Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: creator: cam smith

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23 November 2022

Transformers UK #180–89, 199–205, 219–22, 228–34: Time Wars and Other Stories (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 28)

I read IDW's five Transformers Classics UK volumes alongside Panini's Doctor Who Magazine collections because they lead into Death's Head's appearance in A Cold Day in Hell! I then followed Death's Head out of A Cold Day in Hell! into his own series, and I even picked up The Sleeze Brothers based on its connection. But it was always my intention to eventually go back to The Transformers UK and find out what happened after volume five.

This, however, was made more complicated by the fact that IDW's reprint series stopped with volume five. The UK-original stories from #180 to #289* are available in three different ways:

Titan did a series of reprints of almost all of the Marvel UK material, but organized thematically, rather than by publication order
IDW reprinted some key UK storylines under the Best of UK branding, though mostly early stuff later collected in the Classics UK series
Hachette reprinted every G1 comic in a 100-volume partwork, The Definitive G1 Collection

The Hachette reprints appealed, especially as they integrated the UK and US strips, but they are expensive... if you can find them for sale at all! So I ended up going with the Titan ones, even though their reprints of the black-and-white strips (#215 onwards) are in the manga-sized "digest" format, about half the height of the UK originals! Except I couldn't find a copy of the Titan Time Wars collection anywhere, but thankfully IDW had a Best of UK: Time Wars I could use instead. The digest-sized ones have a cover price of $9... for some I have paid over $30 on the secondary market!

(There are two UK stories I will never read, because Titan reprinted both in collections that otherwise entirely contained stuff I already read, so it's hard to justify paying so much for single stories. These are "Cold Comfort and Joy!" from #198, reprinted in Second Generation, and The Fall and Rise of the Decepticon Empire from #213-14, reprinted in City of Fear.)

I worked out a somewhat idiosyncratic order for them: I didn't want to be jumping from volume to volume too much, so I tried to balance original publication sequence with fewer transitions between volumes. If Classics UK had continued, it would have run three more volumes, so I've divided the run into three roughly equal chunks to review here on my blog. Today I'm covering the first of those chunks, thirteen stories from twenty-eight original issues (plus one annual) distributed across five collections.

from The Transformers #180

The Big Broadcast of 2006 / Space Pirates!, from The Transformers #180-87 (20 Aug.–15 Oct. 1988), reprinted in Transformers: Space Pirates (Titan, 2003)

scripts by Simon Furman; pencils by Lee Sullivan, Dan Reed, and Dougie Braithwaite; inks by Dave Elliott, Dan Reed, Dave Harwood, and Lee Sullivan; colours by Steve White and Euan Peters; letters by Glib

"The Big Broadcast of 2006" was actually a US story (reprinted in Classics, Vol. 4), set in the future era of The Transformers: The Movie. But while the US comic never did anything with the future era other than this story and the movie adaptation, the UK comic had by this point depicted a robust and detailed future history—which was completely contradicted by this tale. UK writer Simon Furman solved this problem by writing a two-page frame to "Big Broadcast" that established it was a story being told by Wreck-Gar, full of lies to mislead his Quintesson interrogators: "Wreck-Gar's whole account is full of absurdities and contradictions." As the Quintessons point out, by this point in the UK continuity, Galvatron, Cyclonus, and Scourge were all in the 1980s, not the future. And besides, the UK continuity was up to 2008, not 2006. It's a clever conceit, though I imagine it will have more impact if I ever read it where it "goes"; this just reprints the two UK pages.

It leads into the next UK future epic, Space Pirates!, one of those future stories that actually doesn't intersect with the present-day timeline. I wasn't really convinced this one held together, to be honest; the maguffin that everyone is chasing after didn't make a ton of sense to me, and the story requires seasoned warriors to make dumb decisions for everything to hang together. I do like a bit of Rodimus angst, but I feel like such angst was done much better in IDW's original continuity two decades later. Now, arguably a lot of Simon Furman epics probably wouldn't make sense if you delved into them, but this one didn't grab me the way some of those others did, so I'm less apt to forgive it its mistakes.

from The Transformers Annual 1989

"Firebug!" / "Dry Run!" / "Altered Image!" / "All in the Minds!" / Time Wars, from Transformers #188-89, 199-205 (22-29 Oct. 1988, 7 Jan.–18 Feb. 1989) and The Transformers Annual 1989, reprinted in The Transformers: Best of UK: Time Wars (IDW, 2009)

plot by Simon Furman; scripts by Dan Abnett, Ian Rimmer, and Simon Furman; pencils by Jeff Anderson, Lee Sullivan, Dan Reed, Andrew Wildman, and Robin Smith; inks by Jeff Anderson, Cam Smith, Lee Sullivan, Dan Reed, Stephen Baskerville, and Robin Smith; colours by Euan Peters and Steve White; letters by Tom Frame, Glib, Annie Halfacree, Glop, and Peter Knight

This is a couple smaller stories, and then another big Transformers epic. Most of the small stories lead into the epic Time Wars, aside from one about the Wreckers battling a fire creature. There's Shockwave using the resurrected Megatron as a weapon against his future self, Galvatron, with the aid of Cyclonus and Scourge, also from the future, and then a Galvatron/Megatron showdown... which turns into an alliance, truly a delightful thing. I guess the one about Scorponok also leads into Time Wars, but it feel disposable.

Anyway, it all leads into the cross-time epic of Time Wars, which honestly I don't think makes sense even by Transformers time travel standards. A bit too much noise and fury, and not enough for someone to actually grab onto, once again, though it has its moments.

from Transformers #222

Survivors! / "The Hunting Party", from Transformers #219-22, 229 (27 May–17 June, 5 Aug. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Way of the Warrior (Titan, 2005)
scripts by Simon Furman; art by Dan Reed, John Stokes, and Simon Coleby; letters by Glib

After Time Wars, the UK Transformers comic changed gears, going small scale—and black and white! Survivors! picks up from the end of Time Wars, chronicling the Wreckers, who haven't been given new orders since those events. They end up teaming up with some former members of the Decepticon Mayhem Attack Squad, Carnivac and Catilla, to take down the deranged Skids. All the characters, all feeling like abandoned warriors, join up together at the end. I'm curious to see where this goes, as "The Hunting Party!" indicates that the new Mayhem Attack Squad has orders to hunt down Carnivac and Catilla for going AWOL. Bad Transformers who become good Transformers is probably one of my favorite tropes (see Dinobot, Blackarachnia, MtMtE Megatron), so this has some real potential if it gets follow up on.

from Transformers #230

The Big Shutdown! / A Small War!, from Transformers #230-33 (12 Aug.–2 Sept. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Perchance to Dream (Titan, 2006)
scripts by Simon Furman; art by Lee Sullivan, Jeff Anderson, and Geoff Senior; letters by Helen Stone, Stuart Bartlett, and Glib

These two stories are united in being about Thunderwing, who is rising to power as Decepticon leader on Cybertron. (I think there is a power vacuum because of the events of Two Megatrons!, which was actually published later!) The Big Shutdown! is a delightful hardboiled pastiche, as the Autobot detective Nightbeat must stop Thunderwing from committing a series of murders on Earth as part of a test being administered by the Decepticon leadership back on Cybertron. The end confused me, but I greatly enjoyed the rest of it, and I hope we get more Nightbeat in this series.

A Small War! jumps ahead to when Thunderwing does lead the Cybertronian Decepticon forces, and it introduces the Micromasters, a group of Autobots who are tiny (i.e., human-sized). The Micromasters get captured, but escape anyhow—only the Decepticons, led by Thunderwing, now also have the secret of their construction. This is fine; it mostly seems to exist to set up the Micromasters' first US appearance in a story I haven't read yet. (It appears in Classics, Vol. 5, but I've only read up through vol. 4.)

from Transformers #234

"[Double] Deal of the Century!" / "Prime's Rib!", from Transformers #228, 234 (29 July & 9 Sept. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Earthforce (Titan, 2005)
scripts by Simon Furman, art by Andy Wildman, letters by Stuart Bartlett and Helen Stone

Finally, we have two small standalone tales. "[Double] Deal of the Century!" introduces Double-Dealer, the Transformer who plays both sides; to be honest, I was thoroughly confused by it because I'm often bad at recognizing Transformers, and that's even harder when they're in black-and-white. "Prime's Rib!" is a random future story, set in 1995 (so about halfway between the 1980s "present" and the 2005+ "future") explaining how there can be a girl Transformer in Arcee if Transformers don't have gender. Optimus Prime had her built to appease angry feminists on Earth! Hilarious if you can take it ironically, I guess. But also pretty stupid.

* The UK comic continued to #332, but from #290 on it was all reprints of US content.

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

27 April 2022

The Age of Chaos (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 22)

The Age of Chaos: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Colin Baker, John M Burns, Barrie Mitchell, Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Lee Sullivan, et al.

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1991-2001
Acquired: December 2021
Read: January 2022

I debated a bit where I should read this. By my usual rules, it would clearly go much later, as the one DWM strip it contains was published in 2001, among those reprinted in the Oblivion collection. But that seemed silly. Given I was skipping The Age of Chaos itself (having already read it on its own between The World Shapers and A Cold Day in Hell!), I decided to violate my usual rules and read where it made the most narrative sense: as the other strips collected here are all seventh Doctor ones in the New Adventures era, I read it as the coda to that run, prior to the transition to "past" Doctors that would come with the strips collected in Land of the Blind.

Under Pressure, from Doctor Who Yearbook 1992
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Vincent Danks, inks by Cam Smith, colour by Louise Cassell, letters by Glib

The seventh Doctor tells Ace a story of the time the fourth Doctor (on a submarine) secretly helped the third and Jo (on a surface vessel) avert a crisis with the Sea Devils. It's pretty charming: Abnett captures the voices of both past Doctors pretty well, and the ways the fourth Doctor helps the third are fun. There are some good moments, such as the fourth ingratiating himself with the submarine's captain. My main issue is the Sea Devils never feel like much of a threat, as we barely see them. I did really like the panel of them all swimming around the sub, the kind of thing you could never afford to do onscreen, but it comes after they've been neutralized. But it's enjoyable enough.

from Doctor Who Yearbook 1993

Metamorphosis, from Doctor Who Yearbook 1993
story by Paul Cornell, art by Lee Sullivan, colour by Louise Cassell, letters by Annie H.

The seventh Doctor and Ace battle (spoiler) Daleks on a space freighter. As Cornell says in his notes, this is pretty generic action-adventure stuff, but it's good anyway, lifted by some cool ideas (there's a reason Steven Moffat stole the "eggs" bit, and the Doctor becoming a Dalek is good, too), some horrific ones (human embryos mutated into Daleks!), and some excellent artwork from Lee Sullivan. Sullivan draws great Daleks, but also a strong Doctor and Ace, capturing their facial expressions well, and clear action sequences. Generic... but solid. The last line is a groaner, in the most delightful way.

from Doctor Who Magazine #305

The Last Word, from Doctor Who Magazine #305 (June 2001)
story by Gareth Roberts, art and colours by Lee Sullivan, lettering by Roger Langridge

And here, the comic strip adventures of the seventh Doctor, Ace, and Benny come to an end. For reasons I didn't understand, this is framed as the Doctor writing up an account (in the third person) of a recent adventure the TARDIS crew had. The adventure itself is somewhere between a parody and a pastiche of the Virgin New Adventures: Gareth Roberts lists all the tropes in the notes at the end, but I picked out most of them myself. Journeys into 1970s pop culture, overcomplicated plots, a voyage into "puterspace," and the Doctor being mentally tormented by all the people and planets he's let die. I had fun, and it mostly comes across as good-spirited. It's funny, though, that despite being a DWMification of the VNAs, it doesn't feel anything like the actual DWM strips that tied into the VNAs! I feel like it makes a better finale to this era than Cuckoo/Uninvited Guest, so I'm glad I read it here. With a wink and tounge-in-cheek, it's time to switch to something completely different!

Stray Observations:

Since all these are outside of the usual DWM context, there's no clear chronological placement; what I can see online (from the "Interweaving with the New Adventures" article and various fan sites) disregard the clues in the stories themselves. Under Pressure's Ace seems to be pre-Spacefleet, while Metamorphosis's is afterwards (though Benny is not around). The Last Word could go pretty much anywhere during Ace and Benny's travels, as long as enough time has passed for Ace and Benny to become aware of the clichés of their own lives.

from Doctor Who Yearbook 1992

I found Vincent Danks and Cam Smith's art on Under Pressure kind of flat, but looking at the uncolored pages in the back, it seems that this is down to the coloring eliminating some of the finer linework.
Gareth Roberts in the notes: "imagine a world where you could not even know what a minority of random noisy strangers were saying on the internet, and where nobody cared about them, took them seriously, or reacted to them." Gee, why would you hope for such a thing, Gareth?

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

10 January 2022

Evening's Empire (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 18)

Evening's Empire: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Andrew Cartmel, Richard Piers Rayner, Dan Abnett, Marc Platt, John Ridgway, et al.

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 1990-93
Acquired: December 2017
Read: September 2021

This set of stories take us into, ahem, "Virgin territory." I suspect I'll have more to say about this when I read the next volume, but here we get the first references to the New Adventures. In The Grief, Ace includes the Timewyrm among the most dangerous foes she's encountered; the internet tells me that Ravens take's place during Cat's Cradle: Warhead; and then in Cat Litter, we start getting footnotes that clarify placement (it opens with one saying recent adventures were seen "both last issue and in Nightshade" and ends with "Next: After Love and War, a new companion and... Sontarans!"). For the DWM strip—which for a long time barely even seemed to acknowledge that there was a tv programme—this is a huge change, and a weird one that I wish was explained more. John Freeman's notes, though, mostly focus on the issues surrounding Evening's Empire, and don't give any sense of why he might want to hitch DWM's narrative to a series of novels that were only just getting off the ground. On Down the Tubes, he off-handedly mentions that Ravens "was the first story where we tried to work with Doctor Who novel publisher Virgin, after meeting with the editor Peter Darvill-Evans and trying to cross promote what were then the only new Doctor Who adventures," but that's it. My impression is that this was a decision ultimately regretted by his successors at DWM, and part of the reason this entire era of DWM ultimately ended up kind of orphaned, but... why did they do it? Anyway, more on that when I get to Benny Summerfield's debut in Emperor of the Daleks.

Overall, this is a dark set of stories. I don't know if I would want all my Doctor Who to be like this, but it works more than it doesn't, and I found it more to my taste than many other DWM runs (i.e., #44-57, #100-47).

from Doctor Who Magazine #162

Living in the Past, from Doctor Who Magazine #162 (July 1990)
story by Andy Lane, illustrations by Cam Smith

This text story clearly should have been in the previous volume, telling as it does the story of how Ace joined the Doctor between Train-Flight and Teenage Kicks! As a story, it's okay; I found it a bit dull but the climax is amazing (Ace leading a dinosaur army), and well drawn by Cam Smith. It kind of ties into the then-ongoing Mandragora storyline; the Doctor says "I'm being distracted by trivia there's something more important going on elsewhere," but it doesn't quite fit in that the Doctor thinks, "Considering the state of the TARDIS, he was lucky to have ended up on the same planet," when in Distractions he says he can't leave Earth if he wants to!

from Doctor Who Classic Comics Autumn Holiday Special

Evening's Empire, from Doctor Who Magazine #180 (Nov. 1991) and Doctor Who Classic Comics Autumn Holiday Special (Sept. 1993)
written by Andrew Cartmel, art by Richard Piers Rayner

More than any story of its era, this feels to me like Doctor Who does Vertigo. The DC Comics imprint wasn't actually launched until Mar. 1993, but of course it drew on preexisting DC comics lines, most notably The Sandman. This has the feeling on many of those stories: journeys into people's psyches, abuse both sexual and parental, mental trauma, criticism of religion, difficult page layouts and transitions. Delete the Doctor and Ace, and this could come straight out of Hellblazer or Animal Man or Black Orchid, anything trying to be Gaiman, Morrison, or Moore, but not actually written by them.

It's okay. For me, it's let down by two things. One is Richard Piers Rayners's artwork. His drawings seem reliant on photo reference in a way that often works to the detriment of the imagery. I can see the argument for why someone's mouth should be open when they are talking, but it never looks good to trace a photo of someone's open mouth. His Muriel Frost is unrecognizable as the same woman from The Mark of Mandragora, and looks like a series of an actress's glamour headshots rather than a moving, living, breathing human being. Individual images look good, but overall this doesn't flow. Though, to be honest, it is a lot like reading a mediocre Vertigo title.

I came to like it less after reading Cartmel's discussion of it in the notes, where he says he wanted to write a narrative countering adventure stories where the women are fantasies for the men. Given that, the way Frost is drawn rankles; and given that, it seems bizarre that Evening's victims are barely discernible as people, and that Ace even feels pretty peripheral; the character of Ives pretty clearly exists only to suffer a horrible fate later on. I am not sure you can write a story criticizing putting women at the margins if you yourself put women at the margins!

That said, there's stuff to like here. Cartmel, for obvious reasons, excels at portentous Sylvester McCoy dialogue; the twist about the scale of the crashed UFO is a good one; seeing Frost's home life is interesting even if it doesn't entirely come off.

from Doctor Who Magazine #183

Conflict of Interests, from Doctor Who Magazine #183 (Feb. 1992)
script by Dan Abnett, pencils by Richard Whitaker, inks by Cam Smith, letters by Caroline Steeden

Darkness, Falling was the first Doctor-less "main" strip in DWM's history, but that was a prelude to a Doctor-focused story; Conflict of Interests is a totally standalone Doctor-free tale. It follows a Foreign Hazard Duty team trying to secure some ruins for archeological study on an alien planet; they run into Sontarans. This was fine; the ending is nice, but I feel like even at seven pages it's a tad longer than it needs to be.

from Doctor Who Magazine #185

The Grief, from Doctor Who Magazine #185-87 (Apr.-June 1992)
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Vincent Danks, inks by Adolfo Bullya and Robin Riggs, letters by Caroline Steeden

The Doctor and Ace find a group of Dan Abnett space marines—not the FHD, though—investigating a planet upon which was trapped an ancient evil. I hate it when new monsters are cheaply claimed to be in the big leagues, and I found the soldier characters hard to distinguish at first, but otherwise this is a solid piece. I particularly like how well Abnett captures the voices of both the Doctor and Ace.

from Doctor Who Magazine #189

Ravens, from Doctor Who Magazine #188-90 (July-Sept. 1992)
story by Andrew Cartmel; pencils by Brian Williamson; inks by Cam Smith and Steve Pini; letters by Caroline Steeden, Glib, and Janey

Again, there's a bit of a Doctor-Who-does-Vertigo vibe to this. But I don't have a problem with that—isn't that what Doctor Who always does, take pop culture and chews it up and spits it out in its own imitable fashion? If the show had been on screen still, you could imagine it going in this direction, and though I think that would run against its populist appeal, this was an era where there was no tv show, and the strip thus didn't have to appeal to a broad audience. I thought this was much better executed than Cartmel's similar attempt in Evening's Empire. Great dark inks by Smith and Pini really support his pretentious seventh-Doctor-as-God stuff. If there's a criticism I have, it's that if you told the whole thing in order, it'd be a bit thin for three parts; it's basically just one scene told incredibly complicatedly! But what a scene. It does very well the ordinary-people-plunged-into-horrifying-world vibe.

from Doctor Who Magazine #191

Memorial / Cat Litter, from Doctor Who Magazine #191-92 (Sept.-Oct. 1992)
scripts by Warwick Gray and Marc Platt, art by John Ridgway, letters by Kid Robson and Caroline Steeden

John Ridgway is back! I'm sure these are both solid stories on the basis of their writing, but getting Ridgway back for the first time in a while adds an inestimable something—and both of these are stories that play to his strengths. (He does a good Ace likeness, for one.) Memorial is a somber but uplifting tale; slight in terms of plot, but what it does, it does well, communicating the Doctor's horror at war. Ridgway is equally at home in horrifying space vistas and the English countryside in mourning. Cat Litter I didn't really get from a writing perspective, but if you say, "John Ridgway, Ace is trapped in the TARDIS and it's a gameboard," obviously it will look great. I didn't know I needed to see Ace running from a pair of giant D20s, but now I can't imagine why I didn't.

Stray Observations:

Normally I don't say much about the cover art of these things, because it ranges from perfectly fine to excellent, but David Roach did not do a good job with Colonel Frost here.
Also, I am again grumpy that the new format collections omit creator credits. You wouldn't know Vincent Danks inked some of Evening's Empire without the notes at the end; several stories thus give no credit to letterers.
Again, the idea of a coherent DWM universe continues to build. Other than the cameos in Party Animals, I think Muriel Frost is the first time a non-companion character created (for the main strip) by one writer is brought back by another.
Due to a number of problem, part one of Evening's Empire ran in DWM #180, but there never was a part two. The complete story eventually appeared two years later in a Doctor Who Classic Comics special. Cartmel took advantage of the story being complete in one volume to shuffle the narrative around; the original part one actually begins on page five of the complete version (spanning pp. 9-15 of this collection), if I am correct. This did confuse me a bit; by the time I got to where the opening was set, I forgot all about it, and thus wondered why Cartmel had skipped over the UNIT assault on Evening's empire.
Because the original art was lost for a few pages, Rayner chose to redraw them for this collection, working in his 2016 style rather than his early 1990s one. The replacement art pages are a bit off (see above), but the story is surreal enough it gets away with it. If any DWM strip would randomly switch styles, it would be this one! I appreciate the inclusion of scans of the originals in the back.
Pretty unsurprisingly, Richard Piers Rayner did no further DWM work. It turns out I have read some other stuff drawn by him: he illustrated the 1989 Swamp Thing Annual by Neil Gaiman (about Brother Power the Geek), a single 1991 issue of L.E.G.I.O.N. (written by former DWM contributor Alan Grant), and some of Tony Lee's mediocre IDW Doctor Who comics in 2011. He basically left comics after this, though, and became the official artist-in-residence for the Middlesbrough Football Club!
Conflict of Interests was the last appearance of Foreign Hazard Duty. Apparently an FHD comic book was once proposed but it never came to pass; it's hard to imagine it, because the FHD never had much to offer beyond "like them out of Aliens." I think it works fine as a consistent space organization for us to see, but it's hard to envision it fronting its own book. Maybe it would have worked better with recurring characters, but each of the four FHD teams we've seen are different. Would UNIT have taken off if it was different guys each time? Also, why aren't the ones in The Grief just FHD?
This was Robin Riggs's only DWM work. I know him best as a prolific inker at DC in the 2000s, working on titles such as Green Lantern / Green Arrow, Birds of Prey, Manhunter, and Legion of Super-Heroes. This is the fourth DWM seventh Doctor collection with art by Cam Smith; it's also the last. He would go on to do a lot of superhero work for DC Comics, including Birds of Prey in the late 1990s and most notably (to me) Action Comics in the early 2000s, being the primary inker during the time Joe Kelly was writing it. Even before I knew them as DWM contributors, both Riggs and Smith are the kind of inker where I was glad to see their name on an issue, because it meant that I was in good hands.
Adolfo Buylla's only other DWM contribution was way back in 1981. Unusually, he had an American comics career before working on DWM, illustrating The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery back in the 1970s. This is Brian Williamson's only DWM work (though he did do the 2007 Doctor Who Storybook), but he's illustrated a number of Titan's Doctor Who titles, including The Fourth Doctor: Gaze of the Medusa.
Warwick Gray is the man we now know as Scott Gray, who continues to work on the DWM strip up to the present. I think he's contributed at least one story to every subsequent Doctor's run, and been the primary writer on many, including the eighth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth. Imagine handing in your first ever Doctor Who comic and being told it was going to be illustrated by John Ridgway!
As I alluded to above, here we begin weaving in and out of the continuity of the NAs. Eventually the official stance would be that everything since Fellow Travellers has followed on from Timewyrm; I disagree, as it contradicts the actual textual evidence. That article was published Nov. 1993, though, and doesn't seem to reflect intentions at time of publication; for example, the console room that debuted in The Good Soldier collection was used in the DWM preview for the first Timewyrm novel. Based on the references we get, it seems to be something like:
- Evening's Empire
- Timewyrm
- The Grief
- Cat's Cradle
  - Ravens
- Memorial
- Nightshade
- Cat Litter
- Love and War
Yes, Ravens supposedly happens during Cartmel's Cat's Cradle novel, Warhead. I haven't read Warhead, though, so I don't know how that is supposed to work.

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

10 November 2021

The Good Soldier (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 16)

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 1988-91
Acquired: August 2015
Read: August 2021

The Good Soldier: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Andrew Cartmel, Mike Collins, Dan Abnett, Lee Sullivan, Paul Cornell, et al.

Normally, it seems to me, that the DWM strip transforms pretty slowly. When Steve Moore first took over for Mills & Wagner, he wrote one last Mills & Wagneresque epic, and of course Dave Gibbons stayed on art. When Steve Parkhouse took over from Moore, his early stories were done-in-one-or-twos with little stings at the end, like the majority of Moore's, only more downbeat, even though soon enough he was writing big Time Lord epics, and he also had the benefit of Gibbons continuing. When the artists began changing during the fifth Doctor era, the writing stayed the same, and when Parkhouse left, the artist stayed the same, and so on. Parkhouse and Ridgway is very different from Mills & Wagner and Gibbons, but there was no sharp demarcation between them.

But the strips collected in The Good Soldier mark, I would argue, one of the more abrupt transitions in DWM history. Most of the McCoy-era strips so far have felt "kiddie" or disposable, or both, even if you discount the ones originally published in or intended for The Incredible Hulk Presents. Suddenly at the beginning of this volume, the strips feel denser, making more use of the way the comics medium had evolved as of the early 1990s. They feel more like the tv show, too; not the tv show as it had been some time ago (I feel like some of the McCoy strips-- Claws of the Klathi! for example-- were trying to emulate Tom Baker stories), but as it was in its last two years on screen. This is especially true in the characterization of the Doctor. Plus the strips suddenly become interested in creating a continuity; there are lots of references to both recent strip adventures (something the strip did a lot in the Parkhouse/McKenzie era, but which had largely vanished since) and recent tv adventures (something the strip has never really bothered to do before).

This era is the one and only time that the DWM strip was the main source for ongoing Doctor Who adventures. The tv show was seemingly over, the Virgin New Adventures had not yet debuted. If you wanted new Doctor Who, this was it! Never again would the comics be at the forefront like this. (Of course, it has acted like it was the only form of Doctor Who going before, and would do so again, but for a brief moment, that was actually true.)

from Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Special

Scream of the Silent, from Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Special (Nov. 1988)
story by John Freeman, illustrations by Lee Sullivan

I actually have no idea how many prose stories DWM has run over the years. It could be hundreds; it could be none up until now. (The Tardis wiki lacks a handy category for them.) If there have been some, none have ever been collected in the DWM graphic novels. That said, I have never really cared for the prose Transformers UK stories I have read; something about them just doesn't work for me. It's like they're not really prose stories at all, but transcriptions of comic strips, not really making use of the medium they're supposedly designed for. They are sparse on interiority and on visuals, just lots of dialogue. Scream of the Silent is no exception; I very easily lost track of what was going on here and why it mattered. I am not entirely sure it all hangs together, but maybe it does and the story just doesn't interest me enough to figure it out. There is a nice Lee Sullivan picture of the seventh Doctor looking in a mirror and seeing the first; it doesn't much have anything to do with anything, though, and I assume the moment was put into the story because it was originally published in an anniversary special issue.

from Doctor Who Magazine #163

Teenage Kicks!, from Doctor Who Magazine #163 (Aug. 1990)
story by Paul Cornell, illustrations by Cam Smith

This, on the other hand, is a prose story by a prose writer, and it feels like it. This short story was published in the first-ever DWM issue with no comic strip, no even a rerun or backup. It features Ace, who rejoined the Doctor (after her sojourn in the Cretaceous) in a story published in the previous issue (which for some reason is not collected until the next graphic novel). This is kind of a weird story; the Doctor takes Ace to confront some gang members she used to run with, and also there are aliens. It felt to me like Cornell was trying to do more than the space allotted really allowed for... but Freeman, say, was probably trying to do much less! Cornell, of course, has a great handle on the character of Ace, and a great prose style, and I really enjoyed reading this, and I'm glad DWM has made Cornell's first Doctor Who prose fiction more readily available.

from Doctor Who Magazine #164

Fellow Travellers, from Doctor Who Magazine #164-66 (Sept.-Oct. 1990)
script by Andrew Cartmel, art by Arthur Ranson, letters by Glib

As I mentioned above, suddenly the tone and style of the DWM strip is all different. It's atmospheric, with interesting and unusual cuts; there's narration boxes with internal narration from Ace. As confirmed by the backmatter, it's a clear indication of influence from Alan Moore; for the first time, we're obviously reading comics written and illustrated by someone who has read Watchmen. I occasionally found some of the transitions here tough to follow (Cartmel was a first-time comic scripter), but I really enjoyed this. Clever twists, good engagement with cultural issues, strong characterization for Ace, spooky atmosphere, nice pop culture references. This feels like it came out of the same Doctor Who universe as Ghost-Light and Survival (which is, in my book at least, a good thing)-- but playing to the strengths of the comics form, not tv.

Darkness, Falling / Distractions, from Doctor Who Magazine #167-68 (Nov.-Dec. 1990)
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Lee Sullivan, inks by Mark Farmer, letters by Steve Potter

These are two three-page stories setting up the "epic" Mark of Mandragora which followed. The first is a brief horror vignette about a UNIT soldier dying, with a one-page Brigadier cameo; the second is about the Doctor and Ace in the TARDIS, realizing that the Mandragora Helix is behind it all, and that it's infected the TARDIS. These are okay; as I'll get to in a moment, I found Mark a bit disappointing, and I think I would have liked these more if they were leading up to something more epic and satisfying than they actually were. Together, they total six pages, less than the normal length of a single issue's worth of comics, which feels a bit cheap, though I guess that matters less in a collected edition than it would have at the time. Lee Sullivan, though, does an excellent job with things like the futuristic cityscape, the secondary console room, and the time vortex-- plus he really nails likenesses. Surely one of DWM's best art finds.

from Doctor Who Magazine #172

The Mark of Mandragora, from Doctor Who Magazine #169-72 (Jan.-Apr. 1991)
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Lee Sullivan, inks by Mark Farmer, letters by Steve Potter

I wanted to like this, and for the first three parts I did. Like the tv show did before it was cancelled, it feels very "now"; I like the attempts at near-future slang ("child") and fashion, and I like our new UNIT commander, Muriel Frost. There's some great stuff here in terms of ideas and art, especially the scene where the TARDIS merges with Earth, and so the Doctor and Ace running down a corridor suddenly find themselves crashing into Frost in a London nightclub. I also really liked the bit where the Doctor and Ace whiteout, thinking they've lost. It's got good stakes to it, and a good sense of threat. It all comes crashing down in the resolution, though, as the Doctor wins without even doing anything! This would almost work, because the Doctor has to sacrifice the TARDIS... except of course the TARDIS is back right away, so the Doctor wins with no cost and no cleverness.

Party Animals, from Doctor Who Magazine #173 (May 1991)
script by Gary Russell, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by Steve Pini, letters by Glib

The Doctor (with Ace) finally makes it to Maruthea for Bojaxx's birthday party. Everyone who's everyone is there, so mostly what follows is a series of cameos. Some are from the DWM universe: Beep the Meep, Abslom Daak and the Star Tigers, Ivan Asimoff, the Freefall Warriors, Death's Head, and the little penguins John Ridgway liked to draw are among the ones I noticed. Many are from outside it: Sapphire and Steel, Worf, Emma Peel, and Bart Simpson! I was going to put Captain Britain in the second group, but I guess he technically goes in the first. (I don't think he ever met the Doctor, but I am sure they have mutual acquaintances.)

The big appearance is from a future Doctor, based on the Doctor performed by Nick Briggs in the Audio/Visual fan audios, which Gary Russell worked on himself. They bicker a little bit, and then leave. Like, why? I appreciate that in this era, DWM was pulling its history together again, but I have no idea what the point of this was, and art aside, I didn't find much to like about it.

from Doctor Who Magazine #174

The Chameleon Factor, from Doctor Who Magazine #174 (June 1991)
story by Paul Cornell, pencils by Lee Sullivan, inks by Mark Farmer, letters by Glib

I found this one pretty inexplicable, to be honest. Ace and the Doctor climb a tree in the TARDIS; a new console room comes into existence; the Doctor gets his ring back. Okay, but why is this a story as opposed to part of a story?

from Doctor Who Magazine Summer Special 1991

Seaside Rendezvous, from Doctor Who Magazine Summer Special 1991 (July 1991)
script by Paul Cornell, pencils by Gary Frank, inks by Stephen Baskerville, letters by Glib

The Doctor and Ace encounter an Ogri (from The Stones of Blood) on the beach. It's all rather pointless. Because I jump around in the book on account of reading the strips in publication order, I actually missed the first page, showing the ship in the nineteenth century, until I got confused by what Paul Cornell was talking about in the backmatter. It's funny, I haven't got on with any of Cornell's DWM strips so far, but he's gone on to have one of the most successful comics careers of anyone working on the mag in this era, and I absolutely love most of his work for Marvel.

from Doctor Who Magazine #176

The Good Soldier, from Doctor Who Magazine #175-78 (July-Oct. 1991)
script by Andrew Cartmel, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by Steve Pini, letters by Glib

The Mondasian Cybermen make an initial foray of Earth in the 1950s, scooping up a bit of desert outside Los Vegas with a diner, some soldiers, and the Doctor and Ace on it! I didn't totally get the Mondasian plan here (why did they scoop up the Earth?) and found the resolution, like the one to The Mark of Mandragora a little easy (though nowhere near as bad). But the rest was great. Awesome visuals of the type Doctor Who could largely only do in comics, great characterization, some thematic complexity, and yet another strong artistic turn from Mike Collins. Again, it shows some influence from comics outside the strip with some collage panels when Ace's mind accesses the Cyber computer network and some good use of narration boxes. (I am pretty sure DWM will never have a consistent artist again like it did in the early days, but alternating between Collins and Sullivan pretty much is, and it's much better than the hodgepodge approach of the last couple volumes. It really does give a unified feel to the proceedings when the writers are always changing.)

from Doctor Who Magazine #179

A Glitch in Time, from Doctor Who Magazine #179 (Oct. 1991)
script by John Freeman, art by Richard Whitaker, letters by Caroline Steeden

This is a throwback to that kind of DWM done-in-one I often don't like, the ominous sci-fi story. But actually this one had a pretty fun concept and some good art. Instead of saving the twist for the end, it has twists throughout, which in my mind is much more interesting, and I wish more writers of short sf realized that.

Stray Observations:

The Tardis wiki claims that Fellow Travellers is when the strip began intertwining its continuity with the NAs... but this surely is not true given the NAs didn't begin publication for another eight months!
Fellow Travellers is the debut of Smithwood Manor, the so-called "house on Allen Road" used as a base and a refuge by the seventh Doctor and companions in many NAs.
"Glib" is the pseudonym of Gary Gilbert, who had a prolific run as a letterer on Marvel UK's Transformers title. According to the paratext in The Transformers Classics UK, "Glib" was a nickname his wife gave him based on his name, but there was a joke that it stood for "Greatest Letterer In Britain," which caused fellow Transformers letterer Gordon Robson to one-up him by adopting the pseudonym "GLOP" for "Greatest Letterer On the Planet."
Darkness, Falling is the first ever main strip in DWM to not feature the Doctor.
Given the reference to Battlefield in Mark of Mandragora (which takes place a couple years later, in 1999), it bothered me that there was no explanation for why Alistair is back on active duty and why Bambera is not present.
Darkness, Falling draws together a lot of the recent continuity of the strip, and weaves it into the tv show. The Doctor says, "Something's been troubling me for weeks.... Recently, I haven't been able to take take [sic] the TARDIS away from Earth. Whilst there, we've met creatures and forces that never should have appeared on its surface—at any time! Those Kalik butchers I told you about, Morgaine, even the Hitchers..." The explicit references here are to Train-Flight, Battlefield, and Fellow Travellers. So this would seem to indicate that all of Season 26 (where the TARDIS is Earthbound) takes place recently, and that the Doctor's solo travels in recent strips also take place in such a range. (Train-Flight and Doctor Conkeror! were the first inklings we had the Doctor knew something was up, and there's also hint of in in Teenage Kicks!) And maybe the Doctor is listing those enemies chronologically? On the other hand, most of the pre-Train-Flight strips or the IHP strips can't go within this gap because the Doctor isn't stuck on Earth in those.
In Party Animals, the Doctor finally makes it to Maruthea, where he's been trying to go since Echoes of the Mogor!, way back in DWM #143. It took him thirty issues to get there! That said, it hasn't been brought up since Nemesis of the Daleks (#152, twenty issues prior), so maybe he gave up for a bit after that.
With both those things in mind, I might suggest the following sequence (though I'm sure there are some wrinkles here I've failed to account for):
- DWM #130-56 / IHP #1-12 / DW25AS: The Doctor travels with Frobisher, Olla, and then by himself, trying to reach Maruthea. (Probably during Mel's tv tenure, if we care about this; there's no evidence that Mel exists in DWMland!)
- Season 25: The Doctor meets and travels with Ace.
- The Doctor drops Ace off in the Cretaceous.
- DWM #159-62: The Doctor travels by himself again, and begins to have inklings that the Mandragora Helix is affecting his life. The TARDIS stops being able to land anywhere other than Earth. He then picks Ace up again.
- Season 26: The Doctor continues to travel with Ace, only making Earth landings.
- DWM #163-73: The Doctor encounters more effects of the Helix, confronts and defeats it, and then finally reaches Maruthea.
The exact sequence doesn't really matter; what I like here is how the strip is not only weaving its own events together again, but it also has the audacity to claim that things that happened on screen are part of its continuity, too. Similarly, The Mark of Mandragora cites both the events of Invaders from Gantac! and Battlefield as being so big that the public has become aware of unearthly threats. Plus there's a small cameo from Magog, the villain of DWM's very first story, The Iron Legion! Since Parkhouse left, the strip hasn't really used its own history much, so it's nice to see that back in play again.
The Mark of Mandragora establishes that Foreign Hazard Duty began as a UNIT off-shoot; once UNIT went public, it needed a top-secret branch to take care of stuff.
This volume contains the only DWM work of Mark Farmer, who would go on to the kind of career where I couldn't point to a specific title and tell you he did something amazing, but where I do know that whenever I see his name, I am going to see solid, dependable work. Future work that sticks out to me includes Batman: Year Two, the Alan Davis Killraven revival, Paul Cornell's Wisdom, and Justice League Detroit.
In the backmatter, Gary Russell says that Bonjaxx is a Dæmon who originally appeared in a backup strip from DWM #49. I haven't read this because it hasn't been collected; the Tardis wiki claims that story features Azal from The Dæmons, however.
from Doctor Who Magazine #173
Russell also says, "writing comic strips is darned difficult. So many people think, 'Oh, I can knock one of those out,' but they can't. I'm a prime example of that." Despite his self-professed lack of ability, he would go on to write several more DWM strips and an IDW miniseries!
The Doctor says he and Ace need a holiday at the end of The Chameleon Factor, which links nicely into Cornell's own Seaside Rendezvous, where they are on holiday. Surely this is intentional? I guess it could also lead into The Good Soldier, though.
Seaside Rendezvous is the only DWM work of Gary Frank who, like Mark Farmer, would go on to a career as a solid artist in American comics. He illustrated the first-ever Birds of Prey story, for example, and he even teamed up again with Paul Cornell during his Action Comics run. The story's inker, Stephen Baskerville, would do no more Doctor Who work, but did ink a million Transformers strips for Marvel UK, and also went on to do some for IDW.
In the backmatter, Mike Collins says the convertible that the Doctor and Ace drive in The Good Soldier is the TARDIS. Am I just dense, because I totally failed to notice this if so! I thought it was just a car with some Doctor enhancements; when does the strip establish it to be the TARDIS? Rereading the first page, I can kind of see it, but I assumed that Ace's comment in a narration box ("I'm not sure I like the TARDIS looking this way") was something she said earlier, in the recently reconfigured TARDIS.

This post is the sixteenth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Incomplete Death's Head. Previous installments are listed below: