Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: creator: adrian salmon

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08 May 2023

The Clockwise War (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 44)

The Clockwise War: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, John Ross, Alan Barnes, Adrian Salmon, Charlie Adlard, et al.

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 1994-2018
Acquired: December 2019
Read: December 2022

The twelfth Doctor's run comes to an end with this somewhat odd collection, which includes just one twelfth Doctor story as well as a number of outstanding uncollected color stories from various sources, basically everything color that was left except for a few strips that made their way into The Age of Chaos.

Anyway, for obvious reasons I didn't follow my usual principle of reading each collection in original publication order: it just wouldn't make sense to go from The Phantom Piper to a bunch of other stuff to The Clockwise War, when The Clockwise War picks up right from The Phantom Piper.

The Clockwise War, from Doctor Who Magazine #524-30 (May-Nov. 2018)
story by Scott Gray, art by John Ross, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

This story caps off the twelfth Doctor era with a story that pits the Doctor and Bill against erstwhile companion Fey, who's out for revenge against the Time Lords after suffering through the horrors of the Time War. I think there's a lot to like about this story but it didn't totally work for me. I like the return of Fey, I like the installment told from the perspective of the War Doctor, I like the reveal about Shayde, I like the return of Jodafra and the use of his death to prove the situation is serious, I like the stuff with Wonderland and especially Annabel Lake. John Ross probably turns in his best-ever DWM work here, it's propulsive and beautiful to look at. On the other hand, the black-and-white monsters are too similar to what we just saw in The Phantom Piper, and while it's nice to see some of the supporting characters from The Parliament of Fear return... I'm not actually sure why they're there! Ultimately I think it's at least partially a victim of the sudden page cut: there's little room to breathe, and just like in the last story, Bill feels a bit forgotten in the middle of it all. This is her last story, but she doesn't get the kind of moments or send-off that Rose, Donna, Amy, and Clara got in theirs. Lots of moments of love but I didn't love it altogether.

from Doctor Who Yearbook 1994

A Religious Experience, from Doctor Who Yearbook 1994
story by Tim Quinn, art by John Ridgway, letters by Janey Rutter, colours by Chrissie McCormack

In this first Doctor story, he and Ian watch a religious ritual on an alien planet. I didn't care for this at all: overly talky and nihilistic, I felt. Plus, John Ridgway's art usually doesn't benefit from being colored, especially coloring this crude.

Rest & Re-Creation / The Naked Flame, from Doctor Who Yearbooks 1994 & 1995
scripts by Warwick Gray, art by Charlie Adlard, colours by Helen Nally and Steve Whitaker, letters by Janey Rutter and Jane Smale

These are both fourth Doctor stories where he re-meets old monsters: the Zygons in the first and the Menoptera in the second. They're by a young pre-"Scott" Scott Gray, and I found both kind of boring and confusing.

Blood Invocation, from Doctor Who Yearbook 1995
story by Paul Cornell, art by John Ridgway, colour by Paul Vyse, letters by Jane Smale

The fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa take on Time Lord vampires in this story that's almost but not quite a prequel to the Missing Adventure Goth Opera; in the extras, Paul Cornell explains that he doesn't know why they aren't consistent. I didn't find much to enjoy here; again, I think I'd be more into John Ridgway drawing vampires if it was all in black and white.

from Doctor Who Magazine #223

The Cybermen, from Doctor Who Magazine #215-38 & 504 (Aug. 1994–May 1996, Nov. 2016)
by Alan Barnes & Adrian Salmon, lettering by Peri Godbold

This was a series of one-page strips published in the magazine across about two years; even before reading the commentary it was obvious to me that it was based on the old Daleks strips: it focuses on the Cybermen on Mondas in the old days, encountering weird threats, where we're usually meant to identify with the monsters, not the people trying to stop them. Like those old strips, they're kinetic and weird and fascinating, and I kind of felt like reading them all in a row wasn't doing them justice. They're very visual stories, and I often didn't know what exactly had happened, and felt I ought to have spent the time working through the art of the (as always) brilliant Adrian Salmon, but instead I went on to the next. But still: where else can you get Cybermen battling dinosaurs, Cybermen with blimps, Cybermen battling Cthuluoid menaces. The use of stuff like the Silurians could be overly fannish, but Barnes and Salmon make it work; I don't know how this actually fits with previous Cybermen stories, not even The Tenth Planet, but I don't really care.

from Doctor Who Yearbook 1996

Star Beast II / Junk-Yard Demon II, from Doctor Who Yearbook 1996
stories by Gary Gillat and Alan Barnes, art by Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon, colours by Paul Vyse, letters by Elitta Fell and Peri Godbold

It would be easy to attack to self-consuming nature of DWM pre-TVM: the best it could come up was two sequels to Steve Parkhouse strips? But actually these were my favorites of the various yearbook stories collected here. Fun, straightforward stories with good artwork. Beep the Meep is always good fun, of course, and it's nice to see Fudge again. I don't know that Junk-Yard Demon demanded a sequel, but if it had to get one, this one is suitably grotesque.

from Doctor Who Magazine #526

Stray Observations:

Branding this collection "Collected Multi-Doctor Comic Strips – Volume 2" is one of those things that's technically correct but seems a bit confusing. Far better to brand it as the fifth and final of the "Collected Twelfth Doctor Comic Strips," since that's the series it actually ties into.
I liked the return of Jodafra, but on the other hand I didn't remember who Gol Clutha was at all even though she appeared much more recently, in Hunters of the Burning Stone and The Stockbridge Showdown!
I know the name came from Moffat (it debuted in this comic, but Scott Gray e-mailed Moffat to find out if the character had a name), but I find "Kenossium" as a name for Ken Bones/T'Nia Miller's General character really really stupid.
In the extras, Tim Quinn complains that editor John Freeman added a reference to the planet Quinnis from Inside the Spaceship to A Religious Experience. He seems to think the name "Quinnis" is intrinsically dumb-sounding but I'm not sure why.
These are Charlie Adlard's only Doctor Who contributions, and he seems faintly bemused by the whole things in the notes. He also did a lot of Vertigo work in the 1990s, but most notably went on to be the penciller on 187 issues of The Walking Dead, making him the person in this volume with the biggest non–Doctor Who comics career.
Star Beast II picks up from the end of The Star Beast; when Big Finish eventually did its own Beep the Meep story (2002's The Ratings War), it would actually pick up right from the end of Star Beast II, with Beep escaping Lassie.

This post is the forty-fourth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Death's Head: Clone Drive and Revolutionary War. Previous installments are listed below:

27 February 2023

The Blood of Azrael (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 37)

The Blood of Azrael: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Mike Collins, Adrian Salmon, and David A Roach

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 2013-14
Acquired: August 2015
Read: December 2022

Here, we settle into what becomes the structure of the strip for the next several years: thirteen-strip arcs designed to fill out the new, smaller, graphic novel size. This one takes us up until the end of Matt Smith's run, and feels a bit like an appendix to the rest of it, picking up some characters and concepts from the previous volume, but not being as big as what had come before. Which, to be fair, is how Clara's tv run with the eleventh Doctor feels too!

Scott Gray, I think, keeps pushing himself here. It's interesting to read the backmatter, because he's always looking for opportunity to squeeze a bit more characterization; he notes, as I did as a viewer, that Clara feels like a bit of a nonentity during her first series, and so he tries to delve into her a bit more... coincidentally foreshadowing her transition into being a teacher that would come with "The Day of the Doctor"! He also zooms in on the eleventh Doctor's occasional bouts of mopiness, his relationship with the TARDIS as a character, and his self-doubts.

He also keeps on building up the DWM world. A lot of DWM fans say they like the comic's building up of its own world, but I think what they really mean is they like the way the comic did that when they were twelve: they like Maxwell Edison and Stockbridge and Dogbolter and the fact people say "mazumas" and the DWM version of Gallifrey. It would be easy for the strip to continuously go back to these things, as it did during the Izzy era. But Gray and his artistic collaborators (mostly Mike Collins here) keep pushing the DWM universe forward. Here, we get more about the Lakes from The Broken Man and Hunters of the Burning Stone, and more about Horatio Lynk and Cornucopia from The Cornucopia Caper, and we get the addition of Amy Johnson to the DWM recurring cast. It's great stuff, and I love that the strip keeps doing it instead of resting on the laurels of nostalgia. Cornucopia is a great setting.

from Doctor Who Magazine #464

A Wing and a Prayer, from Doctor Who Magazine #462-64 (Aug.-Oct. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Like Rose and Martha, Clara is introduced into DWM with a fast-paced, lively story with some good moments for her character, illustrated by Mike Collins. It's the only way to do it, I guess! This is a good solid story that one expects from DWM at this point, which makes it easy to overlook how good it is. Good jokes, good characterization, neat concepts, and an excellent climax. An enjoyable take on the celebrity historical with a delightful ending. If they were all like this, we'd be in great hands.

from Doctor Who Magazine #465

Welcome to Tickle Town, from Doctor Who Magazine #465-66 (Nov.-Dec. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, art & colour by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

Now, it pains me to say this, because normally I have nothing but praise for him (indeed, I own a piece of his original artwork, the only comics artist for whom that is true), but... I don't think Adrian Salmon was the right person to draw this story. Tickle Town is a Disneylandesque amusement park, only its inhabitants have been held captive for twenty years, kept in line by cartoon characters. Salmon of course draws great cartoon characters: the frog cowboy is a particular highlight. But it seems to me the power of the story visually comes from the contrast between the cartoons and the real people, but Salmon's style is sufficiently realist to make it work. Maybe with regular DWM colourist James Offredi it would have stood out more? But I can't help thinking there's a better version of this out there, where (say) Martin Geraghty draws all the human characters and Salmon the cartoons, and the contrast is striking.

But still, it's decent fun, particularly the song about the world being a nuclear wasteland set to the tune of "It's a Small World, After All."

from Doctor Who Magazine #467

John Smith and the Common Men, from Doctor Who Magazine #467 (Nov. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, art by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Back in the Paul McGann days, once senses Scott Gray tearing his hair out trying to come up with new premises for anniversary strips. In 2013, he had to come up with two! Hunters of the Burning Stone was a fiftieth-anniversary story, and now we have a one-off for the anniversary itself. I have fond memories of this one from back in 2013, a sort of sideways take on the concept: less about Doctor Who the show with its characters and aliens, and more about Doctor Who at its core: the values it promotes. John Smith is a government drudge who can't help anyone even when he wants to; the story depicts his slow awakening to something being wrong in the world and how he stops it. David A Roach excels on art, giving us an army of bow-tied bureaucrats, and an atmosphere of all-consuming drudgery. A clever idea for an anniversary story, not derivative at all, and well-executed.

from Doctor Who Magazine #470

Pay the Piper / The Blood of Azrael, from Doctor Who Magazine #468-74 (Jan.-July 2014)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Pay the Piper is a short, seemingly standalone story that ends up leading into a bigger story to come. In the backmatter, Scott Gray calls Pay the Piper a "Utopia"... but of course DWM was doing this kind of thing long before the television programme was (e.g., Stars Fell on Stockbridge, Darkness, Falling, The Keep, Me and My Shadow). Pay the Piper is fun at first: the Doctor and Clara at an auction in cyberspace complete with comedy alien cab driver, then kind of horrifying when the Doctor gets "erased" and it turns out genocide and cannibalism are on the menu. Then it shifts again and you learn that two different guest characters are members of MI-6's "Wonderland" project from Hunters of the Burning Stone... and there's a hell of a cliffhanger when the Doctor accidentally sells the TARDIS!

This all leads into The Blood of Azrael, another Cornucopia-focused story that brings back Amy Johnson, Annabel Lake, and Horatio Lynk, all becoming firm favorites, and gives Matt Smith's Doctor some really interesting stuff to do when he's rich but TARDIS-less. Gray shows real insight into the character of the Doctor, and the story itself is a decent one, with some good twists and nice themes about xenophobia and money and amazing visuals from Mike Collins and David A Roach. The bit where Amy goes to her death is genuinely emotional! She does not die, but I did not remember that.

The complaint I have is a bit unfair: it's just not as good as Hunters of the Burning Stone! I think this is down to the characterization of the climax; the Doctor apologizes, and... that's it, the TARDIS accepts it. I kind of wanted more of a reckoning... but that's probably outside the scope of what the strip can actually do. The last page, with Matt Smith dancing is celebration, is excellent.

Sometimes DWM is superior to the television programme. That was not the case during the Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant eras, even at the strip's best. But I think we actually got pretty close to that again during this latter-era Matt Smith run. It might be dancing in show's shadow... but boy can it dance like no one else.

Stray Observations:

The relationship between Clara and Amy (not that one) had romantic/sexual chemistry in my opinion, Scott Gray picking up something that I don't think was really hinted at on screen until series eight!
I like Cornucopia as I said above. One of the benefits of evolving a setting in a comics medium is that every time the artist changes, the world expands. Dan McDaid's Cornucopia is not Martin Geraghty's is not Mike Collins's. But they all coexist. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like Gray made a slight mistake in removing the "crime is legal" schtick from Corncuopia's first appearance. It's a bit less interesting without it! I like that we get a return from those of those crimelords here.
Yes, my dates above are correct. Like most magazines, DWM is usually cover-dated a month or two ahead of release, but the fiftieth-anniversary issue (for I guess obvious reasons) was cover-dated to the actual month of release.
Scott Gray notes he considered having Annabel disguise herself as Majenta Pryce in Pay the Piper. I see why he didn't, but what a twist it would have been!
Whoever wrote the Tardis wiki article on Amy Johnson didn't read all the way to the end of The Blood of Azrael, because it claims she dies!
"JUST A TRACER" WATCH: We have cover credit! Yes, for the first time, after eighty-eight previous artistic contributions to Doctor Who Magazine in ten previous graphic novels, David A Roach has finally got his name on the cover! Is it because inking has finally been recognized as a valid part of the comics experience? Well, no. It's because he pencils and inks one strip here. Pencilling one strip > inking eighty-eight. I'll be continuing to monitor this key facet of DWM.

This post is the thirty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Eye of Torment. Previous installments are listed below:

16 November 2022

Oblivion (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 27)

Oblivion: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Lee Sullivan, John Ross, et al.

Collection published: 2006
Contents originally published: 2001-03
Previously read: January 2008
Reread: August 2022

In my comments on The Glorious Dead, I wrote, "I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms." Now that we're in the early 2000s, this is more true than ever. The tv show is dead, long live the tv show—now what can the strip be like without it? There aren't even really many callbacks to the previous history of the strip anymore, just its own immediate continuity.

2001 is the year I became a Doctor Who fan, though I didn't discover the strip until I started picking up these reprint collections a few years later. What made me a Doctor Who fan is the spiritual counterpart of this era of the strip: the Paul McGann audio dramas. Like the comic, the audios had a lightly serialized background story with strong character drama in the foreground... and every single installment felt big, like you were watching a movie, or if not that, like the writer was trying to make a statement about Doctor Who every week. Indeed, the very first issue collected here had a cover-mounted CD containing episode one of the very first Doctor Who audio drama I ever heard.

This volume consistently feels like it's cribbing in a way—it's cribbing from the tv show that hasn't come back yet. The audios and the comics of this time, like the show when it returned, reinvented Doctor Who to be like Buffy or Deep Space Nine, without ever losing what made it work in the first place.

from Doctor Who Magazine #303

Ophidius, from Doctor Who Magazine #300-03 (Feb.-May 2001)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge

This is like an RTD series opener. Well, maybe more accurately, an RTD Year Five Billion episode: "okay, you like us, now here's some weird colorful stuff only we can do." The arrival of color to the strip works perfectly in this bold, exciting story that launches a new story arc for the eighth Doctor and Izzy. Ophidius is a great setting, the Doctor and Izzy are both on fine form, and new character Destrii is great—I never read this without foreknowledge of what her true purpose was, but I suspect it works well, as she bonds with Izzy only to betray her. In fact, it's a lot like Moffat's The Impossible Astronaut: you think you're watching a standard series premiere only to realize something much more unexpected and unusual is happening.

The bodyswap plot is a great idea, and would only work in comics. On tv, you wouldn't want to write out one of your leads temporarily like this; imagine Billie Piper being replaced! On audio, you'd have a new character with a new voice, and I think the continuity of personality wouldn't come across. You could do it in a novel, but I don't think it would work as well, as you wouldn't have the clear visual reminder of what had happened. But in comics, you can swap character appearances without worrying about actors, and you can get the same character "voice" but with a totally different appearance.

from Doctor Who Magazine #304

Beautiful Freak, from Doctor Who Magazine #304 (May 2001)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge

This one-part story follows up Ophidius with the character implications. Scott Gray and Martin Geraghty are at the peak of their creative voices here: the character voices shine, the art is gorgeous. "I d-don't want to be strong... I w-want to be me..." is a devastatingly effective line; the sequence of the Doctor plunging Izzy into the TARDIS swimming pool is gorgeous. I don't really remember seeing much of the TARDIS interior in the McGann run up until this point, but they use it really well here. Again, this is the kind of story you could only do in the strip: with its highly variable story lengths, you can spend eight pages on a character moment and nothing else.

from Doctor Who Magazine #309

The Way of All Flesh, from Doctor Who Magazine #306, 308-10 (July-Nov. 2001)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge

I remembered this one as being very bad, but upon reading it, realized I was confusing it with a different DWM story about artists in the early twentieth century, The Futurists. In this one, the Doctor and Izzy meet Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego, and discover evil aliens are using the Mexican Day of the Dead to harvest life-force. I don't have much to say about this one... in that it is yet again a solid, well-done story from the Gray/Geraghty team, enhanced by the way it plays off the ongoing character beats. Amazing visuals, nice conversations between Izzy and Frida.

Character Assassin, from Doctor Who Magazine #311 (Dec. 2001)
story by Scott Gray, art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

Another one of those largely continuity-free one-off strips celebrating something. (The last of the McGann era, if I recall correctly.) A fun but disposable adventure of the Master in the Land of Fiction.

from Doctor Who Magazine #313

Children of the Revolution, from Doctor Who Magazine #312-17 (Jan.-May 2002)
story by Scott Gray, art by Lee Sullivan, colours by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

What can I say? Another strong outing from Scott Gray, this time joined by Lee "Best at Daleks" Sullivan on artwork. Opening with an extract with Izzy's diary is a clever move; it gives us some personality insight, but also lets us quickly and efficiently do some exposition. It has multiple great cliffhangers and several powerful visual moments. "Good Daleks" is a strategy many different Doctor Who stories have pulled (all the way back to Troughton's debut, but more recently Victory of the Daleks on screen and Dark Eyes on audio), but surely this is the only good "good Dalek" story? The way they are revealed and then that reveal is out-revealed is great; the humans' prejudice against Daleks being a driver for the story is very well done; everything looks fantastic underwater; there's a helluva cliffhanger; Izzy is once again on top form. Gray and Geraghty might be firing on all cylinders, but Sullivan can step up to the plate, too. The growing pressure on the Doctor as a character is nicely done as well; more on that soon.

from Doctor Who Magazine #326

Me and My Shadow / Uroboros / Oblivion, from Doctor Who Magazine #318-28 (June 2002–Apr. 2003)
stories by Scott Gray, art by John Ross and Martin Geraghty & David A. Roach, colours by Roger Langridge and Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

Technically, this is three separate stories: a one-issue prologue and then two big stories. But these eleven strips feel like the kind of three-part series finale that Russell T Davies and Steve Moffat would go on to write: this is the comic's "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" or its "Face the Raven"/"Hell Bent"/"Heaven Sent." A story even bigger than The Glorious Dead! Each part works fine on its own from a plot perspective, and there's a shift in approach and location between each installment, but in terms of theme and character, the stories all add up to one big story. Me and My Shadow is fine, a well-enough-but-a-little-confusing story about what Fey has been up to since she was dropped off at the end of Wormwood.
But then we launch into Uroboros and it's magnificent again. The reveal of Destrii in Izzy's body is great. We get more insight into Destrii as a character, and it very much intrigues. The characterization of the Doctor is excellent, being pushed in different directions but never becoming unrecognizable; I very rarely say this, but I would love to get to hear Paul McGann perform some of the anger here. The idea of following up a previous adventure and seeing its consequences is strong; at the time this was a Bush/Blair 9/11 allegory, but it reads even more prescient (unfortunately) these days. This is the kind of comics that just propels you from installment to installment.

It also propels you straight into Oblivion, the explosive finale: Izzy versus Destrii as we finally find out what exactly has been going on. I did get a bit muddled in the backstory of Oblivion and the nature of the threat here, but what really works is of course the character stuff. Izzy taking on Destrii is fantastic; the reveal about Izzy's sexuality, which makes sense of some pretty heavy-handed characterization from way back in End Game even moreso. Her decision to go home is great, and perfectly timed. The sequence paralleling the lives of Izzy and Desrtii is very well written and beautifully drawn.

from Doctor Who Magazine #311

Other Notes:

I was a bit surprised to recognize the Mobox in Ophidius: eighteen years later, Scott Gray would reuse them in a thirteenth Doctor strip adventure. When I read The Power of the Mobox, it had been over a decade since I first read this volume so I didn't recognize them at all, and so I experienced the callback in reverse order!
Did the strip skip issue #305? No, that was the VNA throwback The Last Word, not collected until much later in The Age of Chaos, though I read it much earlier. It did, however, skip #307, which ran a TV Comic reprint. The backmatter here doesn't mention any script or art issues, but I feel like surely there must have been some.
The appearance of what are clearly Martian tripods in "Character Assassin" is a bit cheeky—The War of the Worlds wouldn't come into the public domain in the UK for another sixteen years!
Surely Izzy is—by a wide margin—the strip's best original companion thus far. Though I guess the competition here isn't exactly fierce. I mean, I do like Frobisher, but well-rounded person, he is not exactly.
Making Izzy gay this way—not explicitly clear until her last story—probably feels a bit underwhelming to modern audiences who get much better representation on a regular basis. But she's Doctor Who's first clearly gay main companion, and dealing with that is made to really matter here. The tv show doesn't make it here until 2017; even the audios not until 2011. (I know all of these are arguable.) It does feel a bit like Scott Gray watched Willow come out on Buffy and thought he could do it too. In a good way.
Destrii's Uncle Jodafra is a fun one-off character, and I seem to recall he returns along with her in the next volume.
Interesting to note that in both Izzy and Destrii's stories, a picture of the Enterprise is used as a stand-in for escape. It's the sort of spot the TARDIS itself might be used normally, but of course they couldn't be watching Doctor Who, and I'd rather see Star Trek here than one of those dumb stand-ins the tie-ins use sometimes. So it's a bit jarring, but I also don't know what a better option would be. Anyway, I reckon Scott Gray would write an excellent Star Trek comic.
Pretty amazing to think that much of this was running in parallel with McGann's second audio season (Jan.-June 2002), which was doing much the same thing as I said above, and has almost as good a hit rate. (I rate five of its six stories highly; actually, the bad one is a bad "good Dalek" story.) Charley dominates the audio companions for much the same reason Izzy does the comics ones, and the run manages to do interesting stuff with the Doctor as well, just like this. What a time to be a Who fan in general, and an eighth Doctor one in specific. (And though I haven't read the eighth Doctor novels of this era very systematically, most of the ones I have read are also strong: EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, The City of the Dead, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura. I guess on the other hand, though, you've got Escape Velocity and Time Zero in this era; the McGann comics have never done anything that bad for sure.)
Uroboros/Oblivion is thus the Neverland of this run. I really like Neverland, but one thing that sticks out when comparing this comic run to the audios is that Gray is able to write big epic finales that don't need to draw on Time Lord mythology to have scale and scope. Though he did go to that well in Wormwood, neither this nor The Glorious Dead engage with that aspect of the Doctor Who mythos. I think the Time Lords can be crutch for writers looking for grandeur, and Gray is perfectly capable of working without it.
I feel like my reviews here have kind of undersold this run. If you just read synopses of it all, I'm not sure it would come across better than any other era of DWM history. What makes this era sing is less the big stuff (though the arc is very well done) or the premise of any individual tale (though there are some good ones), but the way the dialogue shines and the story is paced and the art is perfect. It's just well done; I may as well have been grinning all the way through reading this.

This post is the twenty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers issues #180–89, 199–205, 219–22, and 228–34 of The Transformers UK. Previous installments are listed below:

10 October 2022

The Glorious Dead (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 26)

The Glorious Dead: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Adrian Salmon, Roger Langridge, et al.

Collection published: 2006
Contents originally published: 1979-2001
Previously read: January 2008
Reread: July 2022

If you have a consistent writer, does the strip have a natural tendency toward story arcs? The backmatter here explains that after the Threshold arc, editor Gary Gillat promised fewer arcs... but in his very next multi-part story, scripter Scott Gray introduced the elements of a new story arc. Just can't be avoided, I guess? Like the stories in End Game, this arc draws on the strip's long history, but it feels less beholden to it, as instead of lots of returning strip elements, we just have one in the form of Kroton, and also unlike End Game, I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms.

Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools, from Doctor Who Weekly #5-7, 23-24 (Nov. 1979 & Mar. 1980)
story by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon

Just as the McCoy-era strips picked up a character from the Tom Baker–era back-ups and brought him into the main strip in the present, we have that here with Kroton the Cyberman with a Soul, and so the collection helpfully reprints his original appearances. Throwback is basically fine; I think what I struggle with is that even before Kroton breaks away, none of the Cybermen feel particularly Cyberman-y. I mean, I guess there's no reason Cybermen can't chat about things, as long as they do so logically, but they don't feel like the impassive, unstoppable telos of humanity here. But, you know, I would never say no to some Steve Dillon art, and Kroton's interventions on behalf of the human resistance are well done. Ship of Fools is a great spooky sf tale, but Kroton himself could pretty much be any random traveler in it. If someone picked it up because of issue #23's "A NEW CYBERMAN COMIC STRIP!" cover blurb, I imagine they were kind of disappointed.

from Doctor Who Magazine #272

Happy Deathday, from Doctor Who Magazine #272 (Dec. 1998)
story by Scott Gray, art & lettering by Roger Langridge

This is DWM's special contribution to the... ah, 35th anniversary? Is that a thing? It's a deliberately goofy multi-Doctor story, and I have to say, deliberately goofiness is probably better than deadly earnestness when it comes to these things, as the Doctors team up against the Beige Guardian, and there are references to Dimenions in Time, and it all turns out to be a videogame that Izzy is playing. There are some good jokes, and the art is fun.

from Doctor Who Magazine #274

The Fallen, from Doctor Who Magazine #273-76 (Jan.-Apr. 1999)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fell and Peri Godbold

This is DWM's sequel to the TV movie: Grace, since its events, has been using DNA she recovered to try to create a human/Time Lord hybrid, that will fulfill her desire to hold back death. But the DNA didn't come from a Time Lord, because he was in the body of a Skarosian morphant, and so Grace and the MI6 scientist she's been working with have inadvertently created a horrendous monster. Meanwhile, the Master is back... even though no one knows it. What I realized while reading it is that it's really the only sequel to the TVM ever made! BBC Books kind of edged close to it a couple times (and I know authors wanted to use Grace in novels but couldn't), while Big Finish totally ignored it except for using McGann himself (up until they got Eric Roberts, anyway). But this is a full-fledged sequel, following on from its scenes and character beats, even. The Doctor makes big impacts on people's lives, and this has repercussions he's not always thinking about. There's a strong focus on the characters of the Doctor and Grace here, and Martin Geraghty does a great job with big action and character close-ups alike. Overall, a good one, and the beginning of a good direction, I think.

from Doctor Who Magazine #277

Unnatural Born Killers, from Doctor Who Magazine #277 (May 1999)
story & art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Elitta Fell

If you say, "Adrian Salmon, draw a story about Kroton the Cyberman beating up Sontarans," of course he will draw the hell out of it. And it turns out he can write, too! It took a bit for me to adjust to the more irreverent, human Kroton of the 1990s, but it was the right call for sure.

from Doctor Who Magazine #281

The Road to Hell, from Doctor Who Magazine #278-82 (June-Sept. 1999)
story by Scott Gray, pencils from Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith and Fareed Choudhury, lettering by Elitta Fell

I felt that this was the weakest story of the volume, though it got better as it went. At the beginning, I found it hard to track the different groups and characters, who were introduced thick and fast. But once the relationship between Izzy and Sato Katsura came into the foreground, I found the story worked a lot better. There are some great moments here, such as Izzy making the future of Japan manifest as her knowledge of manga, anime, and Power Rangers, but then the cliffhanger being the reveal of the atomic bombing of Japan. Some neat concepts here, and one thing I appreciate about Gray as a writer is his peppering of the dialogue with small moments of humor, especially between Izzy and the Doctor.

TV Action!, from Doctor Who Magazine #283 (Oct. 1999)
story by Alan Barnes, art & lettering by Roger Langridge

It's DWM's 20th anniversary! Alan Barnes's notes in the commentary give the whole thing an air of desperation, but I thought it was a blast... even though, as an American, most of the cultural references go over my head. They bring back one of DWM's first original villains, Beep the Meep, but have him and the TARDIS cross over into a different universe... ours. The Doctor and Izzy chase Beep through BBC Television Centre on the day DWM debuted, culminating in a scene where the real Tom Baker pretends to be the Doctor to cower Beep. Magnificent! The real Tom Baker quotations used in his dialogue are priceless.

from Doctor Who Magazine #286

The Company of Thieves, from Doctor Who Magazine #284-86 (Nov. 1999–Jan. 2000)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Adrian Salmon, inks by Fareed Choudhury, lettering by Elitta Fall and Roger Langridge

This was good fun: the Doctor and Izzy arrive on a ship being hijacked by pirates, and when a Cyberman is found belowdecks, everyone misunderstands the situations... because it's Kroton, his path intersecting the TARDIS's at long last. Like I said above, the interplay between the Doctor and Izzy really works; I enjoyed her putting on her glasses and spouting Star Trek bafflegab to confuse a bunch of pirates about the status of their engines. This does a great job of escalating a complicated situation, and then exiting it. It's filled with delightful moments, such as a "high" Kroton, Izzy's idea to stop the bad guy, the TARDIS team flying through the void of space, and the two pirates who don't trust each other drifting apart in space on the final page. The Glorious Dead is great, of course, but this might be Scott Gray at his best, and Adrian Salmon's work is as delightful as always... or maybe even moreso.

from Doctor Who Magazine #291

The Glorious Dead, from Doctor Who Magazine #287-96 (Feb.-Oct. 2000)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, additional pencils by Roger Langridge, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge

The biggest DWM story ever! Ten whole months! It could be a grind, but Gray stops it from being so by switching things up every so often. The first three parts play out relatively normally, with the Doctor, Izzy, and Kroton trying to figure out what's up with this alien planet and the strange religion coming to it. But then the part three cliffhanger is marvelous: the Doctor hears the words "WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP" and suddenly finds himself waking up... in bed with a Grace who called him "honey?" It's the kind of cliffhanger I can imagine Steven Moffat doing.

Part four then does something I can't remember any DWM story doing before (corrections welcome): jumping forward away from a cliffhanger, in this case about three weeks. The installment entirely focuses on what Izzy and Kroton on the occupied planet Paradost, told almost entirely via her narration (as a letter to Max). The jump forward again feels very Moffat (e.g., "Day of the Moon"); the choice to focalize the installment via the companion feels very Russell T Davies (e.g., "Doomsday"). And then in part five, we're doing something else entirely yet again! Here we have a masterpiece of surreal comics storytelling, as the Doctor tumbles from universe to universe, and thus from storytelling style to storytelling style. It starts out ordinary-ish, with the Doctor in a world where he did stay with Grace, but soon he's in a western, he's a cartoon tiger, he's in Peanuts getting advice from the Rani. I guess it's all a bit Steve Parkhouse—it reminds me of Once Upon a Time Lord—but it's so well done, and it's striking for coming in the middle of what has seemed like a pretty straight DWM space epic up until this point. Bits of it are drawn by Roger Langridge, which works well.

So with part six, things settle down... a bit. But we still get massive surreal landscapes of the omniverse, and the reveal that the alien planet the enemies come from is actually Earth, and the return of Sato, and Izzy shrunk and put in a test tube, and the reveal that the Master is behind it all! Again, it feels a bit RTD, akin to the reveal in Last of the Time Lords that the Toclafane are actually humans, and that the Master has been manipulating the entire series. It's all a bit mad, but in the best DWM way, and Gray and Geraghty's focus on the Doctor and Izzy and Kroton as people keeps it anchored. I do tune out a bit whenever we get one of those multi-page sequences of someone explaining the History Of All Time or whatever, but on the whole, this really works, and I like how it subverts the seeming prophecy about a Doctor/Master battle. Kroton gets a great end. Izzy's discussion of her parents and her relationship to them works well this time out. I think this does a good job of taking the kind of Parkhouse/Gibbons-y space epic and marrying it to the sensibilities of contemporary, character-focused storytelling—similar to what Big Finish was about to do in its own Paul McGann stories, and foreshadowing the approach the new series would take under Russell.

from Doctor Who Magazine #299

The Autonomy Bug, from Doctor Who Magazine #297-99 (Nov. 2000–Jan. 2001)
story by Scott Gray, art & lettering by Roger Langridge

I was going to say this was cute, but it's not; like the New Eighth Doctor Adventure The Cannibalists, it uses cuteness to disguise how horrifying it really is. The Doctor and Izzy come to an institution for deranged robots, and realize they are being pretty awfully mistreated. I didn't love it, but it's an effective serious story from Roger Langridge, and has a great moment of cartoon logic, and a nice conclusion. The stuff with the robots painting their faces is pretty good.

Other Notes:

Roger Langridge will go on to be a McGann-era mainstay of the strip as an artist, so much so that he illustrated the eighth Doctor installment of IDW's 50th anniversary series. But I, weirdly, know him from the fact that he illustrated special installments of the short-lived Shaenon K. Garrity webcomic Smithson (2004-8, I think? previously known as More Fun).
Unnatural Born Killers is one of only a few Doctor-free main strips... and actually the last one featured the Sontarans, too!
The Doctor is said to have defeated Beep twice before; the second time was in the story Star Beast II, published back in 1995, but this was collected with some twelfth Doctor strips, so I haven't read it yet. Big Finish would later add another Beep encounter, a direct follow-up to Star Beast II, inconsistent with this story. Which is, you know, as canon as anything. In IDW's era, they'd even do another story about the Doctor crossing over into our universe!

from Doctor Who Magazine #283

Barnes was inspired by a Star Trek short story he only vaguely remembers; it would be "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman from the anthology The New Voyages.
The only thing to dislike about Kroton being in the TARDIS crew is how little his time was! His departure story immediately follows his introduction. I demand missing adventures set between The Company of Thieves and The Glorious Dead. Another one to go on the the-tv-show-gets-cancelled-and-the-strip-becomes-a-nostalgia-fest list, I guess.
I kept comparing The Glorious Dead to something Russell would do, and it really is, in a number of ways... and then I learned from the commentary that Russell actually wrote DWM after part four!
Did the readers at the time know The Glorious Dead was going to be ten parts? Or did they just come to the end each month and read "TO BE CONTINUED..." every time instead of "TO BE CONCLUDED..." and wonder if it would ever end?

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