Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: creator: john tomlinson

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10 April 2023

Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 1 (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 41)

Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 1: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Richard Alan, Steve Alan, Paul Cornell, Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, Pat Mills, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Lee Sullivan, John Wagner, et al.

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 1979-89
Acquired: October 2022
Read: December 2022

As I am nearing the end of this project, I want to circle back and cover something I would have covered much earlier, had it existed at the time. This collects every Dalek story from DWM and adjacent publications from 1979 to 1993. Most of it was previously collected, but it does contain one story not collected elsewhere, so I read only that one.

If I was starting this readthrough now, I would read this volume between The Iron Legion and Dragon's Claw, though I would do just The Return of the Daleks, Absolm Daak... Dalek Killer, and Star Tigers, and save The Dogs of Doom, Nemesis of the Daleks, and Metamorphosis for their appearances in the proper DWM graphic novels.

The Return of the Daleks, from Doctor Who Weekly #1-4 (Oct.-Nov. 1979)
written by Steve Moore, art by Paul Neary & David Lloyd

This is a back-up strip focusing on the Daleks reinvading a planet where they were defeated centuries ago... coincidentally doing so right when someone is making a movie about the original invasion. It's fine; I found it hard to care about or even keep track of the protagonists. To be honest, I expected the movie stuff to be more significant, with fake Daleks versus real Daleks or something, but it's mostly there to explain why the characters have researched the history of the first invasion.

from Doctor Who Weekly #4

Stray Observations:

Other included stories and what collections to find them in: (see below for links to my reviews)

Abslom Daak... Dalek Killer!, Star Tigers, and Nemesis of the Daleks (in Nemesis of the Daleks)
The Dogs of Doom (in The Iron Legion)
Metamorphosis (in The Age of Chaos)

Did I buy this whole volume for just sixteen pages of new-to-me content? Well... kind of. One benefit it does have is that the original graphic novel appearances of Abslom Daak, Star Tigers, and The Dogs of Doom didn't have any commentary. Paul Scoones provides commentary for The Return of the Daleks and The Dogs of Doom, John Freeman for Abslom Daak and Star Tigers, so I did take the time to read that material, which was nice of them to include.
Found it a bit weird Richard Starkings and John Tomlinson are credited by their pseudonyms on the cover, when in the Nemesis of the Daleks collection their real names were given on the cover. People have heard of Richard Starkings, less so Richard Alan!

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

02 January 2023

The Betrothal of Sontar (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 31)

The Betrothal of Sontar: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Mike Collins, Gareth Roberts, Tony Lee, John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis, Roger Langridge, Martin Geraghty, Jonathan Morris, et al.

Collection published: 2008
Contents originally published: 2006-07
Acquired: November 2008
Previously read: December 2008
Reread: October 2022

This collection spans the entirety of the tenth Doctor and Rose era of DWM, which initiated when "The Christmas Invasion" aired and ran all the way to "The Runaway Bride," and it also includes a (kind of) companion-free storyline from between "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones," making for a nice sizeable chunk of DWM. Like the comics collected in The Cruel Sea, these are definitely trying to ape the storytelling of the Russell T Davies era on screen, but I also felt there was a more concerted effort to play to the strengths of comics here: more stories that do things so big that they could never have been afforded on screen, or stories with lots of different locations. Overall, it's a pretty pleasing package.

I've read this collection before, way back in 2008 when it came out. This is (part of) what I wrote at the time:

Either way, this collection is a bit of a jumble. The title story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis is fine for the most part, though the resolution is highly disappointing. Tony Lee's "F.A.Q." is an absolute mess, and the usually-dependable Mike Collins isn't up to scratch with "The Futurists"-- it has some nice ideas, but they don't really cohere. Jonathan Morris's "Opera of Doom!" is too slight to be effective. Morris's other effort, "Interstellar Overdrive" is quite fun and mostly faultless, but something always bothers me about stories where our protagonists would have died but for a convenient time loop that lets them do things over (as in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Cause and Effect" or Deep Space Nine's "Whispers"). It's fun to see the Brigadier in Alan Barnes's "The Warkeeper's Crown", but as I write this review, I can't remember anything else about the story, good or bad. [...] The standouts of the collection are the two "comedy" one-parters: Gareth Roberts's "The Lodger" has the tenth Doctor moving in with Mickey for a week, with hilarious consequences, of course. And Nev Fountain's "The Green Eyed Monster" puts Rose on a reality television show exploring her jealousy of the Doctor's other women-- especially Jackie!

I was curious to see how much my impressions of some of these stories shifted this time around!

from Doctor Who Magazine #365

The Betrothal of Sontar, from Doctor Who Magazine #365-67 (Feb.-Mar. 2006)
story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This sees the first appearance of the Sontarans in the DWM strip since 1993's Pureblood (and even reuses that story's title term); it's about a group of low-quality Sontarans who run a mining rig instead of getting glorious soldiering duty, a neat look into a different dimension of Sontaran society than we've ever seen on screen. The cosmic maguffin wasn't super interesting, but I liked the two principal Sontaran characters. I'm not sure why in my review above I called this story's resolution "highly disappointing." Like, rereading it I have no idea what my beef was at all.

from Doctor Who Magazine #368

The Lodger, from Doctor Who Magazine #368 (Apr. 2006)
story by Gareth Roberts, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This was fun; you can see why Moffat picked it up to make it into a tv episode, and though being a 45-minute story gave it more room to breathe, this version has the benefit of pairing the Doctor with a familiar character—and not having to work in an alien threat of some kind. More of a series of vignettes than a story, but a very solid series of them, and the kind of thing that (somewhat ironically) only DWM could do, I think.

from Doctor Who Magazine #370

F.A.Q., from Doctor Who Magazine #369-71 (May-July 2006)
story by Tony Lee, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I was dreading this one going in. I remembered my negative review from last time around, and having since suffered through Tony Lee's run on IDW's Doctor Who comic book, my opinions of Lee as a comic writer have only diminished. But... I actually kind of liked this? I wouldn't say it's a work of genius or anything—the stories on either side of it are better—but it's fun enough. It has the grounded sensibility of the RTD era, focusing on an ordinary family affected by alien powers, shades of "Fear Her" (a story that I really like). Rose gets some good spotlight moments. The main thing I don't like is the reveal about the teacher who didn't really exist, which seemed kind of pointless. Like, it's spooky, but it doesn't really seem to make a character or thematic point.

from Doctor Who Magazine #373

The Futurists, from Doctor Who Magazine #372-74 (Aug.-Oct. 2006)
story & art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I really don't know what I was thinking when I wrote my above review, because this story was on fire. Good ideas, great visuals, neat contrasts (black Romans in Britain vs. a fascist Italian state), fast pace—four different key locations in three installments!—nice themes, and above all, good characterization for Rose and some genuine laugh-out-loud jokes. Loved gags about the Silurians, how many people were in the resistance, the use of the resistance, and especially the clever use of the psychic paper. "But Darius... you can't read..." "Oh." I can imagine it playing out perfectly on screen. Rose leading the captured Silurian women in revolt is great, and her voice is captured very well. Exactly the kind of story the strip ought to be doing when the tv show is leading, and the volume's highlight. I don't know how I got it so wrong fourteen years ago.

(Wait... fourteen years ago!?)

from Doctor Who Magazine #375

Interstellar Overdrive, from Doctor Who Magazine #375-76 (Nov.-Dec. 2006)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I do love time loop stories. They're one of my favorite sf subgenres. TNG's "Cause and Effect," Groundhog Day, SG-1's "Window of Opportunity," Discovery's "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," Russian Doll season one, Palm Springs, I love them all. I am a total sucker for them. I even love the chronic hysteresis bit in Meglos.

Um, except this one. I think it's a noble attempt. But it has two things going against it, I reckon. One is that the repetition just isn't as interesting when it's solely visual. Here the scenes are all shown from a different angle, but that means you don't really get that uncanny echo that makes these kind of things work on screen. The second is that since it's only two parts, the loop only repeats once, and so it's less a time loop story, and more a story where something happens once, and then the characters get a do-over. It feels cheap, I guess, if it's that easy to get out of the loop. Seeing the iterations is what makes these kind of things fun!

But there are some good jokes and the part one cliffhanger is a good one.

from Doctor Who Storybook 2007

Opera of Doom!, from Doctor Who Storybook 2007
story by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This story is a delight. Quick, fun, good gags. A little too quick, maybe—the fact that people were disappearing into the alien opera house maybe should have been set up better—but I really enjoyed it. The really terrible musician who becomes amazing is a fun character with lots of good jokes.

The Green-Eyed Monster, from Doctor Who Magazine #377 (Jan. 2007)
story by Nev Fountain, art & letters by Roger Langridge, colours by James Offredi

Rose's last appearance in the strip is a good one, bringing Mickey back again and also marking Jackie's only strip appearance. It's a kind of contrived story about an alien jealousy monster and a talk show, but it's all worth it for the incredible sequence where Rose thinks that the Doctor has settled down with her mother. The ending gag of Jackie wanting a second kiss is delightful.

The Warkeeper's Crown, from Doctor Who Magazine #378-80 (Jan.-Mar. 2007)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Rose of course stopped appearing on screen way back in July 2006, but DWM seems to have considered "The Runaway Bride" her official cut-off point as the current companion—the first episode without her as a lead, I guess. So here we get a companion-less story to bridge the gap before Martha, and DWM brings back the Brigadier to serve as a temporary companion. Though the Brigadier appeared in the "past Doctor" early of the early 1990s, I think this is his first present-day appearance since The Mark of Mandragora.

from Doctor Who Magazine #380

It's okay. I liked the first part all right, which pulls the Doctor, the Brigadier, and the wrong Mike Yates together; I liked the last part, where the wrong Mike Yates tries to remake Britain. The middle part, though, lost me in the complicated exposition about the relations on the alien planet, and the whole story suffered as a consequence. I didn't really get the ending, for example. It seemed like things ought to have been simplified. The idea of the Doctor meeting the Brigadier for the first time after he himself fought in a war seemed squandered in a single panel. (Shades of Big Finish's own attempt to do this story, Way of the Burryman, which I read Warkeeper's Crown in the middle of, coincidentally.)

Other Notes:

#367 is one of the rare issues from this era I actually do own; I picked it up to get the free Big Finish CD that came with it. I have no memory of reading The Betrothal of Sontar part three on its own, but I have to imagine it made no sense.
John Tomlinson previously wrote for DWM way back in 1989, scripting Nemesis of the Dalek. (He also wrote two Who strips for The Incredible Hulk Presents and a prose story from the collection Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer.) At 210 issues, that's the longest gap between contributions for any DWM writer/artist as of 2014's strips. His cowriter here, Nick Abadzis, would go on to the primary writer of Titan's The Tenth Doctor comic.
From #363 to 368, we have three stories, two of which were by Gareth Roberts and got adapted for television! Plus The Love Invasion inspires a scene in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" on screen. Quite a hit rate for him. The Lodger is, however, his last contribution to the DWM strip.
I was all prepared to admit I was too hard on Tony Lee as a writer, and then I read his behind-the-scenes I comments. I don't know how one manages to write a bad creator's commentary, but somehow he does. Lots of very belabored jokes, with the kind of self-deprecating humour that comes across as false modesty.
Jonathan Morris gives an incredible amount of detail in his creator's commentaries, down to entire lost scenes from both his stories. I can't think of another DWM graphic novel with this level of detail. Though I enjoyed Opera of Doom! the lost joke about the very slow gondola chase would have been amazing.

from Doctor Who Magazine #377

The Green-Eyed Monster opens with a caption reading "Quite a while ago...", which confused me at first, but I guess it's meant to indicate that this goes between "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Rise of the Cybermen," which was broadcast many months prior. Placement notes aren't really the kind of thing DWM typically goes in for, and it didn't even occur to me we weren't going in chronological order prior to that, since I think every strip here could comfortably fit between "Tooth and Claw" and "School Reunion."
At the time I read this volume, The Warkeeper's Crown was seemingly Alan Barnes's last contribution to the strip, but he is the writer of the current fourteenth Doctor strip, Liberation of the Daleks, that began in issue #584. In between these points, he wrote one million Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish and script-edited ten million.
David A. Roach works on literally every story in this volume except for one ten-page strip, more than any other writer or artist... and somehow does not deserve cover billing!

This post is the thirty-first in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Widow's Curse. Previous installments are listed below:

18 October 2021

Nemesis of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 14)

Collection published: 2013
Contents originally published: 1980-90
Acquired: December 2013
Read: July 2021

Nemesis of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Richard Starkings, John Tomlinson, Lee Sullivan, John Ridgway, et al.

This is sort of an odd hodgepodge volume: only four genuine DWM strips! Everything else is a back-up, or from another magazine entirely. (And one of the DWM strips was supposed to be in that other magazine.) Yet, despite that, I felt like there was a slight uptick here in terms of quality since A Cold Day in Hell! As always, I'm reading these in original publication order, so that's not quite the order they are organized in in the actual book.

This covers a pretty narrow slice of the monthly; not even a whole year of comics, given the inclusion of twelve strips from a totally different magazine! I remember a lot of moaning about this at the time, but it feels like the right thing to do: that have the same creators and same publisher, some were printed in DWM, and where else would they be reprinted if not here?

Abslom Daak... Dalek-Killer, from Doctor Who Weekly #17-20 (Feb. 1980)

from Doctor Who Weekly #18

script by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon

At four four-page installments, this isn't exactly an epic. I'm not particularly sure it's good, either. Abslom Daak is sentenced to being a Dalek-killer, which means he's teleported to a Dalek-occupied planet and expected to take out as many as he can before he dies. He's so successful, though, it feels like maybe the Daleks ought not have humanity on the back foot as they apparently do?

But there's a purity to this, it's so completely itself, that it's impossible not to enjoy it. Daak is an uncompromising character and thus an utter delight to read about. What really elevates it is the artwork of Steve Dillon, which reeks of power and violence. Why does this lady fall for Daak? I don't know, but Steve Dillon makes me believe it. Having already read Daak's storyline in Titan's Eleventh Doctor comics, it was interesting to come back to this and see how little of a relationship he actually had with Taiyin. So it actually works just fine; it was a total blast to read, and left me wanting more...

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #45

Star Tigers, from Doctor Who Weekly #27-30 (Apr.-May 1980) and Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #44-46 (Sept.-Nov. 1980)
script by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon and David Lloyd

Alas, the more that we got, I think, strays a bit too much from the pure essence of Daak. I want to watch Daak do ridiculous action, not connive on Draconia; Steve Dillon may be a great artist, but he's not up to the task of making Draconians visually distinct enough for me to follow any level of political machinations. Most of this story is about Daak putting a team together... which would be fine if we ever got to see this team do anything, but seven installments was all the Star Tigers ever got. Putting Daak on a team moves him a bit away from the pure rampage he was in the original story. Which, I get it, that couldn't last forever, but this is a bit duller than he deserves.

from Doctor Who Magazine #154

Nemesis of the Daleks, from Doctor Who Magazine #152-155 (Sept.-Dec. 1989)
plot by Richard Alan, script by Steve Alan, art by Lee Sullivan, lettering by Zed

The Star Tigers might detract from the Daak concept, but I can't help but feel that Nemesis of the Daleks does them dirty. They have one adventure together in Star Tigers, and then they apparently all die... off-panel! They deserved better, surely? Anyway, Daak might live in the universe of Doctor Who but he's not a good fit for a Doctor Who story, not right out of the box anyway. By using the Time War and the War Doctor, I thought The Eleventh Doctor made great use of him... but it by necessity, I think, had to make him overtly comedic and somewhat pathetic. I can imagine a good seventh Doctor story where the Doctor manipulates Daak as part of some masterplan of his... unfortunately, this story is more like the Doctor just stands there a lot while Daak does his thing (and then dies). This story features some absolutely gorgeous art from Lee Sullivan, including some great two-page spreads, but aside from that is not up to much. Pretty generic action, without the vigor of the original Daak story, or the cleverness of a good Doctor Who one.

from The Incredible Hulk Presents #1

Once in a Lifetime, from The Incredible Hulk Presents #1 (Oct. 1989)
script by John Freeman, art by Geoff Senior, lettering by Stuart Bartlett

This is the first of a set of twelve five-page strips published in the Marvel UK anthology mag, The Incredible Hulk Presents. It has a cute idea at first (the Doctor trying to dodge a nosy reporter, leads him into a bar of his enemies), but quickly goes too far to be plausible (why does the Doctor maroon and ruin this guy when he could just fly away in the TARDIS himself?).

Hunger from the Ends of Time!, from The Incredible Hulk Presents #2-3 (Oct. 1989), reprinted in Doctor Who Magazine #157-58 (Feb.-Mar. 1990)
script by Dan Abnett, art by John Ridgway, lettering by Annie Halfacree

John Ridgway is back! And so is Dan Abnett's future space police/military, Foreign Hazard Duty. I think probably there's a fun idea here about bookworms in a digital library, but the story's technobabble is far too muddled, and the whole thing (despite being one of only two two-part IHP stories) is over too quickly to make any sense.

from The Incredible Hulk Presents #6

War World! / Technical Hitch / A Switch in Time! / The Sentinel!, from The Incredible Hulk Presents #4-7 (Oct.-Nov. 1989)
scripts by John Freeman, Dan Abnett, and John Tomlinson; pencils by Art Wetherell, Geoff Senior, and Andy Wildman; inks by Dave Harwood, Cam Smith, Geoff Senior, and Andy Wildman; lettering by Annie Halfacree, Stuart Bartlett, and Helen Stone

I've never been a big fan of DWM's occasional foray into the a spooky sci-fi Twilight Zoneesque thing happens and the Doctor doesn't really do anything genre, and it turns out I like them even less when compressed down to five pages. Plus, maybe I am stupid, but I didn't even understand what was happening in A Switch in Time! (the Doctor materializes in a holo-tv, so every time the viewers change the channel, he's in a new situation) until I read the behind-the-scenes material.

from The Incredible Hulk Presents #8

Who's That Girl!, from The Incredible Hulk Presents #8-9 (Nov.-Dec. 1989)
script by Simon Furman, pencils by John Marshall, inks by Stephen Baskerville, letters by Stuart Bartlett and Spolly

This was my favorite of the IHP stories, and one of my favorites in the volume. The Doctor regenerates... into a woman!? The best part of the story is that the Doctor's old friend, the warlord Luj, pretends he's going to make a pass at the Doctor but then immediately lets it go and acts the same toward him. But the female Doctor is really a mercenary named Kasgi hired to sabotage an interdimensional peace conference-- and Luj is really a bad guy, so Kasgi is on the side of right, despite the questionable method of hijacking and kidnapping the Doctor! I liked Kasgi a lot, and I see potential in a reappearance, but I guess not at this point. This was a fun story that made good use of its ten pages.

from Doctor Who Magazine #156

The Enlightenment of Ly-Chee the Wise / Stairway to Heaven / Slimmer! / Nineveh!, from The Incredible Hulk Presents #10-12 (Dec. 1989) and Doctor Who Magazine #156 (Jan. 1990)
scripts by Simon Jowett, John Freeman & Paul Cornell, Mike Collins & Tim Robins, and John Tomlinson; art by Andy Wildman, Gerry Dolan, Geoff Senior, and Cam Smith; letters by Helen Stone, Stuart Bartlett, and Peri Godbold

DWM #156 has a cover date of Jan. 1990, but it was released 14 Dec. 1989, putting it between IHP #10 (9 Dec.) and #11 (16 Dec.), so that's where I read it. It reads well in that context, actually; as a done-in-one story of weird sci-fi happenings, Paul Cornell's first piece of licensed Doctor Who fiction feels like a slightly longer IHP story. And if that sounds like damning with faint praise, it kind of is; I didn't really get it, though I think mostly down to some awkward storytelling in the art, which often left me confused as to what was actually happening. I didn't think the joke of Enlightenment was very well executed, but Slimmer! was decent fun, and Nineveh! had some good ideas, even if it wasn't much of a story. So the volume was on an upswing here overall.

from Doctor Who Magazine #159

Train-Flight, from Doctor Who Magazine #159-61 (Apr.-June 1990)
script by Andrew Donkin & Graham S Brand, art by John Ridgway

The best part of this is the idea that would be reused two decades later on tv in Planet of the Dead, the public transit that accidentally takes you into space. Unfortunately, the story doesn't really do much with that idea, pretty much abandoning the people on the train right away, unlike Planet of the Dead, which is built around them in classic RTD fashion. (Though, that's not one of RTD's better-characterized scripts.) It also features the return of Sarah Jane Smith... but it doesn't do much with her, either; she could be any old companion, so why bother? That said, you say, "John Ridgway, draw a train in the space-time vortex," and he draws it like none other.

from Doctor Who Magazine #162

Doctor Conkerer!, from Doctor Who Magazine #162 (July 1990)
script by Ian Rimmer, art by Mike Collins

I might have got more out of this if I knew what conkers was. But it was cute enough.

Stray Observations:

With #13, the The Crimson Hand graphic novel, these collections got a visual redesign, but reading in original strip order, this is the first of the new-look volumes I've gotten to. It makes me pretty grumpy that part of this redesign means removing the credits from the table of contents-- the actual strips were not very good at including credits during this era (I assume they were printed somewhere else in the mag), meaning it takes more work than it ought to to figure out who wrote and drew any particular strip. (And some letters go completely uncredited.)
In part six of Star Tigers, we hear a human colony has rebelled and is using Kill-Mechs to invade other planets, and we see them in a couple panels. In the next installment, though, Daleks burst out of meteroids and the Kill-Mechs and their emperor are immediately forgotten. "The Kill-Mechs don't matter!" Apparently DWM was unsure it had the rights to the Daleks and hastily redid part six, but a month later, it was all sorted out. (I gather that the 1990 Abslom Daak graphic novel edits out the Kill-Mechs, but here the strips are printed as they originally appeared, not as originally intended.)
David Lloyd never illustrated the main DWM strip, I believe, but he did draw a number of back-ups across the first few years of the mag. Star Tigers is the only one to be collected thus far; a couple years after Star Tigers went out, he would begin illustrating his most famous work, V for Vendetta, with fellow DWM back-up strip vet Alan Moore.
As I stated last time, "Richard Alan" is a pseudonym for strip editor Richard Starkings, used because he was an editor commissioning himself. "Steve Alan" was writer John Tomlinson, used because was worried what he had written was a bit crap!
I don't think Panini began including prose stories in these collections until later. Which is a shame, because Marvel UK published a Daak short story in the Abslom Daak graphic novel that would have been a good inclusion here. (Or so I think... having never read it!)
Nemesis of the Daleks is, I think, the first time the distinctive "Dalek lettering" was used in DWM. Googling tells me it was first used in The Dalek Book back in 1964!
Who's That Girl! is the last Doctor Who comic work of Marvel UK regular Simon Furman; I don't think he ever really "got" Doctor Who the way he did The Transformers, but he goes out with his best strip here. He would go on to do a lot of work for Marvel US, including a particularly mediocre run on Alpha Flight. (But then, is there anyone who had anything other than a mediocre run on Alpha Flight?) Two decades after reinventing the Transformers for the UK market, he would reinvent them all over again for the 2000s with, I think, no small amount of success. Gary Russell must have thought he wrote good Doctor Who, though, because he commissioned a fifth Doctor audio drama from him in 2004.
The Enlightenment of Ly-Chee the Wise was Simon Jowett's only Doctor Who work for two decades, until he contributed a short story to the anthology The Story of Martha-- put together by fellow Marvel UK writer Dan Abnett. Mike Collins's co-writer on Slimmer!, Tim Robins, never contributed another Who strip to Marvel UK, but he did conduct a number of fanzine interviews later collected in Telos's Talkback series. Stairway to Heaven was Gerry Dolan's only DWM strip, and he left comics soon after this for "a successful if little noticed career as a storyboard artist," according to John Freeman.
Train-Flight establishes that Ace is in the Cretaceous, her first mention in the DWM strip. Since the Doctor is still trying to get to Maruthea in subsequent stories, that seemingly means all DWM stories since at least Echoes of the Mogor! must take place in a gap during Ace's travels.
Doctor Conkerer! was Ian Rimmer's only Doctor Who work, but he wrote a number of Transformers strips for Marvel UK, including two charming Christmas specials.
Train-Flight has some forebodings that something is off in the Doctor's life; an extra piece of text in Doctor Conkerer! (replacing where the credits would have been if it had been printed in IHP) adds to this.

This post is the fourteenth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers part 2 of Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent. Previous installments are listed below: