Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: Liberation of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 51)

25 March 2024

Liberation of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 51)

Liberation of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2022-23
Acquired: November 2023
Read: December 2023

I did briefly think that I should maintain the chronology of this project; that is to say, I thought about saving Liberation of the Daleks until The White Dragon (and a hypothetical second volume of thirteenth Doctor comics) was out... but I was won over by the idea of reading Liberation while the fourteenth Doctor was still the current Doctor, and indeed, I was able to finish it the morning of the same Saturday that The Giggle debuted on Disney Plus. I doubt I will ever again read a Doctor's entire comics run while they are the current screen Doctor.

Liberation of the Daleks, from Doctor Who Magazine #584-97 (Dec. 2022–Dec. 2023)
story by Alan Barnes, art by Lee Sullivan, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

It's DWM's longest story! By issue count, at least; I think The Glorious Dead still has it beat out by approximately ten pages. Picking up from the end of The Power of the Doctor, this leads right into Destination: Skaro... though I am unconvinced that its events really could squeeze into the sixty minutes the Doctor states have passed between the two stories in Destination: Skaro. I am pretty sure it took me longer than sixty minutes to read it!

It's a bit bonkers, and it's not very deep, but it is fun. One of Alan Barnes's strengths as a writer has always been rearranging pop culture iconography in interesting ways: here the Daleks attack the World Cup Final in 1966, only it turns out that it's all a simulation from the future, an amusement park where people go to experience Dalek wars... and the park enslaves real Daleks to make it all work. When the Doctor escapes from the simulation, he brings real Daleks with him.

from Doctor Who Magazine #590
It's not very deep, but it is deep enough; the story does some fun stuff with the disjunction between how we perceive Daleks as viewers (fun, goofy) and how they function in the narrative of Doctor Who (purveyors of genocide); probably the best of the many strong cliffhangers is the one where a bunch of tourists began chanting "EXTERMINATE," hoping to be exterminated! As you would, of course. It casts a lens on Doctor Who's own story, but also reflects the way that, say, Nazis come across in real pop culture. Alan Barnes amps it up as the story proceeds by even bringing in the TV Century 21 Daleks, contrasting their even more goofy iconography with the brutality of the "actual" Daleks.

It does give a feeling of being made up as it went along. Mostly I don't mind this (so does, say, the original Star Beast) but it does seem like the whole story could have ended with part eight but keeps going with a whole new subplot.

Lee Sullivan does a great job with Daleks of course, but all throughout; he captures new series Daleks, classic series Daleks, TV21 Daleks, all of them. James Offredi matches him on coloring with some good work, especially on the TV21 stuff.

If you thought this would be a deep plunge into the mysteries of the fourteenth Doctor (and I can see why you might have, though the story itself discards this pretty quickly), this isn't it. But it is a solid piece of DWM fun.

from Doctor Who Magazine #593

Other Notes:

For those of us who keep track of such things, these fourteen strips tie Alan Barnes for the twelfth-longest run as writer of the DWM strip with Steve Parkhouse (#86-99), and tie Lee Sullivan for seventh as artist with David A Roach (#451-64). For total written, it moves Barnes from fifth to third (at 41 strips, a bit below Steve Parkhouse's total of 46), and Lee Sullivan from eighth to seventh (at 44 strips). But I believe there's more to come after this for both, so their numbers will move even further up.
This is Barnes's first contribution to the main strip since #380, a gap of 204 strips! This would place him in second for largest gap (if we discount the returns for issue #500), behind John Tomlinson's record of 210... except that Lee Sullivan makes his first contribution since #317, setting a new record of 267!
I'm given to understand that the conceit of TV Century 21 was that it was a news magazine from one century after its time of publication. Because of that, the humorless pedants of the Tardis wiki have counted all sorts of weird stuff as "valid" because it was printed in TV21 alongside the Dalek strips. Like, they'll count Thunderbirds... but (up until recently) not Scream of the Shalka or Death Comes to Time!? Anyway, if they are paying attention to Liberation, they need to take all that stuff back out, because Barnes establishes the TV21 comic strips are an in-universe 21st-century children's fiction.

This post is the fifty-first in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The White Dragon. Previous installments are listed below:

Science's Less Accurate Grandmother

25 March 2024

Liberation of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 51)

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