Black Sun Rising (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 54)

Black Sun Rising: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 2
by Mick Austin, Vincent Danks, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, Alan McKenzie, Mick McMahon, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Peel, Gary Russell, Geoff Senior, John Stokes, et al.

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1980-92
Acquired: September 2024
Read: November 2024

Unlike its predecessor volume, this contains only two strips that had been previously collected, and only one of them by Panini at that; Black Legacy was in the Cyberman Ultimate Collection, and Skywatch-7 in a volume of IDW's Doctor Who Classics series. So the amount of new-to-me material is much higher here, making it feel more worthwhile. But on top of that, I also found that the material here was more diverse and unusual than what was collected in the previous volume. 

The stories here come from an era where the back-ups went from a regular feature to a more sporadic one, before fading out entirely. The last couple aren't from DWM itself, but special tie-in issues, one from a decade after all the others, which date from 1980 to 1982.

As usual, I am only writing up stories I hadn't read before. On top of that, I did read all the stories in publication order, but here I am going to sometimes review them out of that order... you'll see why.

Yonder...the Yeti, from Doctor Who Weekly #31-34 (May-June 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

A group of hikers in the Himalayas end up encountering the robot Yeti and the Great Intelligence. Some DWM stories manage to cram a lot into a little space to good effect, but this one just felt crammed to me; I struggled to follow the art or copious plot twists. Maybe I was tired when I read it... maybe I'm just getting old!

Business as Usual, from Doctor Who Weekly #40-43 (July-Aug. 1980)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by David Lloyd

This won't set your world on fire, but I found it an effectively creepy use of the Autons. Moore does a good job of extrapolating how an Auton story would go with no Doctor; David Lloyd's talents are put to good use with some of the more horrific moments.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #47

Stardeath / 4-D War / Black Sun Rising, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #47, 51, & 57 (Dec. 1980–Oct. 1981)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by John Stokes and David Lloyd

This trilogy of stories from Alan Moore chronicles some of the early history of the Time Lords, and is the first depiction of a "Time War" in the Doctor Who mythos. (The existence of a "Last Great Time War" of course implies earlier, less great Time Wars.) In Stardeath, Moore really dives into the history, showing the moment alluded to in The Three Doctors where Omega gets trapped in a black home; I think this is the first story to unite that idea with the fact that in The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords use a black hole as a power source for their time travel operations. The hardware is beautifully drawn by John Stokes and, the story uses the same design for Rassilon that we would later see in The Tides of Time. On top of that, someone comes back in time to stop the Time Lords from becoming masters of time... and in doing so accidentally gives the Time Lords a key piece of time-travel technology. Timey-wimey, as we would now say.

Such temporal shenanigans are what drive the last two stories here, which focus on the Time Lord "Special Executive" trying to maintain Time Lord influence in the face of opposition from both contemporary and futuristic enemies. Moore is typically inventive, but I didn't find the agents of the Special Executive very Time Lord-y, to be honest. Cool concepts but I feel like they needed a bit more of a Doctor Who veneer.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #48

The Touchdown on Deneb 7, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #48 (Jan. 1981)
written by Paul Neary, art by David Lloyd

This is a K-9 story. Like K-9's Finest Hour from the previous volume, the Doctor is in it a bit but it focuses on K-9; like K-9's Finest Hour, it's not very good. If there was some kind of explanation for the key plot point that K-9 is acting totally out of character, I missed it!

Voyage to the Edge of the Universe / Crisis on Kaldor, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #49-50 (Feb.-Mar. 1981)
written by Paul Neary (with David Lloyd) and Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd and John Stokes

The idea of taking a group of Dæmons and sending them on a trip to the edge of the universe seems pretty random, to be honest, but if you buy that, this is a pretty good story, in that it really lets David Lloyd cut loose with some crazy visuals. The Kaldor story was less interesting to me (I have never really been into the cut-rate Asimov of most Kaldor stories), but it did have a very macabre twist ending. The main strip in this era, under writers Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse, really loved its stories based on weird concepts that ended with a real downer, and these stories totally fit into that vibe.

from Doctor Who Monthly #64

The Greatest Gamble / The Gods Walk Among Us / Devil of the Deep / The Fires Down Below, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #56 & 59 / Doctor Who Monthly #61 & 64 (Dec. 1981–May 1982)
written by John Peel; art by Mick McMahon, David Lloyd, and John Stokes; letters by Elitta Fell

To be honest, I have never much rated John Peel as a Doctor Who writer (or, for that matter, a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine one, having suffered through Objective: Bajor, which seems to owe more to Jon Pertwee Virgin Missing Adventures than the tv show it's supposedly based on). His stories often have that fatal combination of being bad and dull, of being fundamentally misconceived in some unenjoyable way. So I was surprised how much I liked this run of tales, which brings in the Celestial Toymakers, the Sontarans, the Sea Devils, and the Quarks. What he's quite good at here is shifting into different genres; none of these feel like Doctor Who stories without the Doctor, but stories from other universes with Doctor Who monsters stuck in: a gambling parable, a tomb exploration story, a pirate story, a military thriller. This is exactly what I want out of the DWM back-up strip! He is helped, of course, by a stable of very strong artists who do a great job adapting themselves to each genre. I really enjoyed all of these.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981

Minatorius, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981
written by Alan McKenzie (as Maxwell Stockbridge), art by John Stokes, letters by Elitta Fell

Like The Stolen TARDIS from the previous volume, this is branded as being from "Tales of the Time Lords"; there never were any more. Based on this, we dodged a bullet. I don't think McKenzie really gets Time Lords; why does the one in this story have a wise-cracking robot drone? John Stokes draws some great alien vistas, though.

The Fabulous Idiot / A Ship Called Sudden Death, from Doctor Who Summer Special 1982
written by Steve Parkhouse, art by Steve Parkhouse & Geoff Senior and Dave Gibbons

These two stories take some characters from the main strip's The Free-Fall Warriors and explore what they get up to when the Doctor's not around, part of that building of a coherent DWM universe that was going on during the Peter Davison strips. The first one is fun enough; I always enjoy a bit of Steve Parkhouse art, and there's some good jokes here about Doctor Ivan Asimoff. The second, about the Freefall Warriors, I found less interesting. There are too many of them in too little space. But you know, give me some Dave Gibbons anyday and I am a happy man.

from Doctor Who Magazine Holiday Special 1992

City of Devils, from Doctor Who Magazine Holiday Special 1992
written by Gary Russell, art by Vincent Danks, letters by Annie Halfacree

I do love Sarah Jane Smith, and Vincent Danks does great on art here, but like most Gary Russell–penned comics, this one is pretty pointless. Sarah and K-9 basically stand around while we go through the usual Silurian story. The story doesn't climax so much as just stop.

Stray Observations:

• Other included stories and what previous collections to find them in: (see below for links to my reviews)
• Black Legacy (in Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection)
• Skywatch-7 (in Doctor Who Classics vol. 2 #13)
• Does the existence of "The Original Writer" imply the existence of "The Unoriginal Writer"? And if so, who is it? Anyway, I get it if Alan Moore doesn't want his name on the cover or credits page, but I do find it amusing when the behind-the-scenes material has to contort around giving his name. Like, can he really object to people relaying the fact that he wrote something?
• A couple years after this, Moore would introduce the Warpsmiths to his Marvelman comics, and I could imagine the Special Executive fitting right in there. The backmatter reveals they would be reused in his Captain Britain run; whenever I get around to reading my Captain Britain Omnibus, I look forward to encountering them again. If I'd known ahead of time, maybe I would have incorporated those comics into this project, as I did Transformers, Death's Head, and The Sleeze Brothers!
• Supposedly the Dæmon in Voyage to the Edge is the same guy who shows up running a bar in that really bad Gary Russell story from the McCoy-era strip (see The Good Soldier). God knows why, though.
• I am pretty sure I have read that DWM's The Betrothal of Sontar (2006) was the first use of "Sontar" in the Doctor Who mythos (1993's Pureblood used "Sontara"), but actually it's used in The Gods Walk Among Us way back in 1982.
• For those of us who love the DWM universe, surely the female UNIT commander in The Fires Down Below ought to have been Muriel Frost. Or rather, surely the female UNIT commander in The Mark of Mandragora ought to have been Major Whitaker! The story is set in 1984 and says that Lethbridge-Stewart is in charge of UNIT, which I have to imagine causes some problems but I try to not think about UNIT dating very much these days.
• Back when I wrote up Skywatch-7, I expressed some confusion about the "Maxwell Stockbridge" pseudonym that Alan McKenzie used for his back-up strips, in that it seems like a clear reference to The Stars Fell on Stockbridge et al., but not only predates that story, but DWM itself! The backmatter here goes into that; McKenzie says it was his pseudonym of choice, based on the house pen names used on The Shadow and The Spider (Maxwell Grant and Grant Stockbridge, respectively), and that Steve Parkhouse told him the creation of a DWM character named Maxwell from Stockbridge is a total coincidence!
• The Freefall Warriors went on to appear in a Captain Britain back-up in 1985. I am guessing rights issues mean this has never and will never be collected. These issues go for an average of $13 apiece on Mycomicshop.com; I imagine at some point I will give in and buy them to complete my DWM journey. If I do, you all will be the first to know!

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

Skywatch-7 (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 46)

I am procrastinating the end of the strip by incorporating some bonus content I haven't got to yet. In this case, a back-up strip that received a modern reprint, albeit not from Panini. Issue #13 of IDW's reprint series Doctor Who Classics vol. 2 includes parts 2-3 of The Moderator, but also Skywatch-7, a Doctor-less story about the Zygons. I actually read both stories, but here I'll just focus on the one I haven't read before.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981

This is a standalone Zygon story: a group of UNIT soldiers at an Arctic base are menaced by a Zygon using its shapeshifting powers to cause problems. At first, I was like, "This is all a bit The Thing, isn't it?" Then I registered that one of the soldiers is named Campbell—presumably after John W. Campbell who wrote "Who Goes There?", the story upon which the film is based. Anyway, it's only eight pages so there can't be a lot of twists or tension, but it's a good little action story with a pretty dark turn at the end. You can always count on DWM in the 1980s to lift one's spirits!

Stray Observations:

• The story is credited to "Maxwell Stockbridge," a pseudonym that was used on a number of Marvel UK strips, not just Doctor Who ones. The Tardis wiki attributes it to a number of writers and says it was used from 1981 to 1984, while the Grand Comics Database credits all its uses to Alan McKenzie, and indexes stories from 1980 to 1984 using it; its first recorded use was actually in Marvel UK's Savage Action. The name, since it clearly inspired Steve Parkhouse's choice to make recurring DWM character Maxwell come from Stockbridge, feels so very DWM that it's weird to think it actually preceded it.
• Both the Tardis wiki and the GCD credit Elitta Fell as letterer, but she doesn't have a credit in the actual comic (at least not the version I read). For some reason, IDW re-lettered the recap at the beginning of Part Two.

Skywatch-7 originally appeared in two parts, in Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #58 (Nov. 1981) and Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special (1981). The story was written by Maxwell Stockbridge, illustrated by Mick Austin, [lettered by Elitta Fell,] and edited by Alan McKenzie. The story was reprinted in issue #13 of Doctor Who Classics vol. 2 (Dec. 2009), which was colored by Charlie Kirchoff and edited by Denton J. Tipton.

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

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
24. Ground Zero
25. End Game
26. The Glorious Dead
27. Oblivion
28. Transformers: Time Wars and Other Stories
29. The Flood
30. The Cruel Sea 
31. The Betrothal of Sontar
32. The Widow's Curse
33. The Crimson Hand
34. The Child of Time
35. The Chains of Olympus
36. Hunters of the Burning Stone
37. The Blood of Azrael
38. The Eye of Torment
39. The Highgate Horror
40. Doorway to Hell
41. Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 1
42. The Phantom Piper
43. Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 2
44. The Clockwise War
45. Death's Head: Clone Drive / Revolutionary War
    

The World Shapers (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 8)

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.

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

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.

from Doctor Who Magazine #111

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

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.

from Doctor Who Magazine #118

Changes, from Doctor Who Magazine #118-19 (Nov.-Dec. 1986)
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.)

from Doctor Who Magazine #128

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

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.

from Doctor Who Magazine #123

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

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.

from Doctor Who Magazine #127

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

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:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
   

Voyager (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 6)

Collection published: 2007
Contents originally published: 1984-85
Acquired: January 2008
Read: January 2021

Voyager: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of The Official Doctor Who Magazine
by John Ridgway, Steve Parkhouse, and Alan McKenzie

After souring on Steve Parkhouse's approach to Doctor Who across the course of The Tides of Time, I was pleasantly surprised by this volume. I don't know if it's because Parkhouse found his enjoyment of the series revitalized by a new Doctor, or if it's because he was now writing toward the talents of John Ridgway (in the introduction, Ridgway discusses how Parkhouse tailored the strip to his interests), but suddenly the whole thing feels fresh and energetic in a way entirely unlike 4-Dimensional Vistas.

The Shape Shifter, from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #88-89 (May-June 1984)
script by Steve Parkhouse, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree

This picks up right from The Moderator; the Doctor, having regenerated between strips (it's this kind of thing that makes the strip feel like a parallel universe to the show rather than something that slots in between it) is tracking down whoever hired the Moderator to kill Gus. But it doesn't just pick up in terms of plot but also style and tone: just as The Moderator was dominated by colorful, humorous narration from its title character, so too is The Shape Shifter. This story introduces us to Avan Tarklu, a shape-shifting private investigator who decides to find the Doctor for Dogbolter and turn him in for the reward money. The narrator is a delight, and yet again, I found myself wishing Big Finish's comic strip adaptations lasted longer than a single box set, because I would have loved to hear Robert Jezek read some of this aloud. The story is filled with a lot of genuinely humorous shape-shifting antics; I laughed out loud more than once. This is definitely one of those strips where story and writing are totally simpatico. Avan becoming a burger or hijacking the TARDIS, the panels where they imagine how Avan could make the Doctor's life hell hiding in the TARDIS, it's all a delight. After a number of one-off artists, John Ridgway has debuted as the strip's new long-term artist, and he nails it from the off; his Colin Baker isn't perfect, but otherwise, he has a great sense of tone, both grim and humor, and his storytelling is always clear.

I did find there was one big leap I didn't quite follow: why does Avan agree to collaborate with the Doctor to fool Dogbolter and split the reward money? We go from Avan having the Doctor over a barrel to the two teaming up to take down Avan's ostensible employer! But hey, it's a fun con, and I'll take it.

from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #90

Voyager, from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #90-94 (July-Nov. 1984)
script by Steve Parkhouse, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree

In the time since The Shape Shifter, Avan has taken the name "Frobisher" "in deference to the Doctor's love of all things English" (and it's implied Avan might not actually be his real name, either); here he also adopts the penguin form that will become his default. His presence maintains the moments of humor that Parkhouse introduced with The Shape Shifter. (There's a great gag where Frobisher decides to disguise himself by putting on a fake mustache, for example, and I liked the bit about the gun the Doctor threatens Astrolabus with.) But otherwise this is very unlike what has come so far.

Reading The Moderator and The Shape Shifter, you might think the strip was moving off into a new storyline about Dogbolter in a sort of noir universe, but Voyager is a surreal, weird fantasy epic. The Doctor has a dream about being lashed to a doomed sailing ship, then he finds the ship, along with the mysterious Astrolabus, who's fleeing the strange entity known as the Voyager, apparently for a past crime.

It's weird stuff. I don't quite entirely get it. But it's excellent stuff, too; Parkhouse's occasional moments of surreality in The Tides of Time were great, and with Ridgway as his partner, this story leans into it completely. But unlike some surreal stories, you really feel a sense of danger and mystery. Astrolabus's da Vinci helicopter is awesome; the true identity of his TARDIS is awesome. This is Doctor Who as grandiose mythology, and I wish I got it just a tad more, but I otherwise enjoyed it a lot.

from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #96

Polly the Glot, from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #95-97 (Dec. 1984–Feb. 1985)
script by Steve Parkhouse, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree

Ivan Asimoff of The Free-Fall Warriors reappears, having made his last DWM appearance nearly forty issues prior; I think this makes him the first original strip character to recur after an absence, and leads to a feeling of a DWM universe being built up. 

Shortly after Voyager, the Doctor and Frobisher bump into Asimoff at a busy spaceport; Asimoff asks for help freeing a spacefaring life-form called a zyglot from captivity in his capacity as treasurer of the Save the Zyglot Trust. The plan the Doctor and Frobisher come up with is to kidnap Asimoff and send off a ransom demand so that the public will donate to the Trust to help fulfill the ransom demand! This plan seemed a bit wacky, and I was feeling uncertain about the whole deal, but once the three of them go about an Akker zyglot-hunting ship, the strip sparkles with the kind of humor that has partially defined it of late; the dull Akkers are great, the janitor robot pretending to be a warrior robot is a delight.

In the end, the Doctor donates his share of the money he and Frobisher ripped off from Dogbolter to the Save the Zyglot Trust. It's not a total tonal shift into the humorous, though; the moment where Polly the Glot is freed from captivity is one of beauty, and Astrolabus turns out to the president of the Trust, giving the Doctor glimpses of doom throughout the story, and then kidnapping the Doctor at the end. I think it would be easy for a writer's approach to seem tired as he approaches the end of his tenure (Steve Moore's did after just over a dozen strips), but Parkhouse I think has totally reinvented himself as a writer to play to Ridgway's strengths. (In the introduction, Ridgway said Parkhouse had grown tired; he wasn't even scripting even more, he'd just call Ridgway on the phone and tell him what to draw on a panel-by-panel basis, and then he'd do the dialogue once Ridgway submitted his art.)

from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #98

Once Upon a Time-Lord, from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #98 / The Doctor Who Magazine #99 (Mar.-Apr. 1985)
script by Steve Parkhouse, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree

Steve Parkhouse departs the DWM strip in a story that wraps up the Voyager/Astrolabus storyline. This one too is a delight, as things all get a bit meta when Astrolabus uses his storytelling powers to slow down the Doctor, converting the strip into a children's story book! Surely "Frobisher Eats a Worm" and "Frobisher Wishes He Hadn't" is a highlight of the strip. When Astrolabus thinks he's escaped, he literally escapes the confines of the comic page, running across a blank space with no panel borders. In the end, though, the Doctor turns Astrolabus over to the Voyager, freeing himself from the feeling of doom he's had, but leaving him unsettled. This one is a little too quick to be as satisfying as Voyager, but I still enjoyed it.

from The Doctor Who Magazine #101

War-Game, from The Doctor Who Magazine #100-01 (May-June 1985)
script by Alan McKenzie, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree

Alan McKenzie, formerly editor of the strip, takes over as write from this story, which sends the Doctor and Frobisher to a barbarian planet where they meet a Draconian who crash-landed and set himself up as a local warlord. The comedy is the best part of it, my favorite gag being one where the Doctor and Frobisher get wine, but then reveal they don't have any money. The Doctor says, "I'm sure I can explain.... After all, what can they do to us?" Next panel: the Doctor and Frobisher are being auctioned off as slaves. In this story, Frobisher is back to shape-shifting, making himself look like a barbarian. When they attack a castle, Frobisher makes himself big... only to discover that makes it easier to be stabbed in the leg.

Outside of this, though, I found this one to be fairly dull stuff.

from The Doctor Who Magazine #103

Funhouse, from The Doctor Who Magazine #102-03 (July-Aug. 1985)
script by Alan McKenzie, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree

The TARDIS materializes in a weird sort of space entity that takes the form of a haunted house; it feels like McKenzie trying to give Ridgway the kind of surreal stuff to draw that he did so well under Parkhouse... but I didn't really find it interesting, a couple nice moments aside. (I liked the Doctor's attempted use of an axe to resolve the crisis is fun; the use of string for the actual solution is cute, but feels like nonsense even by Doctor Who time travel standards.)

from The Doctor Who Magazine #106

Kane's Story / Abel's Story / The Warrior's Story / Frobisher's Story, from The Doctor Who Magazine #104-06 / Doctor Who Magazine #107 (Sept.-Dec. 1985)
script by Alan McKenzie, art by John Ridgway, letters by Annie Halfacree

I wanted to like this story. Alan McKenzie takes a stab at the epic, with a four-part story about creatures called Skeletoids invading the Federation of Worlds. The Doctor and Frobisher are among a team of six who unite to stop the invasion; most of the other characters have very detailed backstories and become the strip's viewpoint characters... only it's three-and-a-half issues of set-up and just half an issue of actual action! All the set-up is made totally irrelevant, and the way the Skeletoids are defeated feels far too easy; I think you're supposed to feel bad about one character's sacrifice, but you barely know or care about him. One of the six is the Draconian warlord from War-Game, but at an earlier point in his timeline. If I had cared about him in War-Game, I might have found that more interesting.

Another of the six is Peri, making her strip debut-- which makes her the first human-played companion to appear. Peri doesn't do much, though the way she's folded in is interesting; the Doctor goes to pick her up, where she's working as a waitress in 1985 New York; she says, "I never thought I'd see you again!", so whatever circumstances she left the Doctor under, it felt like a final exit rather than a temporary break. I don't think Frobisher knows here, though, based on how he answers Kane's question about who she is. I don't know where you would wedge the Doctor's travels with her into the strip's continuity; before The Shape Shifter, I guess, but that would disrupt the way The Moderator flows right into it. I'm curious to see what kind of use the strip makes of her going forward; it didn't exactly make great use of its previous human companion.

Anyway, this means this volume, which begins quite strongly, ends with a fizzle. But, you know, tell John Ridgway to draw an ancient valley, and he will draw the hell out of it.

Stray Observations:

• Pedants should note that the first installment of Voyager claims the story title is The Voyager... but even I am not pedantic enough to do something like list it as The Voyager / Voyager. Interestingly, it is the first story where each individual part has its own subtitle ("It Was a Devil Ship.." / "The Light at the Edge of the World..." / "The Lighthouse" / "Dreams of Eternity" / "The Final Chapter"). Also, the cover of the first twelve DWM graphic novels usually used the title strip's unique logo as the cover logo, but the way "VOYAGER" is rendered on the cover is not the way it's rendered in the strip itself. These are the things that I notice and wonder about...
• In part two of Voyager, the TARDIS materialization noise is rendered as "VOORP! VOORP!" Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
• In the introduction, Ridgway talks about how Parkhouse gave Frobisher mono-morphia so he couldn't actually change form, probably because as a shape-shifter he had virtually unlimited power... Ridgway also complains that McKenzie ignored this, most prominently in War-Game. But as far as I noticed, the word "mono-morphia" is never actually used here! There are just a couple Parkhouse stories where Frobisher acts a bit awkward when someone asks him to shape-shift. I think if you weren't paying attention, it would be easy to miss. (Though, given McKenzie was editor on most of the Parkhouse/Ridgway strips, he should have been paying attention!)
• There was a small reference to the Freefall Warriors in The Moderator, but the reappearance of Ivan Asimoff in Polly the Glot definitively ties The Free-Fall Warriors to the home era of Dogbolter and Frobisher, beginning the creation of DWM cosmology of sorts. There's a reference to Dogbolter's company, Intra-Venus, Inc., in Abel's Story, implying that sequence (and thus War-Game) takes place in the same era, too, which would make this the same time period where Davros is active as Emperor of the Daleks (i.e., between Revelation and Remembrance, though at the time these strips came out, that would not have been known).
  
• I feel like on tv, the sixth Doctor was always bumping into old friends, so the appearance of Asimoff is appropriate. Except that on screen, they were always old friends we'd never actually met before (Azmael in The Twin Dilemma, Dastari in The Two Doctors, Stengos in Revelation of the Daleks, Hallett and Traves in The Trial of a Time Lord), but we actually Asimoff already!
• Steve Parkhouse departs the strip after a venerable run as writer (and sometimes artist) spanning three Doctors! I will see as I go, but I suspect no one will repeat this feat. After leaving DWM, he would go on to illustrate DC/Vertigo titles such as The Sandman and The Dreaming. He would also make one small but important contribution to Marvel UK's Transformers strip, writing its first original story, which was also the only UK story Marvel reprinted in its US book.
  
• For the last six strips, Alan McKenzie is credited as "Max Stockbridge." The pseudonym of "Maxwell Stockbridge" was first used back in 1981 according to the Tardis wiki, but this was its first use in the main DWM strip itself. Poking around in the Grand Comics Database informs me it was previously used on DWM back-up strips, in DWM specials, and in other Marvel UK titles such as Marvel Super-Heroes and Savage Action. I had thought the pseudonym was inspired by Maxwell Edison and Stockbridge, but given those didn't appear until late 1982, the pseudonym must have inspired them. (Tardis wiki also claims it was retired by 1984, but these strips were published in 1985.)
  
• In Kane's Story, Kane suggests fixing the damage done to the TARDIS in Funhouse by replacing the busted temporal component with the intact spatial one; Kane says they'll only need the spatial one for their mission to defeat the Skeletoids. But then they promptly travel back in time to 1985!
• Some people seem to think that Kane's Story indicates Frobisher had already met Peri, but I think it indicates exactly the opposite. The Doctor and Frobisher encounter an illusory version of Peri in Funhouse, which turns into a demon. The Doctor expresses concern for her but Frobisher says nothing to her; in Kane's Story, basically the same thing happens again. When Kane asks who Peri is, Frobisher says, "I just hope she doesn't change into anything more comfortable this time!" This makes me think Funhouse was Frobisher's only previous experience of Peri.
  
• It is sort of weird to note that the sixth Doctor had about half as many tv adventures as the fifth... but twice as many comic ones! As a helpful GallifreyBase commenter elucidates: "Davison was squished at both ends as Tom Baker was the lead in the strip right up to December 1981 and Davison didn't start until Castrovalva was broadcast. However with Twin Dilemma on air at the end of season 21, Colin went straight into the strip straight after Caves was broadcast and remained the lead until Time and the Rani went out, so he got both the gap between seasons 21 & 22, the hiatus and after 23 went out. Giving him much more time as the current Doctor." Good fact!
  

This post is the sixth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One 
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two