Nemesis of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of
Doctor Who Magazineby Richard Starkings, John Tomlinson, Lee Sullivan, John Ridgway, et al.
This is sort of an odd hodgepodge volume: only four genuine
DWM strips! Everything else is a back-up, or from another magazine entirely. (And one of the
DWM
strips was supposed to be in that other magazine.) Yet, despite that, I
felt like there was a slight uptick here in terms of quality since
A Cold Day in Hell! As
always, I'm reading these in original publication order, so that's not
quite the order they are organized in in the actual book.
This covers a pretty narrow slice of the monthly; not even a whole year
of comics, given the inclusion of twelve strips from a totally different
magazine! I remember a lot of moaning about this at the time, but it
feels like the right thing to do: that have the same creators and same
publisher, some were printed in
DWM, and where else would they be reprinted if not here?
Abslom Daak... Dalek-Killer, from
Doctor Who Weekly #17-20 (Feb. 1980)
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from Doctor Who Weekly #18
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script by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon
At four four-page installments, this isn't exactly an epic. I'm not
particularly sure it's good, either. Abslom Daak is sentenced to being a
Dalek-killer, which means he's teleported to a Dalek-occupied planet
and expected to take out as many as he can before he dies. He's so
successful, though, it feels like maybe the Daleks ought not have
humanity on the back foot as they apparently do?
But there's a purity to this, it's so completely itself, that it's
impossible not to enjoy it. Daak is an uncompromising character and thus
an utter delight to read about. What really elevates it is the artwork
of Steve Dillon, which reeks of power and violence. Why does this lady
fall for Daak? I don't know, but Steve Dillon makes me believe it.
Having already read Daak's storyline in Titan's Eleventh Doctor
comics, it was interesting to come back to this and see how little of a
relationship he actually had with Taiyin. So it actually works just
fine; it was a total blast to read, and left me wanting more...
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from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #45
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Star Tigers, from
Doctor Who Weekly #27-30 (Apr.-May 1980) and
Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #44-46 (Sept.-Nov. 1980)
script by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon and David Lloyd
Alas, the more that we got, I think, strays a bit too much from the pure
essence of Daak. I want to watch Daak do ridiculous action, not connive
on Draconia; Steve Dillon may be a great artist, but he's not up to the
task of making Draconians visually distinct enough for me to follow any
level of political machinations. Most of this story is about Daak
putting a team together... which would be fine if we ever got to see
this team do anything, but seven installments was all the Star Tigers
ever got. Putting Daak on a team moves him a bit away from the pure
rampage he was in the original story. Which, I get it, that couldn't
last forever, but this is a bit duller than he deserves.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #154
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Nemesis of the Daleks, from
Doctor Who Magazine #152-155 (Sept.-Dec. 1989)
plot by Richard Alan, script by Steve Alan, art by Lee Sullivan, lettering by Zed
The Star Tigers might detract from the Daak concept, but I can't help but feel that Nemesis of the Daleks does them dirty. They have one adventure together in Star Tigers, and then they apparently all die... off-panel! They deserved better, surely? Anyway, Daak might live in the universe of Doctor Who but he's not a good fit for a Doctor Who story, not right out of the box anyway. By using the Time War and the War Doctor, I thought The Eleventh Doctor
made great use of him... but it by necessity, I think, had to make him
overtly comedic and somewhat pathetic. I can imagine a good seventh
Doctor story where the Doctor manipulates Daak as part of some
masterplan of his... unfortunately, this story is more like the Doctor
just stands there a lot while Daak does his thing (and then dies). This
story features some absolutely gorgeous art from Lee Sullivan, including
some great two-page spreads, but aside from that is not up to much.
Pretty generic action, without the vigor of the original Daak story, or
the cleverness of a good Doctor Who one.
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from The Incredible Hulk Presents #1
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Once in a Lifetime, from
The Incredible Hulk Presents #1 (Oct. 1989)
script by John Freeman, art by Geoff Senior, lettering by Stuart Bartlett
This is the first of a set of twelve five-page strips published in the Marvel UK anthology mag, The Incredible Hulk Presents.
It has a cute idea at first (the Doctor trying to dodge a nosy
reporter, leads him into a bar of his enemies), but quickly goes too far
to be plausible (why does the Doctor maroon and ruin this guy when he
could just fly away in the TARDIS himself?).
Hunger from the Ends of Time!, from
The Incredible Hulk Presents #2-3 (Oct. 1989), reprinted in
Doctor Who Magazine #157-58 (Feb.-Mar. 1990)
script by Dan Abnett, art by John Ridgway, lettering by Annie Halfacree
John Ridgway is back! And so is Dan Abnett's future space
police/military, Foreign Hazard Duty. I think probably there's a fun
idea here about bookworms in a digital library, but the story's
technobabble is far too muddled, and the whole thing (despite being one
of only two two-part IHP stories) is over too quickly to make any sense.
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from The Incredible Hulk Presents #6
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War World! / Technical Hitch / A Switch in Time! / The Sentinel!, from
The Incredible Hulk Presents #4-7 (Oct.-Nov. 1989)
scripts by John Freeman, Dan Abnett, and John Tomlinson; pencils by Art Wetherell, Geoff Senior, and Andy Wildman; inks by Dave Harwood, Cam Smith, Geoff Senior, and Andy Wildman; lettering by Annie Halfacree, Stuart Bartlett, and Helen Stone
I've never been a big fan of DWM's occasional foray into the a spooky sci-fi Twilight Zoneesque thing happens and the Doctor doesn't really do anything
genre, and it turns out I like them even less when compressed down to
five pages. Plus, maybe I am stupid, but I didn't even understand what
was happening in A Switch in Time! (the Doctor materializes in a
holo-tv, so every time the viewers change the channel, he's in a new
situation) until I read the behind-the-scenes material.
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from The Incredible Hulk Presents #8
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Who's That Girl!, from
The Incredible Hulk Presents #8-9 (Nov.-Dec. 1989)
script by Simon Furman, pencils by John Marshall, inks by Stephen Baskerville, letters by Stuart Bartlett and Spolly
This was my favorite of the IHP stories, and one of my favorites
in the volume. The Doctor regenerates... into a woman!? The best part of
the story is that the Doctor's old friend, the warlord Luj, pretends
he's going to make a pass at the Doctor but then immediately lets it go
and acts the same toward him. But the female Doctor is really a
mercenary named Kasgi hired to sabotage an interdimensional peace
conference-- and Luj is really a bad guy, so Kasgi is on the side of
right, despite the questionable method of hijacking and kidnapping the
Doctor! I liked Kasgi a lot, and I see potential in a reappearance, but I
guess not at this point. This was a fun story that made good use of its
ten pages.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #156
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The Enlightenment of Ly-Chee the Wise / Stairway to Heaven / Slimmer! / Nineveh!, from
The Incredible Hulk Presents #10-12 (Dec. 1989) and
Doctor Who Magazine #156 (Jan. 1990)
scripts by Simon Jowett, John Freeman & Paul Cornell, Mike Collins & Tim Robins, and John Tomlinson; art by Andy Wildman, Gerry Dolan, Geoff Senior, and Cam Smith; letters by Helen Stone, Stuart Bartlett, and Peri Godbold
DWM #156 has a cover date of Jan. 1990, but it was released 14 Dec. 1989, putting it between IHP
#10 (9 Dec.) and #11 (16 Dec.), so that's where I read it. It reads
well in that context, actually; as a done-in-one story of weird sci-fi
happenings, Paul Cornell's first piece of licensed Doctor Who fiction feels like a slightly longer IHP
story. And if that sounds like damning with faint praise, it kind of
is; I didn't really get it, though I think mostly down to some awkward
storytelling in the art, which often left me confused as to what was
actually happening. I didn't think the joke of Enlightenment was very well executed, but Slimmer! was decent fun, and Nineveh! had some good ideas, even if it wasn't much of a story. So the volume was on an upswing here overall.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #159
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Train-Flight, from
Doctor Who Magazine #159-61 (Apr.-June 1990)
script by Andrew Donkin & Graham S Brand, art by John Ridgway
The best part of this is the idea that would be reused two decades later on tv in Planet of the Dead,
the public transit that accidentally takes you into space.
Unfortunately, the story doesn't really do much with that idea, pretty
much abandoning the people on the train right away, unlike Planet of the Dead,
which is built around them in classic RTD fashion. (Though, that's not
one of RTD's better-characterized scripts.) It also features the return
of Sarah Jane Smith... but it doesn't do much with her, either; she
could be any old companion, so why bother? That said, you say, "John
Ridgway, draw a train in the space-time vortex," and he draws it like none
other.
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from Doctor Who Magazine #162
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Doctor Conkerer!, from
Doctor Who Magazine #162 (July 1990)
script by Ian Rimmer, art by Mike Collins
I might have got more out of this if I knew what conkers was. But it was cute enough.
Stray Observations:
- With #13, the The Crimson Hand graphic
novel, these collections got a visual redesign, but reading in original
strip order, this is the first of the new-look volumes I've gotten to. It
makes me pretty grumpy that part of this redesign means removing the
credits from the table of contents-- the actual strips were not very
good at including credits during this era (I assume they were printed
somewhere else in the mag), meaning it takes more work than it ought to
to figure out who wrote and drew any particular strip. (And some letters
go completely uncredited.)
- In part six of Star Tigers, we hear a
human colony has rebelled and is using Kill-Mechs to invade other
planets, and we see them in a couple panels. In the next installment,
though, Daleks burst out of meteroids and the Kill-Mechs and their
emperor are immediately forgotten. "The Kill-Mechs don't matter!" Apparently DWM
was unsure it had the rights to the Daleks and hastily redid part six,
but a month later, it was all sorted out. (I gather that the 1990 Abslom Daak graphic novel edits out the Kill-Mechs, but here the strips are printed as they originally appeared, not as originally intended.)
- David Lloyd never illustrated the main DWM strip, I believe, but he did draw a number of back-ups across the first few years of the mag. Star Tigers is the only one to be collected thus far; a couple years after Star Tigers went out, he would begin illustrating his most famous work, V for Vendetta, with fellow DWM back-up strip vet Alan Moore.
- As I stated last time, "Richard Alan" is a pseudonym for strip
editor Richard Starkings, used because he was an editor commissioning
himself. "Steve Alan" was writer John Tomlinson, used because was
worried what he had written was a bit crap!
- I don't think Panini began including prose
stories in these collections until later. Which is a shame, because
Marvel UK published a Daak short story in the Abslom Daak graphic novel that would have been a good inclusion here. (Or so I think... having never read it!)
- Nemesis of the Daleks is, I think, the first time the distinctive "Dalek lettering" was used in DWM. Googling tells me it was first used in The Dalek Book back in 1964!
- Who's That Girl! is the last Doctor Who comic work of Marvel UK regular Simon Furman; I don't think he ever really "got" Doctor Who the way he did The Transformers, but he goes out with his best strip here. He would go on to do a lot of work for Marvel US, including a particularly mediocre run on Alpha Flight. (But then, is there anyone who had anything other than a mediocre run on Alpha Flight?) Two decades after reinventing the Transformers for the UK market, he would reinvent them all over again for the 2000s with, I think, no small amount of success. Gary Russell must have thought he wrote good Doctor Who, though, because he commissioned a fifth Doctor audio drama from him in 2004.
- The Enlightenment of Ly-Chee the Wise was Simon Jowett's only Doctor Who work for two decades, until he contributed a short story to the anthology The Story of Martha-- put together by fellow Marvel UK writer Dan Abnett. Mike Collins's co-writer on Slimmer!, Tim Robins, never contributed another Who strip to Marvel UK, but he did conduct a number of fanzine interviews later collected in Telos's Talkback series. Stairway to Heaven was Gerry Dolan's only DWM strip, and he left comics soon after this for "a successful if little noticed career as a storyboard artist," according to John Freeman.
- Train-Flight establishes that Ace is in the Cretaceous, her first mention in the DWM strip. Since the Doctor is still trying to get to Maruthea in subsequent stories, that seemingly means all DWM stories since at least Echoes of the Mogor! must take place in a gap during Ace's travels.
- Doctor Conkerer! was Ian Rimmer's only Doctor Who work, but he wrote a number of Transformers strips for Marvel UK, including two charming Christmas specials.
- Train-Flight has some forebodings that something is off in the Doctor's life; an extra piece of text in Doctor Conkerer! (replacing where the credits would have been if it had been printed in IHP) adds to this.
This post is the fourteenth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers part 2 of Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent. Previous installments are listed below:
- The Iron Legion
- Dragon's Claw
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
- The Tides of Time
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
- Voyager
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
- The World Shapers
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
- The Age of Chaos
- The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
- A Cold Day in Hell!
- Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
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