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:

The Tides of Time (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 4)

Collection published: 2005
Contents originally published: 1980-84
Acquired: 2005
Previously read: December 2005
Reread: December 2020

The Tides of Time: The Complete Fifth Doctor Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Monthly
by Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, Mick Austin, Steve Dillon, et al.

This volume represents a new approach to the Doctor Who Magazine strip, one that pretty much comes to dominate it for much of its run. Steve Parkhouse writes what are ostensibly six separate stories, but each one builds on the previous one, and runs into the next-- and that's a series of linkages that even continues on either side of this collection. Its first story follows up the last story of Dragon's Claw; its last story sets up the first story of Voyager. That said, though I like the idea of an ongoing story in principle, and I remember Scott Gray being a strong practitioner of it during the eighth Doctor years, the way it's done here is pretty slipshod at best...

Timeslip, from Doctor Who Weekly #17-18 (Feb. 1980)
plot by Dez Skinn, script & artwork by Paul Neary

This little story wraps up the appearances of the fourth Doctor in these graphic novels (for now, anyway; I think he'll be back during the "multi-Doctor" years). I don't know the circumstances of its creation, but it feels like someone whipped it up real quick when The Star Beast was delayed or something. It's much more continuity-focused than most other DWM strips, actually (albeit barely) explaining where Romana is, and giving a footnote about the randomiser. Most notably, the Doctor degenerates because of an alien influence, quickly passing through Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton again before spending four pages as William Hartnell. Unfortunately for the long-term fan, all of the Hartnell images are referenced from incredibly common publicity photos, which stops the art (which I would say otherwise looks quite nice, especially its vast cosmic horrors) from having any sense of life.

from Doctor Who Monthly #63

The Tides of Time, from Doctor Who Monthly #61-67 (Feb.-Aug. 1982)
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

This story starts off pretty neat: time disturbances interrupt the Doctor's cricket game, so he goes back to Gallifrey to check out what's going on, only to learn that all reality is at stake. Steve Parkhouse and Dave Gibbons make Gallifrey seem amazing by basically ignoring the way the tv show approached it. Rather than talk to Time Lord officiants, the Doctor goes into the Matrix, ostensibly "home of the Celestial Intervention Agency"-- which I guess is headed by Rassilon and two guys named Morvane and Bedevere (whom the Doctor supposedly already knows), and they all hang out with "High Evolutionaries," which are highly advanced specimens of other races, including Merlin from The Neutron Knights. Like, this is nothing like what we saw on screen, but hey, it gives the whole thing a great sense of grandeur. Gibbon's art for Gallifrey is amazing, looking nothing like how it appeared on screen, but like an epic sci-fi city-- I love it.

The trip to Gallifrey is followed by a surreal visit to another dimension, which Gibbons handles real well... and after this, The Tides of Time totally fizzles out. The Doctor mostly stands around as people deliver exposition and Shayde does all the work. Literally the Doctor's only contribution to this whole big story is to fly Shayde into position. It looks cool, but once the whole thing is over, it seems faintly pointless.

Sir Justin and Shayde are the Doctor's companions for this story. The idea of Sir Justin is fun, but he doesn't have much to do other than stand around and be baffled up until his heroic sacrifice; I found it difficult to summon up much feeling at that point. I don't know if I would count Shayde as a companion at this point, but he does look cool, a Matrix construct with a (detachable!) black globe for a head. We'll be seeing more of him going forward.

from Doctor Who Monthly #69

Stars Fell on Stockbridge, from Doctor Who Monthly #68-69 (Sept.-Oct. 1982)
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

Dave Gibbons's lengthy run on the strip finally comes to an end here with a neat little two-part story. Here we learn that the village from The Tides of Time where the Doctor is hanging out and playing cricket is Stockbridge, and we meet one of its inhabitants, Maxwell Edison. Maxwell is a UFO and conspiracy nut who ends up drawn into an adventure with the Doctor; the Doctor takes him up into a mysterious spaceship orbiting the Earth. It's a foreboding, atmospheric tale, and I enjoyed it a lot. Undoubtedly the best adventure in this volume, with a charming ending.

from Doctor Who Monthly #73

The Stockbridge Horror, from Doctor Who Monthly #70-75 (Nov. 1982–Apr. 1983)
written by Steve Parkhouse; pencils by Steve Parkhouse and Mick Austin; inks by Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, and Mick Austin; lettering by Steve Parkhouse, Mick Austin, and Steve Craddock

This story, to me, entirely reads like Steve Parkhouse made it up as he went along. It starts out about mysterious goings-on in Stockbridge, including the TARDIS making its own trip to the Carboniferous Period, but then becomes about the Doctor battling a strange elemental on the TARDIS. Shayde turns up to do the actual defeating of the elemental while the Doctor just watches; then the Doctor's being attacked by the Time Lords, then Rassilon and the other Matrix Lords are putting him on trial for some reason, but he gets off because Shayde destroys the evidence. (Apparently a society of time travellers can't travel back to when the evidence still existed.) It doesn't settle on any one thing long enough to be effective, and despite some cool concepts, the Doctor once again feels like a side character in a story about how cool Shayde is!

Also this story introduces SAG 3, an elite UK military unit who do exactly nothing.

from Doctor Who Monthly #77

Lunar Lagoon, from Doctor Who Monthly #76-77 (May-June 1983)
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork by Mick Austin, lettering by Steve Craddock

This feels a bit like one of Parkhouse's fourth Doctor tales: a downbeat story of an ineffective Doctor. He's trapped on a Pacific island with a Japanese soldier who's been there for a long time; despite the Doctor's efforts, the soldier dies... partially because of something the Doctor does to defend himself. I'm not sure what I think of it, to be honest. I think it's well done for what it is... I'm just not sure this is what I want Doctor Who to be doing! I didn't care for Fuji's stilted dialogue or the weird proportions Mick Austin gives him, but otherwise he is a pretty well-drawn character.

from Doctor Who Monthly #83

4-Dimensional Vistas, from Doctor Who Monthly #78-83 (July-Dec. 1983)
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork by Mick Austin, lettering by Steve Craddock and Jerry Paris

Another Steve Parkhouse Time Lord epic, another load of nonsense. Like most of them, it's got some good ideas (the way the Monk and the Ice Warriors work together to make a giant crystal by just waiting is neat), but the overall story is random junk again. The Doctor is joined by Gus, the American pilot who killed Fuji, and realizes he's in an alternate timeline where World War II continued until at least 1963 (though in Lunar Lagoon we're told it's 1983). Trying to figure out what's going on, they discover airplanes are vanishing and the Meddling Monk is there and there are Ice Warriors and SAG 3 is back and... stuff... look, I don't even know how or why.

We also learn the Time Lords sent the Doctor to Stockbridge to figure out the time anomalies resolved in this story. So, 1) why was he always trying to play cricket and/or fish, and 2) why did the Time Lords get mad at the Doctor for hanging out in Stockbridge back in The Stockbridge Horror. Like I said, Parkhouse tries to pull all these tales together, but it's nonsensically done. (The Doctor says that he never went back to the real Earth after leaving it in The Stockbridge Horror, which is plainly not true; he must have been on the real one to see Shayde destroy the evidence of the malfunctioning TARDIS.)

I do like how Mick Austin draws the time vortex.

from The Official Doctor Who Magazine #86

The Moderator, from Doctor Who Monthly #84 / The Official Doctor Who Magazine #86-87 (Jan.-Apr. 1984)
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Steve Dillon

It's interesting, reading all of these, and realizing for all his weirdnesses as storyteller, Steve Parkhouse got one thing right about the fifth Doctor as a character: he is knocked about by tragedy to a degree not true of previous incarnations, something we saw on screen most prominently in Earthshock, Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks, and The Caves of Androzani. The different between the strip's approach and the show's approach, though, is that the tv fifth Doctor would still get these moments of triumph, either within the stories, or in the other stories, but the comic fifth Doctor rarely feels like he's accomplished anything. This is all brought to its utmost in The Moderator, where Gus is gunned down at the moment the Doctor returns him to his own time as a punishment for the Doctor mouthing off to a reprehensible villain.

Here it worked for me, though. Maybe it's the black comic touch of the titular Moderator himself. Maybe it's the slightly unusual structure Parkhouse employs. (The story bounces back and forth between the Moderator hunting the Doctor and the Doctor and Gus on an adventure, but the Moderator is hunting the Doctor for something the Doctor does at the very end of the adventure.) Maybe it's the delightful despicability of Josiah W. Dogbolter. This story is dark, but it feels meaningful in a way some of Parkhouse's other dark tales (like End of the Line or The Neutron Knights) did not. There's tragedy, but also the Doctor and Gus stand up for something despite it all.

Stray Observations:

• Something I like is that the strip kind of doesn't even care that there's a tv show. Oh, it picks up references to it, obviously (the Doctor is seemingly president of Gallifrey because of the events of The Invasion of Time, or maybe The Deadly Assassin), but this is a continuous run of stories for the fifth Doctor where the first one picks up from a fourth Doctor tale and the last one leads into a sixth Doctor one. Which makes no sense from a continuity standpoint! There's no sense at all that these slot in between tv episodes or even really care about the existence of contemporaneous tv episodes, except that the Doctor's appearance (almost incidentally) changes between installments.
• I like the way that the DWM fifth Doctor is kind of, but not quite, the character played by Peter Davison. He occasionally gets lines you can perfectly imagine Davison delivering (his exasperation at a running-away Max in Stars Fell), but the whole idea that the Doctor really just wants to hang about playing cricket (or fishing) seems much more influenced by the Doctor's costume than anything else! He's also more... morose than the tv fifth Doctor; there's a bit where he almost commits suicide when he thinks he's lost in the wrong dimension! Again, not the tv version, but an interesting incarnation of the Doctor of his own. It's a shame Big Finish's Comic Strip Adaptations line seems to have ended after a single box set; I'd've liked to have heard Peter Davison tackle this slightly different take on his character.
• Apparently Gallifrey's military is normally completely separate from the Time Lords (the Doctor says, "What's a Time-Lord doing slumming around the military? Good heavens...you'll be in politics next!"); that they have a TARDIS and Tubal Cain is assigned to them is depicted as abnormal. The way time torpedoes work here would be used in the audio adventure Neverland.
• Steve Parkhouse seems to think all TARDISes look like police boxes.
• Toby Longworth's performance as Dogbolter in The Maltese Penguin and The Quantum Possibility Engine has indelibly impressed itself upon my mind; I can't not imagine him delivering the lines.
• After inaugurating the DWM strip with a three-year run, Dave Gibbons would go on to do a lot of work for DC on lower-tier superhero comics such as Legion of Super-Heroes, L.E.G.I.O.N., JSA, Rann-Thanagar War, and something called Watchmen.
  

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

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
   

Dragon's Claw (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 2)

Collection published: 2004
Contents originally published: 1980-82
Acquired: December 2013
Read: November 2020

Dragon's Claw: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly
by Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, Steve Moore, et al.

This volume transitions us out Mills & Wagner era into that of first Steve Moore and then Steven Parkhouse; at the same time, the Doctor Who magazine goes from a weekly to a monthly, and the stories decrease in length. I'm guessing this is because it's one thing to serialize a story in eight parts when that means it takes eight weeks, and another when when that means it takes eight months! Later the mag would reverse this decision-- which I think was the right call, based on this volume.

Dragon's Claw, from Doctor Who Weekly #39-43 / Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #44-45 (July-Oct. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

This is the last of the big fourth Doctor comic stories; in a way, it feels like Steve Moore's attempt to do a Mills & Wagner, so to speak. Interesting setting, big enemy, long-form storytelling... yet this never clicked for me. I'm not sure I could say why. (Dave Gibbons actually says something similar in the intro to Iron Legion.) Maybe it's because the Doctor and Sharon and K-9 spend most of the story sitting around? For a story about ninja warrior monks (there's your RTD connection again!) and Sontarans, it's surprisingly light on action; compare this to The Iron Legion or The Dogs of Doom, which are constantly moving moving moving. The stakes feel very abstract too. I guess the emperor is threatened, but so what? Anyway it seems to me that this story marks the beginning of a slump for the strip. The Time Witch was a wobble, but could have been an aberration; this story confirms it.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #46

The Collector, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #46 (Nov. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

This one starts out pretty good: the Doctor and Sharon land in Blackcastle, but get sucked to an asteroid by a guy who's been kidnapping humans and putting them on display for centuries. Trying to get him free from a deranged computer, the Doctor accidentally gets him and K-9 killed... so he just goes back in time and undoes it, the end. Sure, there's some bafflegab to justify why he can't always do this, but it's a big cheat regardless. Plus he never actually sets the victims of the Collector free! (The bit of bafflegab is lettered in a slightly different hand, which makes me think it was added at the last minute when someone objected that the Doctor would do this all the time if it were possible.) I think it debuts a formula we'll see through the rest of Steve Moore's time on the strip: more on that later.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #48

Dreamers of Death, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #47-48 (Dec. 1980–Jan. 1981)
written by Steve Moore, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

The TARDIS lands on an Earth colony planet where the Doctor has some old friends; the use of alien creatures to create shared dream experiences has become all the rage since his last visit. Well, it turns out the alien creatures are evil. You probably could write an interesting story about this concept, but this isn't it; the dream stuff is abandoned in favor of the creatures merging into a giant devil-shaped gestalt creature and stomping through the city. The Doctor defeats it with a hose.

This is Sharon's last story; suddenly she's decided to start a new life with a guy she meets in the story, even more sudden than Leela falling in love with Andred, which is saying something. It's disappointing but not too disappointing because introductory story and maybe Dogs of Doom aside she's never really had much to do except stand there while the Doctor explains things. She feels a very RTD companion, like I've said, but without storytelling actually focused on her as a character, she quickly becomes generic. The idea that she could go straight from 14 to 18 raises more problems than it solves... and now she's settling down!? It's all a bit weird. (Sharon says there's nothing for her in Blackcastle now that she's grown up... yet in one of these stories, she mentioned having a father! I am pretty sure Big Finish made her into an orphan.)

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #52

The Life Bringer! / War of the Words / Spider-God, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #49-52 (Feb.-May 1981)
written by Steve Moore, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

Here we settle into the Steve Moore pattern (into which you could also insert The Collector and, to a lesser extent, Dreamers of Death): mediocre sci-fi adventures that feel like rejected Twilight Zone scripts with some kind of sting in the tail. In The Life Bringer!, the Doctor meets and liberates Prometheus. Is he the real god? At the end, Prometheus heads to Earth to make life. Is this the origin of humanity in the distant past, or its resurrection in the distant future? I feel like the end wants you to go "spooky..." but frankly I didn't care.

War of the Words is about aliens fighting over a library; it has a pretty dumb resolution. Spider-God is about a weird alien biology, where the whole story is built around a twist ending that feels like it comes from a mediocre American sf story of the 1930s. At least Dave Gibbons draws the hell out of everything!

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #55

The Deal / End of the Line, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #53-55 (June-Aug. 1981)
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

Here is the debut of Steve Parkhouse as strip writer, who quickly makes his style known: bleak stories of an ineffective Doctor. In The Deal, the TARDIS and an alien soldier get stuck on a battlefield, and team up to get off, but the Doctor ditches the soldier and he dies when the Doctor realizes he's a monster. In End of the Line, the Doctor faces zombies in a ruined cityscape; he helps some survivors escape but the story ends with him realizing there's no place for them to escape to... and they all die en route anyway! Ouch, geeze, way to cheer me up, New Steve. The dark brooding cityscapes of End of the Line are pretty neat, though.

By this point, things that remind me of the RTD years have largely vanished from the strip... with the exception of the fact that End of the Line is about a bunch of people trapped in a dystopian urban center yearning to get out to an edenic countryside, but who need the Doctor to repair their transport system. So, yeah, "Gridlock" again!

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #56

The Free-Fall Warriors, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #56-57 (Sept.-Oct. 1981)
written by Steve Parkhouse, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons

This is like one of those episodes of a tv show where the main cast does little except meet some people who are clearly being set up for a spin-off. The Doctor's on vacation, where he meets a science fiction writer named Ivan Asimoff (!). The two of them then meet a group of stunt pilots called the Freefall Warriors (that's how it's always written in the story, though part one is called "the Free-Fall Warriors" and part two "the Free Fall Warriors"). One is a big tiger and is named "Big Cat"; another has a machine head and is called "Machine Head"; one is named "Bruce." You can tell Parkhouse put a lot of work into this. The Doctor and Asimoff mostly sit there while the Freefall Warriors thwart a raider attack in contrived circumstances. I barely get why the Doctor is in this story; the purpose of the Asimoff character is even less clear!

Like I said, it feels like the Freefall Warriors are being set up for bigger things, but if so, they didn't amount to much; Big Cat reappeared solo in the Doctor Who Summer Special for 1982, and there was a four-issue back-up strip in Captain Britain in 1985 showing how they all met. None of this material has been collected as far as I know.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #58

Junk-Yard Demon, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #58-59 (Nov.-Dec. 1981)
written & lettered by Steve Parkhouse, pencils by Mike McMahon, inks by Adolfo Buylla

For the first time in my DWM journey, we have a strip not drawn by Dave Gibbons. (I know he didn't draw #17-18, but I haven't got there yet!) Mike McMahon and Adolfo Buylla have a drastically different style: lots of dark, distorted proportions, sparse backgrounds, detailed mechanics. I love their boggle-eyed Tom Baker. The story is fun, probably the best Parkhouse-written tale in this volume. Actually, the best-written tale in this volume full stop. The Doctor meets some scavengers who repurpose Cybermen as servants; one is accidentally reactivated and it steals the TARDIS, along with one of the scavengers. It's a neat, atmospheric story, slightly injured by some unclear storytelling from McMahon and Buylla; there are times I didn't follow the action right away.

The Neutron Knights, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #60 (Jan. 1982)
written & lettered by Steve Parkhouse, artwork by Dave Gibbons

The fourth Doctor departs DWM at his most ineffectual in Steve Parkhouse's most depressing tale yet: the Doctor stands and watches as barbaric space knights invade a castle; everyone dies when Merlin overloads an atomic reactor! Wow, Steve Parkhouse really hates happy endings, huh? This one foreshadows The Tides of Time but I didn't think it really worked on its own. Which, to be fair, it's not meant to be read on its own. I might be pausing a bit before picking up my next volume, but back in the day, it was straight from this to part one of The Tides of Time in Feb. 1982!

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #60

Stray Observations:

• I am reliably informed that The Collector features the introduction of that old Doctor Who comics convention, the use of "VWORP! VWORP!" to represent the sound of the TARDIS materializing. This is a surprisingly hard thing to research on the Internet; I found one article on BuzzFeed that clarified it dates back years... all the way to the Matt Smith era! Wow.
  
• The Free-Fall Warriors features, I believe, the debut of the long-running DWM future space currency, the mazuma.
• Weirdly, The Neutron Knights's narration captions are in the past tense. I feel like this almost never happens in comic stories (unless there's some kind of retrospective frame). I found it jarring, but I think it's just a Steve Parkhouse thing, as I noticed he did this in some of his Transformers strips as well.

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

1. The Iron Legion
   

The Iron Legion (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 1)

Collection originally published: 2004
Contents originally published: 1979-80
Acquired: December 2013
Read: November 2020

The Iron Legion: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Weekly
by Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills & John Wagner, and Steve Moore

I've been collecting the Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels since The Tides of Time; my entry point into Doctor Who fandom during the Wilderness Years was Paul McGann's Big Finish audios, and I think someone told me the story was an influence on Neverland. I then grabbed the four eighth Doctor volumes, and I kept picking them up from there; eventually I realized I might as well go back and pick up the first two fourth Doctor volumes and have a complete set. So now I have around thirty of the things!

However... I've only read less than a quarter of them in the past fifteen years: The Tides of Time, the four eighth Doctor volumes, The Betrothal of Sontar, and The Widow's Curse. Plus I did pick up the Ninth Doctor Collected Comics special edition of DWM, and since 2007 I've been a regular reader of the mag. (Or, at least as regular as you can be in the States, where distribution can be erratic.) Much of the strip's history is thus something I know of, rather than actually know.

But that's all about to change. With the release of the Ground Zero collection, you can read (basically) from one end of the main strip to the other, and so I am finally going to read all of my DWM graphic novels, and I am going to chronicle that here. Plus also I'll be reading some side stuff of interest. (I did think about jumping between volumes to create a perfect publication order, but I decided that would be too much work, so I'll just be doing the volumes by order of the main strip. Though within each volume, I'll stick to publication order; I didn't like the re-sequencing of the strips in the eighth Doctor volumes.)

from Doctor Who Weekly #3

The Iron Legion, from Doctor Who Weekly #1-8 (Oct.-Dec. 1979)
written by Pat Mills & John Wagner, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons 

I'll be honest, I expected to not like this! People seem to like it, but I was suspicious that was because the Golden Age of Doctor Who is twelve, and that as a 30-something 40-something years on, it was going to be eh, whatever. I even thought this having heard the Big Finish audio adaptation, which is fun enough, but wears thin after a while.

Well, I was wrong because this is great! This is perfectly paced comics; Mills & Wagner knew their stuff. Each incident propels you into the next, each installment brings you something new to marvel at. Roman legionnaire robots driving tanks through England; gladiatorial games fought by ecto-slimes; a guy whose half robot because of all the limbs that have been lopped off as punishment.

Dave Gibbons's art is great, too. I mean, you know this if you've read, say, Watchmen, but he was born great as far as I can tell. The man can draw anything and make it look good! In the interview at the front, he's down on his Tom Baker likeness, but I think he captures the essence of the man's face if not its precise details. The other thing that really shines is the voice: Baker's voice booms off the page. The quips and the anger and the portentousness, you can hear it all.

I don't think this is the best the strip can do, but it's a great start, showing how the comics medium really lets Doctor Who go big in a way 1970s tv just couldn't.

from Doctor Who Weekly #14

City of the Damned, from Doctor Who Weekly #9-16 (Dec. 1979–Jan. 1980)
written by John Wagner & Pat Mills, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons 

This story brings the Doctor to a dystopian city where emotion has been outlawed; the Moderators hunt down those who display emotion and program it out of them. It's not quite as wild as The Iron Legion, but it has its own energy. The Doctor gets lots of good lines once again, and I loved the rebels, who each carry one book in their head... except filtered through the goofiness of Doctor Who. So here we get rebels named Nervous, Humble, Silly, and (my favorites) Slightly Angry, Fairly Angry, and Very Angry.

The plot gets a little bonkers: blood bugs that die if they consume adrenaline are kind of accidentally unleashed on the city, which means everyone will die unless the Doctor can bring emotion back. But again, it's all good fun. There's a delightful bit where the Doctor steals a Moderator teleporter, but can't quite get it right and keeps appearing in odd places.

As I'll note in future reviews, and in my stray observations below, it felt a bit Russell T Davies to me. Or rather, Russell T Davies feels a bit like this now that I know what I'm looking for; the whole emotion thing seemed reminiscent of what he did in "Gridlock," just kind of refracted. On its own, I don't think it would stand out, but as we go on, a pattern emerges...

from Doctor Who Weekly #24

The Star Beast, from Doctor Who Weekly #19-26 (Feb.-Apr. 1980)
written by Pat Mills & John Wagner, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons 

One of my favorite things Doctor Who can do is that juxtaposition of the everyday and the fantastic. What is more sublime, then, than Fudge's mother offering a Wrarth warrior more tea-- and the Wrarth warrior helpfully detaching its arm so that the Doctor can use it as a weapon!? In The Star Beast, Beep the Meep is on the loose in Blackcastle, a northern industrial town. Beep might look cute, but it's really a deadly war criminal, unbeknownst to local kids Fudge and Sharon.

I've heard the audio version of this, and I thought it felt very much like how Russell T Davies might have relaunched Doctor Who if he had done it in 1980 instead of 2005. That's not something Alan Barnes added in, that's very much present here. Like I said, it makes his signature moving of mixing the fantastic and the domestic, but even though it's a move that feels very Doctor Who, I struggle to think of many examples of it happening in pre-2005 tv Doctor Who outside of Survival. Yet here it is, Mills & Wagner and Gibbons tapping into something the tv show wouldn't devise for another decade, in its mixing of everyday Blackcastle life with fantastic space stuff.

There is one bit I really hate, though: one issue ends with Blackcastle being sucked into a black hole. This cliffhanger is resolved by the narrator basically going, "um, no it wasn't, everything was fine"! Were they making this up as they went along?

Sharon is instantly likeable, which is good, given she becomes the new companion, Doctor Who's first companion of color. But what on Earth is up with the way Dave Gibbons draws her hairline? It makes her look fifty... a bad fifty.

from Doctor Who Weekly #27

The Dogs of Doom, from Doctor Who Weekly #27-34 (Apr.-June 1980)
written by John Wagner & Pat Mills, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons 

This is the last of the Wagner & Mills collaborations. It starts great, with colorful space truckers named "Joe Bean" and "Babe Roth"! I loved the way Gibbons rendered their space truck in particular. Babe is a single working mum, and we see her dealing with her kids' robot tutor, and struggling with being so far away from them.

Again, it made me think of something RTD would do later on; it reminds one of the comic-booky residents of New Earth in "Gridlock"... and where are these human colonists? The New-Earth System! Russell would have been, what, 16-17 when these strips all came out? I don't think he's ripping them off or even deliberating pastiching them, so much as it feels like they were absorbed into his bones as part of the fundamentals of How Doctor Who Works. Like how if someone hired me to make Doctor Who, I would make it like the 2001-02 Paul McGann audios without even meaning to.

After a strong start, though, it becomes the weakest of the Wagner & Mills joints once the Daleks turn up. Gibbons draws a mean Dalek, of course, and I derive sheer joy from seeing K-9 explode one, but running around on a Dalek ship as they carry out a typically inscrutable plot just isn't as imaginative as the stuff this comic has done up until now. The climax of the story is well-orchestrated, but in the middle I found myself getting bored for the first time in this series.

Sharon gets a space jumpsuit in this story, which makes her look very leggy. How old is she supposed to be, anyhow? Like, fourteen? Anyway, she doesn't really get much to do here; the installments are so short, and she spends much of it away from the Doctor while he fights the Daleks with K-9 and a hypnotized werewolf. The idea of Sharon is great, but she's not up to much in the execution.

from Doctor Who Weekly #38

The Time Witch, from Doctor Who Weekly #35-38 (June-July 1980)
written by Steve Moore, artwork & lettering by Dave Gibbons 

Steve Moore takes over as writer here, in a story that introduces a number of changes. It's shorter (just four parts, instead of eight), Sharon gets a new haircut (that's good), and Sharon is aged up by four years! To be honest, having already read the rest of Sharon's appearances in Dragon's Claw, I'm not sure why this was done; Sharon never does anything at 18(?) that she couldn't have done at 14(?), except for how she was written out. I'm also not convinced that Gibbons draws her very differently, given how she already looked in stories like Dogs of Doom!

In this one, it's a mental battle of wills between the Doctor and a woman called the "time witch." I don't much like stories of that sort, in that it seems like anything can happen, but this one has some clever touches and decently defined rules. It's fine, but nothing special.

Stray Observations:

• The village where The Iron Legion opens will eventually be established as Stockbridge, the village from the fifth Doctor comics. The Tardis wiki tells me this happens in The Stockbridge Child, but I am pretty sure Alan Barnes's script for the Big Finish audio adaptation also includes this retcon.
• Another bit that feels very RTD to me is where the Doctor is running alphabetically through aliens before he remembers the ecto-slime and its weakness. Russell totally poached this for "World War Three"!
• In The Star Beast, the Doctor proves he's a good guy to the Wrarth by showing them a medal he received for defeating the Cybermen: it has a picture of a Cyberman's head with an "X" over it! When was this issued to him and by whom?
  
• At one point, a Dalek calls the Doctor a "fool." This just doesn't seem very Dalek-y to me.
• Fact fans should note that Mills and Wagner would come up with the strip ideas together (I think all or most actually began life as pitches to the television series; one unproduced pitch of theirs would eventually become the Big Finish audio The Song of the Megaptera), they alternated on the actual writing; the "Mills & Wagner" ones are by Mills, while the "Wagner & Mills" ones are by Wagner. I do think there's a difference of tone. The two Mills ones are a bit... wackier? That seems to imply comedy. Maybe "colorful" is a better word. The two Wagner ones are a bit grimmer. Though both balance both aspects!
• Pat Mills went on to write a couple Doctor Who audio dramas; in addition to the Megaptera "Lost Story," he would also write a couple "New Eighth Doctor Adventures," including The Scapegoat, which was a lot like these stories in its sheer energy. John Wagner is most famous as co-creator of Judge Dredd, but around these parts we best know him as co-writer of DC sf epic Bob the Galactic Bum!
  

This post is the first in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Dragon's Claw.

Revolutionary Reading: An Examination of the Legion of Super-Heroes Threeboot, Part I: Teenage Revolution

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2005 (contents: 2004-05) 
Acquired February 2016
Read May 2016

Legion of Super-Heroes: Teenage Revolution

​

Writer: Mark Waid

Penciller: Barry Kitson
Additional Pencils: Leonard Kirk, Dave Gibbons, Scott Iwahashi
Inkers: Art Thibert, Mick Gray, Barry Kitson, James Pascoe, Drew Geraci, Scott Iwahashi
Colorists: Chris Blythe, Paul Mounts, Dave McCaig
Letterers: Phil Balsman, Jared K. Fletcher, Pat Brosseau, Rob Leigh

This is the new Legion of Super-Heroes. In the past, the Legion of Super-Heroes was a group of teenage superheroes from the future. This version, the third since the group was introduced in Adventure Comics #247 back in 1954, is something more: they are revolutionaries. They don't want to beat up bad guys (or they don't only want to beat up bad guys), they want to beat up the system itself. There are seventeen Legionnaires on the "core" team-- but they are only the vanguard of 75,000-member youth movement from dozens of planets across the galaxy.

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1 (art by Barry Kitson & Mick Gray)

The idea of superheroes as revolutionaries isn't a new one. I would argue that it goes back the genre's ur-text, Action Comics #1 in 1938. Superman in that first story doesn't fight Lex Luthor: he fights war profiteers. And in later stories he tackles other aspects of the United States' economy and social structure, like slumlords and people fixing college football games and unsafe driving conditions. (Okay, and a leaking dam.) This doesn't last, as in Action Comics #13 it starts off about a taxi driver protection racket, but ends up being about the Ultra-Humanite, introducing the first superhero to his first supervillain.

But the idea that the superhero is a revolutionary figure recurs throughout the genre's history, and various creators take it on in various ways: Dennis O'Neill and Neal Adams in Green Lantern/Green Arrow (1970-72), Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch in The Authority (1999-2000), Joe Kelly in Action Comics #775: "What’s so funny about Truth, Justice, & The American Way?" (2001), Mark Millar in Superman: Red Son (2003), and Paul Pope in Batman: Year 100 and Other Tales (1998-2006). Alan Moore has taken on the idea repeatedly in his comics work, including in Miracleman (1982-89), Watchmen (1986-87), and V for Vendetta (1982-89). More on him later, though. I wouldn't suggest that revolution is the only project of the superhero genre (Amazing Fantasy #15, the debut of Spider-Man, captures a whole different part of it), but it is an important part of it.

If you know anything about the comics I listed, it's that they're excellent, but mostly dark, bloody, and dour. Teenage Revolution shows that a revolutionary superhero comic does not have to be like that. The Legion is bright and fun, rebelling against a future that's forgotten how to enjoy itself, where people communicate only via screens (even when in the same room), everyone goes outside completely bundled up, and children's locations are monitored at all times for their safety.

from Teen Titans/Legion Special #1 (art by Barry Kitson)

The teens in the Legion stand for a brighter, more exciting time, and they access this through-- in a sort of metatextual twist that's never really explained-- comic books published by DC Comics. They have spinner racks in Legion HQ:

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1 (art by Barry Kitson & Mick Gray)

...quiz each other on their DC Comics trivia:

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #6 (art by Barry Kitson & Art Thibert)

...and even use them as a guide to what "dates" used to be like:

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #3 (art by Barry Kitson & Art Thibert)

The superheroes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are a key part of the inspirations of the Legionnaires, as is reflected in their code names:

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1 (art by Barry Kitson & Mick Gray)

But the parameters of the Legion's conflict with the wider society of the United Planets is often defined vaguely. The Legion doesn't want kids (or "underagers," as they are called) to have their locations monitored, but other than that, what are they fighting for? And how are they fighting for it? The comic skirts around these issues, not always willing to show the violence that comes with revolution. Often throughout the series, an external threat ends up diverting the Legion's attention, and their violence is directed against that.

How revolutionaries articulate violence against their own society is a key question in stories of revolution, I think. In his book From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (2010), Peter Y. Paik argues that most would-be revolutionaries, and fiction about revolutionaries, flinches from these issues. But Paik praises Alan Moore's works (Miracleman, Watchmen, and V for Vendetta are all discussed) as being among those that examine this difficulty thoroughly. Revolutionary change requires violence, he says, and though the moral cost is too high to bear, but "The grievous price of achieving utopia thus ceases to be terrible once Homo sapiens reaches the stage at which it feels free to shrug off as unduly burdensome the moral reservations entailed by the sacrifices that have been committed for the sake of advancing the progress of history."

How does one become able to "shrug"? How do you reach the point where you can say, "Killing all these people was okay because it advanced the progress of history"? Paik's analysis of Watchmen shows how the superhero Ozymandias is one such shrugger.

For the most part, Mark Waid and Barry Kitson's Legion of Super-Heroes avoids these issues. Things rarely get violent between them and the United Planets. (The first panel above refers to one such moment, where the Science Police tried to bulldoze Legion HQ. But the Legion's followers surrounded it and stopped it from happening with their bodies, and no one was hurt: there were no sacrifices.) I'll talk about one such moment when I get to the third volume.

But for now, the very first issue actually has one of the series' most protracted engagements with the idea of revolutionary violence. In this issue, the Legion is summoned to the planet Lallor, which is outside the United Planets, but allied to it. The Legion has been organizing underagers on Lallor into a political majority. It's a little unclear to me exactly what the backstory is. At one point, the leader of the Legion, Cosmic Boy, describes it as an "armed adult rebellion," implying the adults are rebelling against the underagers, but here, a dying Lallor underager tells Invisible Kid:

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1 (art by Barry Kitson & Mick Gray)

...implying that the adults were in control. Either way, there's some kind of armed conflict between the adults on Lallor and the Legion-affiliated underagers. Because the alliance between the United Planets and the government of Lallor, the U.P. government asks the Legion not to intervene against the Lallor government.

The Legionnaires, of course, ignore this edict. They justify their intervention-- they shrug-- in terms of preventing a larger outbreak of violence. Cosmic Boy argues that a number of planets are edging toward war:

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1 (art by Barry Kitson & Mick Gray)

...and in a war, it's the young who will fight it on behalf of their elders. That it's the young who pay for decisions made by adults in which they have no say is a recurrent social criticism raised by the Legionnaires throughout the series. Here, the Legion engages in violence to prevent the larger violence of a full-scale war, knowing that the young, the disenfranchised will pay the most if there is one.

The United Planets' dithering is often portrayed as the biggest threat to peace. Because the United Planets is so big and so socially conservative, it is not quick to act. Because the Legion exists outside the government, they can act quickly and decisively to cut situations off before they escalate into larger outbreaks of violence. Thus, Cosmic Boy authorizes Legion involvement on Lallor.

from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1 (art by Barry Kitson & Mick Gray)

But this is a rare moment in the series. The youth movement that is the Legion of Super-Heroes never has direct, violent confrontations with the social order of the United Planets, something that's hard to imagine would be the case if this comic had been written ten years later, after Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Most of the time, the Legion doesn't have to shrug at all, and it feels like some of the potential of this version of the Legion has been left on the table as a result.

That's not to say there isn't a lot to like about the "threeboot" Legion, but this essay is focused on one particular aspect, not leaving me with much room to mention how much I liked Barry Kitson's clean art, the pervasive feeling of optimism, the clever sci-fi ideas, and especially the character of Dream Girl, who is definitely my favorite in this incarnation. Like the best reboots, Waid and Kitson's take is at least as interesting as what it's replacing, and the differences are more than interesting enough to justify the undertaking.