Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: creator: lee sullivan

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25 March 2024

Liberation of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 51)

Liberation of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2022-23
Acquired: November 2023
Read: December 2023

I did briefly think that I should maintain the chronology of this project; that is to say, I thought about saving Liberation of the Daleks until The White Dragon (and a hypothetical second volume of thirteenth Doctor comics) was out... but I was won over by the idea of reading Liberation while the fourteenth Doctor was still the current Doctor, and indeed, I was able to finish it the morning of the same Saturday that The Giggle debuted on Disney Plus. I doubt I will ever again read a Doctor's entire comics run while they are the current screen Doctor.

Liberation of the Daleks, from Doctor Who Magazine #584-97 (Dec. 2022–Dec. 2023)
story by Alan Barnes, art by Lee Sullivan, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

It's DWM's longest story! By issue count, at least; I think The Glorious Dead still has it beat out by approximately ten pages. Picking up from the end of The Power of the Doctor, this leads right into Destination: Skaro... though I am unconvinced that its events really could squeeze into the sixty minutes the Doctor states have passed between the two stories in Destination: Skaro. I am pretty sure it took me longer than sixty minutes to read it!

It's a bit bonkers, and it's not very deep, but it is fun. One of Alan Barnes's strengths as a writer has always been rearranging pop culture iconography in interesting ways: here the Daleks attack the World Cup Final in 1966, only it turns out that it's all a simulation from the future, an amusement park where people go to experience Dalek wars... and the park enslaves real Daleks to make it all work. When the Doctor escapes from the simulation, he brings real Daleks with him.

from Doctor Who Magazine #590
It's not very deep, but it is deep enough; the story does some fun stuff with the disjunction between how we perceive Daleks as viewers (fun, goofy) and how they function in the narrative of Doctor Who (purveyors of genocide); probably the best of the many strong cliffhangers is the one where a bunch of tourists began chanting "EXTERMINATE," hoping to be exterminated! As you would, of course. It casts a lens on Doctor Who's own story, but also reflects the way that, say, Nazis come across in real pop culture. Alan Barnes amps it up as the story proceeds by even bringing in the TV Century 21 Daleks, contrasting their even more goofy iconography with the brutality of the "actual" Daleks.

It does give a feeling of being made up as it went along. Mostly I don't mind this (so does, say, the original Star Beast) but it does seem like the whole story could have ended with part eight but keeps going with a whole new subplot.

Lee Sullivan does a great job with Daleks of course, but all throughout; he captures new series Daleks, classic series Daleks, TV21 Daleks, all of them. James Offredi matches him on coloring with some good work, especially on the TV21 stuff.

If you thought this would be a deep plunge into the mysteries of the fourteenth Doctor (and I can see why you might have, though the story itself discards this pretty quickly), this isn't it. But it is a solid piece of DWM fun.

from Doctor Who Magazine #593

Other Notes:

For those of us who keep track of such things, these fourteen strips tie Alan Barnes for the twelfth-longest run as writer of the DWM strip with Steve Parkhouse (#86-99), and tie Lee Sullivan for seventh as artist with David A Roach (#451-64). For total written, it moves Barnes from fifth to third (at 41 strips, a bit below Steve Parkhouse's total of 46), and Lee Sullivan from eighth to seventh (at 44 strips). But I believe there's more to come after this for both, so their numbers will move even further up.
This is Barnes's first contribution to the main strip since #380, a gap of 204 strips! This would place him in second for largest gap (if we discount the returns for issue #500), behind John Tomlinson's record of 210... except that Lee Sullivan makes his first contribution since #317, setting a new record of 267!
I'm given to understand that the conceit of TV Century 21 was that it was a news magazine from one century after its time of publication. Because of that, the humorless pedants of the Tardis wiki have counted all sorts of weird stuff as "valid" because it was printed in TV21 alongside the Dalek strips. Like, they'll count Thunderbirds... but (up until recently) not Scream of the Shalka or Death Comes to Time!? Anyway, if they are paying attention to Liberation, they need to take all that stuff back out, because Barnes establishes the TV21 comic strips are an in-universe 21st-century children's fiction.

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

Transformers UK #215–18, 223–27, 235–54: Aspects of Evil! and Other Stories (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 48)

I had thought that I would intersperse my Titan reprints of Marvel UK's Transformers comics among my Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels. I knew I wouldn't read them at quite the same rate... but I did not anticipate just how long it would take me to read them all, because I did not realize how difficult they would be to track down!

It took me almost six months to my hands on a copy of Aspects of Evil! First, I almost ordered the wrong book, because the Transformers wiki gives the wrong ISBN for Aspects of Evil!; I actually bought and paid for a copy of Fallen Star, but (thankfully, I guess) the Amazon seller was a scammer who didn't actually have the book (and did refund me when confronted). But then when I put the correct ISBN into Bookfinder... I couldn't find it anywhere! It wasn't that the book was going for insanely high prices, it was that it just wasn't being sold anywhere at all on the whole Internet.

After a few months, my saved search on eBay finally paid off, but I was outbid at the last moment. I began considering other options, like posting a desperate plea on the Transformers trading subreddit or actually paying the insane prices to import the Hachette collections of the relevant issues, when finally Aspects of Evil! was posted on eBay again, this time as a pair with Fallen Star, which I actually did need. I think this helped me win, as I was willing to pay a decent price with the knowledge that I would end up with two different books; someone tried to snipe me at the last minute, but didn't beat the maximum bid I had set.

from Transformers #216

So, after a huge delay, I was finally able to finish off Marvel UK's original Transformers comics. These all come from the era when the strip had moved into shorter, black-and-white strips, but I was able to supplement a bit with some recent collections from IDW that took a couple of these strips and colorize them. This post covers the first half of that black-and-white run, though it jumps around a bit and overlaps with my previous post on it (see #28 in the long list at the bottom of this post).

Race with the Devil, from Transformers #215-18 (29 Apr.–20 May 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Fallen Star (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman, art by Andy Wildman, letters by Glib and Hel

This story is okay. A group of Autobots called the Triggerbots is assigned to shadow some Decepticon mercenaries, Darwking and Dreadwind; it turns out that the mercenaries are trying to recover Starscream's corpse, since it contains the Underbase, the collected knowledge of the Transformer race. (This is all due to the Underbase saga, from the US book.) Starscream kind of becomes a zombie and the Triggerbots stop him and save some humans. I guess if I ever could remember who the Triggerbots were, I might have cared about this more.

from Transformers #223

Aspects of Evil!, from Transformers #223-27 (24 June–22 July 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Aspects of Evil! (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman; pencils by Jeff Anderson, Art Wetherell, Andy Wildman, Lee Sullivan, and Simon Coleby; inks by Jeff Anderson, Simon Coleby, Andy Wildman, Lee Sullivan, and Cam Smith; letters by Helen Stone and Glib

We're back in the future timeline of Transformers, but in a different way. This five-part story is a set of five vignettes, framed by a dying Rodimus Prime in the year 2356 telling stories of various evils he has encountered to a student eager to learn of Unicron, but on the way, Rodimus tells him of Scorponok in 1991, Galvatron in 2009, Shockwave in 2004, and Megatron in 1990. Thus, we get glimpses all up an down the future timeline (which itself has been rewritten, thanks to the Time Wars) with tales set both before and after the 1986 film (set in 2006).

I found this fairly effective. Up until this point, the short black-and-white stories had clearly been scripted for the original longer format and then had their installments cut in half. Here, writer Simon Furman is figuring out the format that drive the book from here on out, telling small but sharp stories. I liked how Scorponock manipulated Rodimus's morality to his advantage during a Decepticon civil war; I liked the brutality of Megatron dealing with a traitor. The only one that didn't work was the last one... you can't cram Unicron into a five-page tale and convince me that he is the ultimate evil!

from Transformers #235

Deathbringer, from Transformers #235-36 (16-23 Sept. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Best of the Rarities #1 (IDW, Aug. 2022)

script by Simon Furman, art by Geoff Senior and Staz, letters by Glib, colors by John-Paul Bove

Another okay story, one that doesn't use the format as well as Aspects of Evil! Basically, the Autobots encounter a mechanoid animated by a fragment of the Matrix (which was lost in space back when Optimus died), and Optimus angsts about it. I never care much for angsty Optimus, and this story is no exception.

from Transformers #238

"Way of the Warrior" / "Survival Run" / "A Savage Place!", from Transformers #237-39 (30 Sept.–15 Oct. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Way of the Warrior (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman; art by Simon Coleby, Lee Sullivan, and Geoff Senior; letters by Glib and Helen Stone

This follows up on the Survivors, the group of Autobots, along with the Decepticons Catilla and Carnivac, who struck out on their own when cut off from Autobot High Command. The Mayhem Attack Squad is trying to hunt down and punish the two Deception traitors; the story mostly focuses on Carnivac, who refuses to recognize Autobot authority but also begrudgingly finds himself doing the right thing and in a desperate stand for his own survival. Decepticon-turned-"good" is one of my favorite Transformers tropes, and this is a good example of it. The middle installment illustrated by Lee Sullivan, with Carnivac crawling through the desert, is particularly effective.

from Transformers #240

"Out to Lunch!", from Transformers #240 (21 Oct. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Aspects of Evil! (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman, art by Andy Wildman, letters by Annie Halfacree

This is a good example of the vignette-focused approach of this era of the UK strip. Back in Race with the Devil, Dreadwind and Darkwing were working for Megatron, but he had (kind of) died, so this follows up on what they get up to next now that Thunderwing is in charge of the Decepticons. Here, they're hanging out in a bar on Cybertron, but it's attacked by Mecannibals... only they're too drunk and self-pitying to notice! So the story cuts between them and the desperate attempts of an Autobot agent to stop the Mecannibals from eating everyone. Fun stuff, exactly what you should do in a five-page Transformers comic, I reckon.

"Rage! / "Assault on the Ark!", from Transformers #241-42 (28 Oct.–4 Nov. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Perchance to Dream (Titan, 2006)

script by Simon Furman, art by Andy Wildman, letters by Stuart Bartlett

These two tales jump back a bit to explain more of how Thunderwing ascended to power, following up on The Big Shutdown! They're fine but I kind of didn't really care.

"Mind Games", from Transformers #243 (11 Nov. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Fallen Star (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman, art by Staz, letters by Annie Halfacree

It's hard to talk about this story without getting into the weeds on continuity. Basically, when Simon Furman took over the US book, he decided he wanted to recurrect Megatron. But Megatron had already been resurrected in the UK book. He didn't want to alienate US readers by suddenly revealing Megatron had already been resurrected, so he wrote a story for the UK strip explaining that what everyone had thought was a resurrected Megatron was actually a clone of Megatron created by Straxus. (Chronologically, this goes before most of what I've reviewed above; see the note at the end of this post.) Anyway, not much happens here; it's mostly to set up the next story.

from Transformers #244

"Two Megatrons!", from Transformers #244 (18 Nov. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Best of the Rarities #1 (IDW, Aug. 2022)

script by Simon Furman, art by Geoff Senior; letters by Glib, colored by John-Paul Bove

The "real" Megatron and the clone Megatron battle it out. Transformers fans have written whole dissertations on how this causes more problems than it solves, continuity-wise, but if you ignore all that, this is a great story with a perfect climax. Megatron is dead, love live Megatron!

"Underworld!" / "Demons!" / "Dawn of Darkness", from Transformers #245-47 (25 Nov.–9 Dec. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Aspects of Evil! (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman; art by Jeff Anderson and Geoff Senior; letters by Helen Stone, Annie Halfacree, and Glib

To be honest, I completely forgot about this story until I went to write it up right now. I guess some Transformers battle robot zombies in sewers? Not really my thing.

from Transformers #248

"Fallen Star!", from Transformers #248 (16 Dec. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Fallen Star (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman, art by Andy Wildman, letters by Helen Stone

Another vignette, this one focused on Starscream who, thanks to events in the US book, has been brought back to life... but is feeling like he's lost his mojo in the process. But then he realizes that maybe after all, he's still got it. Told in the first person, this is a fun story of Starscream at his best. (Well, worst.) Nicely done.

from Transformers #249

"Whose Lifeforce Is It Anway?" / "The Greatest Gift of All!", from Transformers #249-50 (23-30 Dec. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Way of the Warrior (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman, art by Staz, letters by Stuart Bartlett and Helen Stone

Two linked stories, both pretty okay. Not as forgettable as some of these, but not the best either. In the first, we see an Autobot walrus robot named Longtooth. Long enough, Optimus Prime bequeathed a fragment of the Matrix to him to use to save a dying comrade... but the cowardly Longtooth kept it for himself. Guilt has since made him suicidal in battle, but all his fellow Autobots think he's just very brave. This I think is a good set-up for a story, but really all that happens is he just suddenly decides to send the Matrix fragment (anonymously) back to Earth so Optimus can make use of it. Not much of a story. In the second one, Optimus thinks about using the fragment to bring back some dead Autobots, but ends up using it to revitalize a part of Earth damaged ecologically by the Transformers' war. It's fine, you know. More Optimus angst.

from Transformers Annual 1990

"The Quest!" / "Destiny of the Dinobots!" / "Trigger-Happy!" / "Dreadwing Down!" / "The Chain Gang!", from The Transformers Annual [1990]

stories by Steve Alan (with Steve White), Ian Rimmer, Simon Furman, and Dan Abnett; art by Andy Wildman, Art Wetherell, Stephen Baskerville, and Dan Reed; colour by Steve White and Euan Peters; letters by Glib; dinosaur consultation by Steve White

The 1990 Transformers Annual (by which I mean the one published in 1989) contains, as they usually do, a mix of comic and prose stories. The UK produced two more after this, but this was the last one with a substantive amount of original content. "The Quest!" is a dull text story designed to recap Transformers history, but most of what's left is decent stuff. "Destiny of the Dinobots!" is a tragic glimpse of the future of the Dinobots (seemingly set after the "Earthforce" run I'll discuss in my next Transformers post); "Dreadwing Down!" and "The Chain Gang!" are two decent action-focused tales. I also enjoyed "Trigger-Happy!", a two-part text story about Backstreet, an Autobot who screws up so much he goes on the run rather than be punished by Optimus... but thankfully it's all a big misunderstanding.

from Transformers #254

"The Void!" / "Edge of Impact" / "Shadow of Evil", from Transformers #251-53 (6-20 Jan. 1990), reprinted in Transformers: Aspects of Evil! (Titan, 2005)

script by Simon Furman; art by Staz and Cam S; letters by Glib and Annie Halfacree

These are the first three installments of the last-ever future timeline story, detailing what Rodimus, Arcee, and Kup do after their defeat by Galvatron back in Aspects of Evil! It's all very moody, as some kind of enemy is stalking the Autobots on their escape vessel... but to be honest, I don't particularly care for how downbeat the future stories have become. The future was never cheery per se, but since the Autobots defeated Unicron, it feels like it's just fallback after fallback, and Rodimus Prime deserves better.

"White Fire", from Transformers #254 (27 Jan. 1990), reprinted in Transformers: Best of Hot Road #1 (IDW, May 2022)

script by Simon Furman, art by Cam Smith, letters by Stuart Bartlett, colors by John-Paul Bove

And finally the future timeline comes to an end here, in a story where Rodimus almost defeats Unicron... but Kup screws things up so that the Matrix will be eternally corrupted. Good job, heroes! I don't like the direction the future stories were going in, so I am glad it all got cut off here, to be honest.

A Quick Note on Chronology

from Transformers #241

Suffice it to say that this era of the strip is very confusing chronologically, with the UK stories jumping around a lot relative to the US stories and even themselves. I'll make a post later with more details, but here's how the above stories go chronologically, by my reckoning anyway. I've included US stories and UK stories not covered in this post for context; stories actually discussed here are in bold. I've omitted the future timeline stories from this list.

US #53: "Recipe for Disaster!"
UK #215-18: Race with the Devil
UK #219-22, 229, 232-33: Survivors! / "The Hunting Party!" / A Small War!
UK #243-44: "Mind Games" / "Two Megatrons!"
UK #230-31: The Big Shutdown!
UK #241-42: "Rage!" / "Assault on the Ark!"
US #54: "King Con!"
UK #235-36: Deathbringer!
US #55: "The Interplanetary Wrestling Championship!"
UK #228: "[Double] Deal of the Century!"
UK #237-39: "Way of the Warrior" / "Survival Run" / "A Savage Place!"
US #56-59: "Back from the Dead" / "The Resurrection Gambit!" / "All the Familiar Faces!" / "Skin Deep"
UK #240, 245-48: "Out to Lunch!" / "Underworld!" / "Demons!" / "Dawn of Darkness" / "Fallen Star!"
US #60-61: "Yesterday's Heroes!" / "The Primal Scream"
UK #249-50: "Whose Lifeforce Is It Anyway?" / "The Greatest Gift of All"
Annual 1990: "The Chain Gang!"
US #62-66: Matrix Quest

This post is the forty-eighth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers issues #255–89 of Transformers UK. Previous installments are listed below:

01 May 2023

Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 2 (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 43)

Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 2: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Richard Alan, Alan Barnes, Paul Cornell, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, Robin Smith, and Lee Sullivan

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 1993-2002
Acquired and read: December 2022

I got twelve pages of new-to-me content in the previous Daleks collection... here just eight, and all the reprints here already had extras. Good value for money!?

If this had come out in time, I would have read its one new strip between Ground Zero and End Game. That's about when it was released, and a random Peter Cushing story feels of a piece with the "past Doctor" strips that ended with Ground Zero.

Daleks versus the Martians, from Doctor Who Magazine Spring Special 1996
written by Alan Barnes, art by Lee Sullivan, letters by Elitta Fell

Fun fact: I have only seen the first Peter Cushing film as a Rifftrax installment, and I have never seen the second at all. This is a prequel to the second, I guess, setting up the Dalek invasion of Earth. Lee Sullivan draws good Daleks, of course, but otherwise there was nothing for me to be found here.

Stray Observations:

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

Emperor of the Daleks! and ...Up Above the Gods (in Emperor of the Daleks)
Bringer of Darkness (in Land of the Blind)
Fire and Brimstone (in End Game)
Children of the Revolution (in Oblivion)

Early reports were that this volume would include Return of the Elders (a follow-up to the old Dalek strips from TV Century 21, reprinted as a standalone DWM special in 2020), which was published as a back-up in DWM #249-54. This did not come to pass. Alas, as it would have brought this volume's newly reprinted content up to a whole fourteen pages!

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

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:

16 November 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Doctor Who Magazine #303

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

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

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

from Doctor Who Magazine #304

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

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

from Doctor Who Magazine #309

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

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

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

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

from Doctor Who Magazine #313

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

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

from Doctor Who Magazine #326

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

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

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

from Doctor Who Magazine #311