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Collection published: 2008 Contents originally published: 1986-87 Acquired: September 2008 Read: January 2021 |
The World Shapers: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by John Ridgway, Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, et al.
by John Ridgway, Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, et al.
The Tides of Time gave us the strip's first run with a consistent writer but different artists for each story; The World Shapers
gives us the reverse, in that John Ridgway illustrates the whole volume
(with some inks from Tim Perkins here and there), but no two sequential
stories share writers. The result is a somewhat odd feeling collection,
without a consistent tone or ethos. Ridgway does his best to make it
all hang together, I reckon, but I did often feel like no two writers
had quite the same idea of Frobisher, for example. You can, of course,
make this kind of thing work in Doctor Who, but I'm not persuaded this volume does...
Exodus / Revelation! / Genesis!, from Doctor Who Magazine #108-10 (Jan.-Mar. 1986)
script by Alan McKenzie & John Ridgway, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree
Nature of the Beast! / Time Bomb / Salad Daze, from Doctor Who Magazine #111-17 (Apr.-Oct. 1986)
scripts by Simon Furman and Jamie Delano, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree
Changes, from Doctor Who Magazine #118-19 (Nov.-Dec. 1986)
script by Grant Morrison, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree
Profits of Doom!, from Doctor Who Magazine #120-22 (Jan.-Mar. 1987)
script by Mike Collins, pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, letters by Annie Halfacree
The Gift, from Doctor Who Magazine #123-26 (Apr.-July 1987)
script by Jamie Delano, pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, letters by Richard Starkings
The World Shapers, from Doctor Who Magazine #127-29 (Aug.-Oct. 1987)
script by Grant Morrison, pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, letters by Richard Starkings
Exodus / Revelation! / Genesis!, from Doctor Who Magazine #108-10 (Jan.-Mar. 1986)
script by Alan McKenzie & John Ridgway, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree
Alan McKenzie's short run on the DWM strips comes to an end with a story that feels all too typical of his work. Exodus actually gets off to a good start; the TARDIS accidentally materializes around a refugee spaceship, and Peri and Frobisher have to talk the Doctor into helping them out. It's a slight but charming story, and would be perfectly enjoyable... except it leads into the last two parts. These, like a lot of Alan McKenzie stories, give the impression of having been completely made up until he ran out of pages, and don't really deliver on their promises. There's some attempt at a murder mystery, but the culprit is introduced so late in the game one barely remembers who he is! The Cybermen are in it, but don't really amount to much. I'm not sure I've really enjoyed any of the DWM stories based around tv monsters thus far, actually.
The end has this weird little stinger where Frobisher reveals he has mono-morphia. It's just two panels, and I found it kind of awkward, but it does finally make explicit something that only implied by Steve Parkhouse in Voyager. Frobisher says, "It's been coming on for a while," presumably to explain why he could shape-shift in some of the earlier Alan McKenzie stories.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #111 |
scripts by Simon Furman and Jamie Delano, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree
Here we have three stories that I struggle to say much about. Nature of the Beast! is a plodding werewolf runaround with little sparkle; it's interesting because at the same time he wrote his two stories here, Simon Furman was coming into his own as the primary writer of Marvel UK's The Transformers comic, but there's little sign here of the personality-based writing he used so effectively over there. (At the time this came out, Furman's stories "Robot Buster!", "Devastation Derby!", and "Second Generation!" were being released in The Transformers;* these aren't works of high art, but they're more interesting than this.) Jamie Delano's Time Bomb was also a struggle; there was some neat stuff like the Doctor and Frobisher running around on primordial Earth, but really what was this story even about? I can't really say. Furman's last contribution (in this volume) is a one-part story about Peri imagining she's in an Alice in Wonderland scenario. Furman seems to have grokked that Ridgway can sell the surreal like few others on the basis of Voyager and Once Upon a Time-Lord, but this is boring surreal, not interesting surreal.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #118 |
script by Grant Morrison, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree
This, I think, isn't a particularly great story. It would be a bottle episode if this was a Star Trek show: a shapeshifter is loose on the ship and attacking the crew. But of course, this is a comic so it doesn't mean anything to save on sets and casting, and this is Doctor Who, so the TARDIS interior is in fact very extravagant. But Grant Morrison and Ridgway work well together to capture the sense of whimsy and wonder that go with the TARDIS interior. Is Grant Morrison a Doctor Who fan? I always had the impression of "not actually, really" but isn't the trick the Doctor pulls at the end how he gets into Chronotis's TARDIS in Shada? That seems like a bit of a deep cut for 1987. One of the nice touches that keeps this kind of generic story interesting (aside from a Ridgway TARDIS interior) is that he has a very good handle on the voices of the TARDIS crew; the Doctor's bit about "van Gogh" was spot on. (It's not necessarily a quality one needs from the DWM strip, but it's nice when it happens.)
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #128 |
script by Mike Collins, pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, letters by Annie Halfacree
In his intro to Voyager, John Ridgway complained that once Steve Parkhouse left the strip, it became much more like the tv show. This, I think, is not actually a complaint you can level at the work of Alan McKenzie, who often seemed to be trying to do something interesting even if I never particularly enjoyed reading what he actually did. The script by Mike Collins (who still works on the strip to this day!), though, does seem like one that could have aired on tv. Maybe because of that, though, I found it the most enjoyable story in this volume thus far. I think if I outlined the plot you wouldn't be wowed: what works is that Collins has a good sense of the whole TARDIS team, and the world he builds feels real and lived-in, in a way true of much 1980s sf film... but not really the glossy sci-fi stuff they gave us on the BBC. Like Morrison, he has some good Colin Baker bits, and he even remembers Peri is a botanist, and both his Peri and Frobisher are pretty smart and resourceful, and I liked the story's only real significant guest character, Kara McAllista.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #123 |
script by Jamie Delano, pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, letters by Richard Starkings
This, though, was my favorite of the book. It's pretty nuts. The Doctor, Peri, and Frobisher go the planet Zazz looking for a party; instead they find a mad scientist trying to build a volcano-powered rocket ship. He gives them a gift for his brother, the Lorduke of Zazz; they attend an all-night party with the Lorduke (the Doctor is a great dancer), and when they open the present, it turns out to be a self-replicating robot. The Doctor must investigate the robots origins while a seemingly hungover Frobisher gets the scientist to help them and the Lorduke-- who models their whole society after the 1920s-- holds Peri hostage and forces her to sing. It's bonkers, none of this should go together, but it's a delight to read, because for the first time in a long time this feels like the madness of Doctor Who the comic strip, not Doctor Who the tv show. Profits of Doom! might have worked by hewing closely to the tv show, but this works by being nothing like it. It has a sense of humor, for one thing! One of my favorite bits is how the Doctor uncovers the history of Zazz's moon in a series of short hops through history, essentially watching it on fast forward.
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| from Doctor Who Magazine #127 |
script by Grant Morrison, pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, letters by Richard Starkings
The sixth Doctor bows out of DWM with this atmospheric but ultimately pointless tale. Grant Morrison takes the opportunity to explain a throwaway line from The Invasion and tie the Cybermen together with the alien Voord from The Keys of Marinus. This is, I think, based on them having handlebar heads, which I actually kinda buy. It's vaguely clever and has some neat bits (such as the role of the Time Lords, and the dead Time Lord's TARDIS... though I didn't care for it talking)... but why? The actual story is just that the Doctor hears a bunch of exposition, and then Jamie dies. I dunno, I found this weird. It's going for epic, I guess, but it ends up being just kind of a jumble of possibly interesting ideas where nothing interesting is done with them.Stray Observations:
- Genesis! gives the writer credits as "SCRIPT: ALAN McKENZIE (ADAPTED BY JOHN RIDGWAY)," while the table of contents labels the whole story how I did above. In the introduction to Voyager, Ridgway explained that he rewrote the script as he drew it, putting the Cybermen in it more because the editor felt the magazine was wasting the money it had paid to use them with how little McKenzie had actually used them, and it was also Ridgway who added in the first explicit confirmation of Frobisher's mono-morphia.
- Peri is not in Time Bomb, except for one panel at the very end; Salad Daze came out between parts one and two of The Trial of a Time Lord and debuts the new look she had in that serial.
- Mel debuted as the Doctor's companion in The Trial of a Time Lord Part Nine, broadcast 1 Nov. 1986, between issues #118 and 119 of DWM. Peri, however, continues as the companion in the strip all the way to issue #129, released some ten months after she was written out of the show.
- Changes establishes that the TARDIS's occasionally-mentioned state of temporal grace only applies when the TARDIS is in temporal flight: when the engines are off, so is it. I am too lazy to go back and see if this matches up with the way it was used on the show.
- The ending of Profits of Doom! seems to set up Seth as a recurring villain, but unless it's not mentioned on the Tardis wiki, he never appeared again. Mike Collins has illustrated many, many Star Trek stories-- but written just one Trek tale, and it struck me that like this, it features a group of rapacious capitalist scavengers as the villains!
- Speaking of whom, I usually do little "what did they go on to do?" summaries when someone who is famous for subsequent work (e.g., Dave Gibbons) makes their last contribution to DWM. I cannot do this for Mike Collins because he has never not worked on DWM! Last year's Mistress of Chaos graphic novel featuring the thirteenth Doctor includes strips drawn by him; he has worked on seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth Doctor comics! But on the side, he has carved out a career in American comics, illustrating much of DC's The Darkstars, as well as Star Trek comics for DC, Marvel (especially Early Voyages), and Wildstorm. He also did the covers for over eighty Star Trek ebooks, including the S.C.E. series. And he worked as a storyboard artist on the Doctor Who tv show during the Moffat years!
- These are Jamie Delano's only Doctor Who stories, I think; he is best known as the first writer of the Hellblazer comic book, a spin-off of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing.
- Richard Starkings makes his Doctor Who debut here, lettering the last two stories. He is still lettering Doctor Who comics thirty-plus years later, working most recently on Titan's new Doctor Who Comic this year!
- Steve Moffat would actually reference The World Shapers on screen in World Enough and Time, as one of the multiple Cyberman origins the Doctor has experienced. I think I yelped when I heard that; even before reading The World Shapers, I knew the significance of the reference.
* All of these are collected in The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two; see below. My parallel reading is not quite in sync.
This post is the eighth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four. Previous installments are listed below:
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