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Collection published: 2005 Contents originally published: 1980-84 Acquired: 2005 Previously read: December 2005 Reread: December 2020 |
by Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, Mick Austin, Steve Dillon, et al.
Timeslip, from Doctor Who Weekly #17-18 (Feb. 1980)
plot by Dez Skinn, script & artwork by Paul Neary
This little story wraps up the appearances of the fourth Doctor in these graphic novels (for now, anyway; I think he'll be back during the "multi-Doctor" years). I don't know the circumstances of its creation, but it feels like someone whipped it up real quick when The Star Beast was delayed or something. It's much more continuity-focused than most other DWM strips, actually (albeit barely) explaining where Romana is, and giving a footnote about the randomiser. Most notably, the Doctor degenerates because of an alien influence, quickly passing through Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton again before spending four pages as William Hartnell. Unfortunately for the long-term fan, all of the Hartnell images are referenced from incredibly common publicity photos, which stops the art (which I would say otherwise looks quite nice, especially its vast cosmic horrors) from having any sense of life.
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| from Doctor Who Monthly #63 |
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons
This story starts off pretty neat: time disturbances interrupt the Doctor's cricket game, so he goes back to Gallifrey to check out what's going on, only to learn that all reality is at stake. Steve Parkhouse and Dave Gibbons make Gallifrey seem amazing by basically ignoring the way the tv show approached it. Rather than talk to Time Lord officiants, the Doctor goes into the Matrix, ostensibly "home of the Celestial Intervention Agency"-- which I guess is headed by Rassilon and two guys named Morvane and Bedevere (whom the Doctor supposedly already knows), and they all hang out with "High Evolutionaries," which are highly advanced specimens of other races, including Merlin from The Neutron Knights. Like, this is nothing like what we saw on screen, but hey, it gives the whole thing a great sense of grandeur. Gibbon's art for Gallifrey is amazing, looking nothing like how it appeared on screen, but like an epic sci-fi city-- I love it.
The trip to Gallifrey is followed by a surreal visit to another dimension, which Gibbons handles real well... and after this, The Tides of Time totally fizzles out. The Doctor mostly stands around as people deliver exposition and Shayde does all the work. Literally the Doctor's only contribution to this whole big story is to fly Shayde into position. It looks cool, but once the whole thing is over, it seems faintly pointless.
Sir Justin and Shayde are the Doctor's companions for this story. The idea of Sir Justin is fun, but he doesn't have much to do other than stand around and be baffled up until his heroic sacrifice; I found it difficult to summon up much feeling at that point. I don't know if I would count Shayde as a companion at this point, but he does look cool, a Matrix construct with a (detachable!) black globe for a head. We'll be seeing more of him going forward.
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| from Doctor Who Monthly #69 |
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons
Dave Gibbons's lengthy run on the strip finally comes to an end here with a neat little two-part story. Here we learn that the village from The Tides of Time where the Doctor is hanging out and playing cricket is Stockbridge, and we meet one of its inhabitants, Maxwell Edison. Maxwell is a UFO and conspiracy nut who ends up drawn into an adventure with the Doctor; the Doctor takes him up into a mysterious spaceship orbiting the Earth. It's a foreboding, atmospheric tale, and I enjoyed it a lot. Undoubtedly the best adventure in this volume, with a charming ending.
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| from Doctor Who Monthly #73 |
written by Steve Parkhouse; pencils by Steve Parkhouse and Mick Austin; inks by Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, and Mick Austin; lettering by Steve Parkhouse, Mick Austin, and Steve Craddock
This story, to me, entirely reads like Steve Parkhouse made it up as he went along. It starts out about mysterious goings-on in Stockbridge, including the TARDIS making its own trip to the Carboniferous Period, but then becomes about the Doctor battling a strange elemental on the TARDIS. Shayde turns up to do the actual defeating of the elemental while the Doctor just watches; then the Doctor's being attacked by the Time Lords, then Rassilon and the other Matrix Lords are putting him on trial for some reason, but he gets off because Shayde destroys the evidence. (Apparently a society of time travellers can't travel back to when the evidence still existed.) It doesn't settle on any one thing long enough to be effective, and despite some cool concepts, the Doctor once again feels like a side character in a story about how cool Shayde is!
Also this story introduces SAG 3, an elite UK military unit who do exactly nothing.
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| from Doctor Who Monthly #77 |
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork by Mick Austin, lettering by Steve Craddock
This feels a bit like one of Parkhouse's fourth Doctor tales: a downbeat story of an ineffective Doctor. He's trapped on a Pacific island with a Japanese soldier who's been there for a long time; despite the Doctor's efforts, the soldier dies... partially because of something the Doctor does to defend himself. I'm not sure what I think of it, to be honest. I think it's well done for what it is... I'm just not sure this is what I want Doctor Who to be doing! I didn't care for Fuji's stilted dialogue or the weird proportions Mick Austin gives him, but otherwise he is a pretty well-drawn character.
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| from Doctor Who Monthly #83 |
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork by Mick Austin, lettering by Steve Craddock and Jerry Paris
Another Steve Parkhouse Time Lord epic, another load of nonsense. Like most of them, it's got some good ideas (the way the Monk and the Ice Warriors work together to make a giant crystal by just waiting is neat), but the overall story is random junk again. The Doctor is joined by Gus, the American pilot who killed Fuji, and realizes he's in an alternate timeline where World War II continued until at least 1963 (though in Lunar Lagoon we're told it's 1983). Trying to figure out what's going on, they discover airplanes are vanishing and the Meddling Monk is there and there are Ice Warriors and SAG 3 is back and... stuff... look, I don't even know how or why.
We also learn the Time Lords sent the Doctor to Stockbridge to figure out the time anomalies resolved in this story. So, 1) why was he always trying to play cricket and/or fish, and 2) why did the Time Lords get mad at the Doctor for hanging out in Stockbridge back in The Stockbridge Horror. Like I said, Parkhouse tries to pull all these tales together, but it's nonsensically done. (The Doctor says that he never went back to the real Earth after leaving it in The Stockbridge Horror, which is plainly not true; he must have been on the real one to see Shayde destroy the evidence of the malfunctioning TARDIS.)
I do like how Mick Austin draws the time vortex.
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| from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #86 |
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Steve Dillon
It's interesting, reading all of these, and realizing for all his weirdnesses as storyteller, Steve Parkhouse got one thing right about the fifth Doctor as a character: he is knocked about by tragedy to a degree not true of previous incarnations, something we saw on screen most prominently in Earthshock, Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks, and The Caves of Androzani. The different between the strip's approach and the show's approach, though, is that the tv fifth Doctor would still get these moments of triumph, either within the stories, or in the other stories, but the comic fifth Doctor rarely feels like he's accomplished anything. This is all brought to its utmost in The Moderator, where Gus is gunned down at the moment the Doctor returns him to his own time as a punishment for the Doctor mouthing off to a reprehensible villain.Stray Observations:
Here it worked for me, though. Maybe it's the black comic touch of the titular Moderator himself. Maybe it's the slightly unusual structure Parkhouse employs. (The story bounces back and forth between the Moderator hunting the Doctor and the Doctor and Gus on an adventure, but the Moderator is hunting the Doctor for something the Doctor does at the very end of the adventure.) Maybe it's the delightful despicability of Josiah W. Dogbolter. This story is dark, but it feels meaningful in a way some of Parkhouse's other dark tales (like End of the Line or The Neutron Knights) did not. There's tragedy, but also the Doctor and Gus stand up for something despite it all.
- Something I like is that the strip kind of doesn't even care that there's a tv show. Oh, it picks up references to it, obviously (the Doctor is seemingly president of Gallifrey because of the events of The Invasion of Time, or maybe The Deadly Assassin), but this is a continuous run of stories for the fifth Doctor where the first one picks up from a fourth Doctor tale and the last one leads into a sixth Doctor one. Which makes no sense from a continuity standpoint! There's no sense at all that these slot in between tv episodes or even really care about the existence of contemporaneous tv episodes, except that the Doctor's appearance (almost incidentally) changes between installments.
- I like the way that the DWM fifth Doctor is kind of, but not quite, the character played by Peter Davison. He occasionally gets lines you can perfectly imagine Davison delivering (his exasperation at a running-away Max in Stars Fell), but the whole idea that the Doctor really just wants to hang about playing cricket (or fishing) seems much more influenced by the Doctor's costume than anything else! He's also more... morose than the tv fifth Doctor; there's a bit where he almost commits suicide when he thinks he's lost in the wrong dimension! Again, not the tv version, but an interesting incarnation of the Doctor of his own. It's a shame Big Finish's Comic Strip Adaptations line seems to have ended after a single box set; I'd've liked to have heard Peter Davison tackle this slightly different take on his character.
- Apparently Gallifrey's military is normally completely separate from the Time Lords (the Doctor says, "What's a Time-Lord doing slumming around the military? Good heavens...you'll be in politics next!"); that they have a TARDIS and Tubal Cain is assigned to them is depicted as abnormal. The way time torpedoes work here would be used in the audio adventure Neverland.
- Steve Parkhouse seems to think all TARDISes look like police boxes.
- Toby Longworth's performance as Dogbolter in The Maltese Penguin and The Quantum Possibility Engine has indelibly impressed itself upon my mind; I can't not imagine him delivering the lines.
- After inaugurating the DWM strip with a three-year run, Dave Gibbons would go on to do a lot of work for DC on lower-tier superhero comics such as Legion of Super-Heroes, L.E.G.I.O.N., JSA, Rann-Thanagar War, and something called Watchmen.
This post is the fourth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two. Previous installments are listed below:
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