much like the junkyard that we saw in An Unearthly Child, so the artist apparently couldn't be bothered to rewatch the episode or look at screen snaps.

Dialogue indicates that this is their first visit to Earth, although I'm pretty sure it was said or implied they had visited a few other time periods on Earth before ending up in the junkyard.

Susan doesn't seem to want to be on Earth, but the Doctor thinks it would be good for her to go to school and continue her education.
Uhhhhh.... what? From An Unearthly Child it was Susan who wanted to stay on Earth and keep going to school, not The Doctor.

Now you'd think if she was after evil aliens she might have some sophisticated, super-scientific restraining/containment device to keep them from attacking her, but noooooo... she stuffed them in a big sack and threw it over her shoulder. Yeahhhhh...

Well, I presume it WORKED?

When she gets in her TARDIS and leaves it resembles a blue police box.
Which is odd as the clubhouse was in a wooden area so you'd expect the chameleon circuit to take a shape that blends in with the surroundings.

No, I'd expect Sexy to get herself stuck as a police box asap, like the gods intended.

A year later the TARDIS materializes in an area surrounded by trash bags, which doesn't really look that much like the junkyard that we saw in An Unearthly Child, so the artist apparently couldn't be bothered to rewatch the episode or look at screen snaps.

Oops.

Dialogue indicates that this is their first visit to Earth, although I'm pretty sure it was said or implied they had visited a few other time periods on Earth before ending up in the junkyard.

Yeah, Susan specifically tells Ian n'Babs that the Doc got hooked on Earth when he encountered the French Revolution on his first visit. (The sicko.)

Susan doesn't seem to want to be on Earth, but the Doctor thinks it would be good for her to go to school and continue her education.
Uhhhhh.... what? From An Unearthly Child it was Susan who wanted to stay on Earth and keep going to school, not The Doctor.

Well, she might have been reluctant to go to school at first, only to discover that she loved it (a bit weird in view of what an awful time she had in the audios/books set in that period, not to mention what we see on-screen, but then Susan IS a bit weird).

Of course, given how Hartnell literally sneered at Coal Hill teachers to their faces about their pig-ignorance compared to the children of his race, it's beyond strange he thought they could provide his precious granddaughter with any sort of education...

which doesn't really look that much like the junkyard that we saw in An Unearthly Child, so the artist apparently couldn't be bothered to rewatch the episode or look at screen snaps.

See also 'Attack of the Cybermen' and 'Remembrance of the Daleks'.

To be fair, said junkyard is the retroactive creation of I M Foreman's TARDIS so we shouldn't be too surprised if it changes its appearance...

Everyone knows that Chris Claremont, long-time writer of X-Men, had a thing for Doctor Who. Apart from sneaking a Dalek into an issue of 'Excalibur' (in which he also introduced Brigadier Alysande Stewart of the W.H.O.), he's also reputed to have swiped bits of the plot of 'Days of Future Past' from 'Day of the Daleks'*.

But was he also punting former X-Men artist John Byrne** off-air copies of recently broadcast Who stories in the early 1980s? Not only does Byrne's version of Mr Fantastic describe one of his devices as "dimensionally transcendental" but his subsequent run of Fantastic Four stories includes stories that seem to have been inspired by 'Full Circle' and the recently repeated 'The Krotons'***.

And of course, post-Byrne the Fantastic Four are one of the few Marvel characters the comic strip Doctor has (almost) brushed shoulders with, as he once landed the TARDIS at their late 1980s HQ at Four Freedoms Plaza. Which is closer than he ever got to meeting Roj Blake.

* Entirely plausible after he openly swiped a storyline from The Avengers' 'A Touch of Brimstone', and indeed seems to have picked up a general love of putting his characters in bondage gear from that particular episode.

** Not the one who wrote 'Warriors of the Deep'. Nor the one who wrote 'Tutti Frutti'.

*** The whole stranded alien using the brightest and best of the locals to brainpower his crashed-ship, under cover of inviting them to be his honoured companions, is arguably a bit of a staple sf story anyway. But then said alien takes his ornate helmet off to reveal nothing underneath, just like Omega did in the story repeated two weeks later... and remember that Americans didn't get to see much pre-Tom material until a few years later.

Meanwhile an early 1990s Doctor Strange comic has the eponymous hero refer to "charged vacuum emboitments"... but a few issues earlier there's a passing reference to someone called Vera Duckworth, so they were obviously hedging their bets on Who/Coronation Street rivalry.

TRAITORS.

It gets worse when you realise that Jean-Marc Lofficier was writing for the series at the same time, and he usually can't wait to shoehorn Doctor Who into everything he does.

It turns out that I'm not the first to spot Whoey goodness creeping into that run of the Fantastic Four. It's also picked up by commentators on this Marvel website - https://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/fantastic_four_251-256.shtml - who also pick up on nods to 'The Masque of Mandragora' I missed.

And while it's not relevant to the Who references in the Doctor Strange comics I mention above, I note that the inker on the final issues of that run was Kev F Sutherland of the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre.

I note that the inker on the final issues of that run was Kev F Sutherland of the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre

Well thank the gods he found something better to do with his time...

Everyone knows that Chris Claremont, long-time writer of X-Men, had a thing for Doctor Who. Apart from sneaking a Dalek into an issue of 'Excalibur' (in which he also introduced Brigadier Alysande Stewart of the W.H.O.), he's also reputed to have swiped bits of the plot of 'Days of Future Past' from 'Day of the Daleks'*.

And - I was completely unaware of this when I made the earlier comment - he also included the actual Brigadier and "Sergeant-Major Benton" as speaking characters in The Uncanny X-Men No. 218 (though unfortunately the colourist on that issue clearly had no idea what the British wears on duty, so the Brig spends the entire issue in what appears to be a set of blue and white striped pyjamas).

the Brig spends the entire issue in what appears to be a set of blue and white striped pyjamas

Bless!

Well, UNIT does frequently change its uniform, as well as its name...

So I just discovered there’s a TV21 where Gerry Anderson’s Earth (Fireball XL5, Stingray, International Rescue, Spectrum and some of the other shared universe characters) repel a Dalek invasion. Firstly that’s a movie I’d love to see. Secondly does that make it an alternate reality or another time war contradiction.

Secondly does that make it an alternate reality or another time war contradiction.

I don't think those are mutually exclusive categories.

Danny - Gerry Anderson’s Earth (Fireball XL5, Stingray, International Rescue, Spectrum and some of the other shared universe characters) repel a Dalek invasion

Dalek: Aim for the strings, Exterminate!

I've written about parts of the new issue of 'Vworp Vworp!' (No. 5) elsewhere on Nitcentral, specifically the features on attempts at doing a Doctor Who animated series. But there are plenty of other goodies in there, though surprisingly few to do with the comics that are usually this excellent fanzine's focus.

The animation section takes up the first 38 pages (of 148) so there's a lot of space but much of the rest veers away from their usual media to focus on other aspects of Who art and craft, including a feature on novelty DVD box set design, and an article about the original art for the mid-1970s Weetabix cards - with a shocking and juicy revelation about Vega Nexos!

The best of these is a series of pieces about the late Phil Bevan, who contributed very distinctive illustrations for fanzines, DWM and even 'The English Way of Death' and whose early death in 1998 gives these articles a poignance that the rest of the issue doesn't achieve.

Instead, there's quite a bit of pendantry from Alan Stevens in articles on the TV Century 21 Dalek strips, 'The Curse of the Daleks' stage play and Abslom Daak. The first two are potentially quite interesting, interrogating the commonplace but sparsely evidenced assumption that Terry Nation had very little to do with the spinoffery that bears his name. Unfortunately the cases he makes for specific storylines to be the work of Nation are thin and specious, at one point claiming that the third arc (generally known as 'Duel of the Daleks') must be El Tel's work because one character has a name beginning with a 'Z'!

The Abslom Daak piece spends far too much time psychoanalysing a character who really can't bear that much thought, though it is quite diligent in going through the various Daak strips and proposals that have been pitched over the years (including one where he gets shanghaied by a time travelling Mickey and Martha, a not hugely enticing prospect despite a game attempt at a two page strip on this theme).

It feels a bit belated because Daak was already the focus of much of Issue 2 and is also undercut by the preceding comic strip 'Paper Tigers', which Stevens scripts and which demonstrates how badly he misunderstands the characters. It also ignores all published Daak strips post-1980, including 'World of the War-King', which appeared in Issue 2 and was much superior to this offering.

Other strips in this issue are a bit desultory. Lance Parkin writes a sequel to 'The Iron Legion', in which Capaldi's Doctor makes sub-Carry On jokes about a naked sexy cat robot woman, and which doesn't justify its considerable page count. There's some TV Century 21 pastiches by Stevens again, an odd three-pager about a Cyberman sandwich board zealot and - bizarrely but quite entertainingly - a two page strip adaptation of the Third Doctor's appearance on 'Noel's House Party' in 1993 to introduce the end of 'Dimensions of Time'. No sign of Mr Blobby though. There's also a text story by Donald Tosh that appears without any context but must have been written fairly recently as it references the new series.

The art throughout is effective and 'Paper Tigers' makes up for the deficiencies of its script by featuring black and white illustrations by the great John Ridgway in a welcome return to Doctor Who, even if the subject matter doesn't play to his strengths (Daak is notably not a character he's drawn before). This is a companion piece to a lengthy interview about his Doctor Who comics work - sadly not touching on much else in his considerable career. This in turn is part of a section on the 'Voyager' storyline and is one of the highlights of this issue. There's even a couple of pages on the Golden Wonder Adventure Comics of 1986, which reminded me that I once had a complete set of these. Fortunately a quick look at ebay reassures me that they're not worth very much now and I didn't lose out on a pension when they went in the bin.

But it's Ridgway who gives us the most frustrating part of the whole experience. The feature includes art samples with Eccleston's Doctor and Rose that he submitted to DWM c.2005 "but they weren't interested". It boggles the mind that Panini didn't offer work to one of the Doctor Who comic strip's definitive artists. And given that Jonathan Morris - who wrote the DWM strip regularly for almost two years - is a huge fan of Ridgway's, it feels like a missed opportunity that they were never teamed up together.

with a shocking and juicy revelation about Vega Nexos!

OK *sigh* spill...

at one point claiming that the third arc (generally known as 'Duel of the Daleks') must be El Tel's work because one character has a name beginning with a 'Z'!

Like love, Alan Stevens has never been known for his rationality.

Lance Parkin writes a sequel to 'The Iron Legion', in which Capaldi's Doctor makes sub-Carry On jokes about a naked sexy cat robot woman

WHY GODS WHY.

This is a companion piece to a lengthy interview about his Doctor Who comics work - sadly not touching on much else in his considerable career

SADLY? You want people to talk about Lesser Programmes (comics. Whatever) in a WHO MAG?

with a shocking and juicy revelation about Vega Nexos!

OK *sigh* spill...

Vega Nexos, with his tiny amount of screen time and narrative significance, has always seemed an odd choice to appear in these cards.

And it turns out he was a last minute addition, with his picture pasted on top of the original artwork of a more famous Who monster that it had been decided to omit: the Ice Warriors.

We possibly have different definitions of the words 'shocking' and 'juicy'.

Given how bloody boring every Ice Warrior story is, replacing 'em with ANYTHING OR ANYONE is probably a good idea.

Imagine what 'Cold War' would have been like if the submarine crew had thawed out Vega Nexos instead.

Wouldn't have been any MORE pointless, would it.

...but quite a bit funnier.

Yeah, for all we know, Vega Nexos was a FANTASTIC stand-up comedian whose attempts to introduce this particular art-form to miserable old Peladon was tragically cut short...

It turns out that "Do not be afraid. It is trickery!" is the Vegan equivalent of "Don't tell him, Pike!"

Anyway, back in the world of comics, John Freeman's website has started publishing a new version of the 'Terror from the Deep' newspaper strip that didn't happen back in 1989/90. 18 episodes have appeared so far. The first is here: https://downthetubes.net/doctor-who-terror-from-the-deep-episode-1/

There's also a link to a feature on the background to the strip and why it failed to appear (beyond a few sample pages in DWM) back in the day.

These people have a weird idea of what constitutes an episode.

It's a newspaper strip. They're generally a bit short...

Oh!

As mentioned earlier, Dave Gibbons's new book 'Confabulation' does include a few pages about Doctor Who. Nothing he says will be particularly new to anyone who follows the Who comics, but you may be amused at working out which of the two Doctors he illustrated was a "shouty ham actor" and which was "like drawing a vanilla blancmange".

Interestingly, he's another of several Who comics people from this period who claim to have grown up enthralled by Hartnell on TV but drifted away from the series after he left.

you may be amused at working out which of the two Doctors he illustrated was a "shouty ham actor" and which was "like drawing a vanilla blancmange".

Colin Baker and Peter Davison, perchance...?

Interestingly, he's another of several Who comics people from this period who claim to have grown up enthralled by Hartnell on TV but drifted away from the series after he left.

BURN THE BLASPHEMERS!

Colin Baker and Peter Davison, perchance...?

Hint: he worked on the Doctor Who strip from 1979 to 1982, so Colin would have been before his time...

I trust you're not implying this degraded scribbler was referring to the OTHER Baker...?

Somehow, and despite never actually appearing in a newspaper strip, 'Doctor Who' manages an entry in The A to Z of British Newspaper Strips (2022) by Paul Hudson. This is by dint of it appearing in Radio Times from 1996-7 and the stretched definition of the title criteria to include selected magazine strips. This also means that Nev Fountain gets multiple appearances via Private Eye.

'Doctor Who' manages an entry in The A to Z of British Newspaper Strips (2022) by Paul Hudson. This is by dint of it appearing in Radio Times from 1996-7

OMG I remember that! One of the great nadirs of my life was actually DELIBERATELY LOOKING UP some godawful comic-strip nonsense involving Stacy and her Ice Warrior boyfriend Ssard in some shop's Radio Times and suddenly realising I had a problem. The kind of problem that involves really, really needing some new Doctor Who on telly where it belongs and knowing the telemovie had almost certainly blown any chance of this happiness and LOOK WHAT I'M REDUCED TO...

No wonder you have such a low opinion of the comics...

It's not the sort of thing one ever gets over, though I'm sure I'd despise all comics ANYWAY. Except The Lodger and Death to the Doctor and there was a lovely Donna-saying-farewell one...

Paul Crompton has drawn the fourth Doctor as Colin Baker. In the 6th Doctor's costume. In 1975.

Paul Compton in DWM: 'Half the time I didn't know what the hell I was doing because I really did enjoy my real ale.'

Fair enough.

Dalek Chronicles- Attack of the Terrakons:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k1o9JWU1u4


The Terrokons are sea monsters-like creature and they sure proved menacing to the Daleks.
Not bad the way this story presented in the Daleks dealing with the Terrokons.

Liberation of the Daleks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EBADFfo5D8

Written by Alan Barnes and artwork by Lee Sullivan.

Liberation of the Daleks is a DWM comic strip story consists of 14 parts each in issues 584 to 597.

The said issues were released between November 10 2022, 18 days after The Power of the Doctor, and November 9 2023, 16 days before The Star Beast.

The video here is that of a fan made presentation showing all of the story in one go as a movie.

It details the first moments of the Fourteenth Doctor after the regeneration in The Power of the Doctor.

This has been described as effectively "in lockstep" with the television continuity for the first time in the DWM comic series.

Showrunner Russell T. Davies and writer of The Star Beast has confirmed in a DWM article that Liberation of the Daleks takes entirely in the first hour of the Fourteenth Doctor's life.

After the regeneration the newly regenerated Fourteenth Doctor goes to Wembley Stadium on July 30 1966.

He soon noticed a very strange family and as soon he has uncovered what they really are come the Daleks as they invade the stadium.

From then on comes a fascinating tale as the Doctor that these Daleks are not quite like the Daleks he has met and fought before and the explanation for this, including why the said family were at Wembley Stadium, is very intriguing.

It was also quite shocking to what happened to a certain accessory.

As I say this is a fascinating tale and certainly a very good for a Doctor who has just come out of a regeneration.

The video here is that of a fan made presentation showing all of the story in one go as a movie.

Hmm. Nicely done - dammit I love Murray Gold's music - but I think I might wait till I've got hold of the magazines or just get the collected version out of the library cos watching THIS would take up more time than I've got given how many Big Finish box sets I'm behind on at the moment...

It details the first moments of the Fourteenth Doctor after the regeneration in The Power of the Doctor.

Bloody cheek, reducing our beloved and long-awaited TennantDoc to a sodding DRAWING the moment he regenerates, what does it think it IS, Fear Her?!

And with ZERO regeneration trauma (unless it happens after the first few minutes of course) - what kind of unnatural freak of a drawn-Doctor does he think he IS!

Showrunner Russell T. Davies and writer of The Star Beast has confirmed in a DWM article that Liberation of the Daleks takes entirely in the first hour of the Fourteenth Doctor's life.

RTG is CANONISING this thing?!

After the regeneration the newly regenerated Fourteenth Doctor goes to Wembley Stadium on July 30 1966.

Mysteriously not mentioning he's been precisely then n'there before, with Amy n'Rory (Extra Time)?

He soon noticed a very strange family and as soon he has uncovered what they really are come the Daleks as they invade the stadium.

Mysteriously unmentioned by aforementioned Extra Time...

Showrunner Russell T. Davies and writer of The Star Beast has confirmed in a DWM article that Liberation of the Daleks takes entirely in the first hour of the Fourteenth Doctor's life.

RTG is CANONISING this thing?!

Worse. He's canonised it ON SCREEN not just 'confirmed in a DWM article' which doesn't really count even if He IS God...(Destination Skaro: 'Sixty minutes ago I was this really brilliant woman...')

Once Upon a Time Lord - Firelight:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4fOf04lLnY


This is a fan made presentation of the graphic novel by Dan Slott.

Featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha.

This plus cameos from the previous Doctors with a companion of theirs respectively.

The Doctor and Martha comes to a planet which is holding a funfair when Martha got taken away by creatures called the Pyromeths.

The Promeths forced Martha to tell stories in return for her survival.

This has Martha tells stories about the Doctor.
Quite fascinating the stories Martha tells about the Doctor which includes seeing foes who were believed to be long dead and I don't mean just the typical ones.

Pretty good how it all wraps up at the end against the Pyromeths.

Timeslip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlxsiv1WZmY


Timeslip is a comic strip story Doctor Who Weekly issues 17 to 18 in May 1980.
Featuring the Fourth Doctor and K9.
Written by Dez Skinn and Paul Neary with art by the latter.
Timeslip has the TARDIS encounterING a giant amoeba-like creature which feeds on Time energy and starts to consume the TARDIS itself.
The effect of this creature has the Doctor reverts back to each of his three previous selves.
Fortunately a way has been found to defeat this creature and the Doctor back to his fourth self.
Overall a fascinating little story of seeing the Doctor being back literally as the men he used to be.

Doctor Who and the Iron Legion:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=23_rLuqe_so

Doctor Who and the Iron Legion is first comic strip story published in Doctor Who Weekly in 1979 in its first eight issues.
Featuring the Fourth Doctor
Written by Pat Mills and John Wagner with art by Dave Gibbons.
This is a fan-made presentation of the story and the story got adapted by Big Finish in 2019.

The Collector:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTjUqjY4M8A

The Collector is a DWM comic strip story in issue 46 in October 1980.
Featuring the Fourth Doctor, Sharon and K9.
Written by Steve Moore with art by Dave Gibbons.
This is a fan-made presentation of the story.
Not bad story about the said Collector who has been kidnapping humans ....well for his collection.
Interesting the resolution the Doctor comes up with which restores the kidnapped humans to where they belong and the one he comes up for the Collector.

Dreamers of Death:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVKiGX-rY5Y&t=16s

Dreamers of Death is a comic strip story from DWM in issues 47-48 in November-December 1980.
Featuring the Fourth Doctor, K9 and the swansong for Sharon.

Written by Steve Moore with art by Dave Gibbons.

This is a fan-made presentation of the story.

This has the Doctor and Sharon some of the Doctor's old friends on Unicepter IV when this world caught up with the latest craze of shared dreaming.

Of course something nefarious goes on here and quite interesting how the Doctor solves the situation here and culminating with Sharon's said departure.

That story was included in the Marvel run, in North America,in the early 1980's.

I own the issue in question.

The Neutron Knights:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJWvlR7AYPc&t=2s

The Neutron Knights is a comic story from DWM in issue 60 in December 1981.

Featuring the Fourth Doctor and this is the final run of regular Fourth Doctor comics, the Fourth Doctor having regenerated in Logopolis earlier that year.

Written by Steve Parkhouse with art by Dave Gibbons.

This is a fantasy story with the said Neutron Knights being defenders of Earth and a wizard and another figure who are familiar in a certain legend.

Overall a pretty good story to end the Fourth Doctor regular comic strip run in DWM.

Stars Fell on Stockbridge:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbfP38veDWM

Stars Fell on Stockbridge is a comic strip story from Doctor Who Monthly in issues 68-69 in September- October 1982.
Featuring the Fifth Doctor.
Written by Steve Parkhouse with art by Dave Gibbons.
Filling the companion role here is Maxwell Edison.
This is a fan-made presentation of the story.
Max Edison, in the said town of Stockbridge, is an enthusiast on UFOs and he was out looking for an alien spacecraft when he stumbled upon the Doctor and the TARDIS.
Fascinating by what the Doctor and Max find in the alien spaceship.
In Stockbridge, Max is not treated seriously by his fellow residents due to what his interest are but certainly gratifying him in the eyes of the said residents by what happens at the end of this quite pleasant story.

Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UkWlR2OYfY

Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time is a comic strip story in DWM #243 in August 1996.

Written by Sean Longcroft.

This is a fan-made presentation of the story.

Longcroft stars as himself in this story as it details his childhood growing up with Doctor Who starting with the Fourth Doctor.

I got this explanation from TARDIS Wiki:
"The story serves as a transition between the two comics which fell directly before and after its printing — Ground Zero (the final continuous Seventh Doctor story) and Endgame (the first continuous Eighth Doctor story)."

The story has Sean struggling to write a Doctot Who story for the BBC when he gets a visit from his old friend the Fourth Doctor.

A pretty fun look on what Doctor Who means to Longcroft with what this story presents and all without worrying about canon as this is definitely non-canon.

Defender of the Daleks


Episode 1:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=stU7Ch5q5Co

Defender of the Daleks

Episode 2:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K9fRuYYhRk

Defender of the Daleks

Episode 3:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qFWuHcPS58

Episode 4:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsTe1XMvfUA

Defender of the Daleks is comic strip story from Titan Comics released in September-October 2020 as part of Time Lord Victorious.

This is a fan-made presentation of the story.

Featuring the Tenth Doctor.

Written by Jody Houser and she is someone who had usually written for the Thirteenth Doctor in Titan Comics and let's say that very fact isn't overlooked here.

Art by Roberta Ingranata.

The Tenth Doctor meets up with the Daleks here but notwithstanding the Daleks themselves, something is not right as time is not right.

This plus meeting a dangerous creature known as Hond, a creature that is even dangerous to the Daleks themselves.

The Doctor spends much of the time with one Dalek, the Dalek Prime Strategist and quite thrilling when the mutant creature inside it was revealed out in the open in an intriguing moment.

The Doctor ultimately gets away from the Daleks especially when he gets an unexpected help and it certainly took me by surprise.