The Uncollected Internet Doctor Who Short Trips, 2004–21

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about all the short Doctor Who stories with Christmas themes that had never received some kind of hard-copy publication. In the process of researching it, I had to also figure out all the Internet-published short Doctor Who stories that were not Christmas-themed. Just as I read all the Christmas-themed ones as a sort of "book" in 2022, for Christmas 2025, I read all the other ones. Once again, here is a handy guide to all of them, along with my thoughts. (Note there were a bunch of short stories published on the official site during lockdown in 2020, but those were all subsequently collected.)

Adventure Calendar

As covered in my previous post, the official Doctor Who web site used to run an annual "adventure calendar" that often included short stories. Some were Christmas-themed, but some were not. Here are the ones that were not:

• "Number 1, Gallows Gate Road" by Rupert Laight (4 & 11 Dec. 2008). The tenth Doctor lands at a boarding house in 1940 where everyone—including himself—is curiously lacking in ambition. Published in two parts, I found the first pretty strong and atmospheric. Like a lot of Doctor Who stories, the second part, where you have to give explanations and solutions, is less engaging, but still I enjoyed it.
• "Houdini and the Space Cuckoos" Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four by Joseph Lidster (15-16, 19, & 25 Dec. 2012). In this story, the eleventh Doctor must team up with Harry Houdini to stop some aliens. I usually get on with Joseph Lidster's work very well, but this is more action-focused and less character-focused than plays to his strengths, I think. I did think he did a good job of capturing the voice of the eleventh Doctor.
• "Doctor Who and the Horror of Coal Hill" by Gavin Collinson (21 Dec. 2017). This is a bit longer than some of the other ones, and I found it surprisingly engaging. The main story is about the first Doctor visiting Coal Hill School during the time Susan is a student there, and helping a teacher fight off an alien menace; the story periodically jumps ahead and shows later Doctors coming back to the school later on to remember the events of the story. It's a neat story that parallels the Doctor's status as an outside with the perils of immigration. I thought Collinson's Christmas stories were a bit slight, but this one is strong.

Other Stories from the Official Site

• "The Feast of the Stone" by Cavan Scott & Mark Wright (3 Apr. 2004). This is the only story in this post to predate the 2005 revival, back when the official Doctor Who site was a subsection of "BBC Cult." (It is amazing to me that twenty years on, it's still there, though!) This is the only other story to ever feature the Doctor and his companions from the webcast Scream of the Shalka; it was part of a BBC Cult vampire-themed initiative. It's decent enough, but I very much enjoyed the glimpses of this unique Doctor with his unique companions, particularly the robotic shell of the Master. Scott & Wright to a good job capturing the voices of both Richard E. Grant's Doctor and Derek Jacobi's pseudo-Master.
• "'42' Prologue" by Joseph Lidster (12 May 2007). You may remember the 2007 episode "42," about the tenth Doctor and Martha, told in real time aboard a dying spaceship. This story chronicles the four minutes before they showed up, from the perspective of one of the characters on the ship. It doesn't particularly work on its own (it would be interesting to read it and then immediately start the episode, I think), but it's Joseph Lidster, so it has a strong sense of voice and character.
• "The Lonely Computer" by Rupert Laight (24 May 2008). The David Tennant years were really the peak of content on the official site; this story is based on a passing reference to the Doctor having met a lonely computer in Belgium in "The Unicorn and the Wasp." It's a little underdeveloped but Laight does well by both the tenth Doctor and Donna.
• "Blue Moon" by Oli Smith (July 2009). For the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo missions, the BBC site released this story about the Doctor discovering secret alien intervention in the moon landing—a premise the show would use itself just a couple years later. I thought this one was just okay, not much to say about it.
• "The War of Art" by Paul Cornell (Aug. 2010). I forget what the occasion for this one was, but I feel like it did have one, like it was a tie-in to a game or something. Paul Cornell is one of my favorite writers (not just Doctor Who writers, but writers full top) and he can do good, beautiful character work—but as this story shows, he can also be quite funny. Aliens invade a futuristic gallery, and Cornell uses this as the opportunity for a number of art jokes; I laughed out loud repeatedly.
• "The Night after Hallowe'en" by Mark B. Oliver (29 Oct.–5 Nov. 2010). This is the first of several stories by Mark B. Oliver about a family of kids the eleventh Doctor keeps meeting; they also appeared in a couple Christmas stories. I find the kids pretty generic, as is the plot here. I don't feel like they warranted repeat appearances.
• "What the TARDIS Thought of 'Time Lord Victorious'" by James Goss (15 Nov. 2020). This is one of two online prose tie-ins to the "Time Lord Victorious" event; it is told from the perspective of the TARDIS, picking up from the end of "The Waters of Mars," establishing how the tenth Doctor gets from there to the events of the crossover. It's fine. Goss always writes with a strong sense of voice, but the basic premise of the crossover was a bit silly.

Stories from Other Sources

• "My Dad, The Doctor" by Jamie Mathieson (First News, 29 Oct. 2015). Mathieson, writer of several Peter Capaldi tv stories, writes this prose story about him, one where the Doctor uses his sonic sunglasses to take over the mind of a kid's dad in the middle of a crisis. Well written but I found the final twist didn't make a ton of sense. It was written for a kids newspaper, but Mathieson republished it on his own blog.
• "The Dawn of the Kotturuh" by James Goss (official newsletter, 25 Sept. 2020). This is another tie-in to Time Lord Victorious, one explaining how the alien Kotturuh brought death to the universe during the Dark Times. It was originally published in the official Doctor Who e-mail newsletter. Frankly, even by the standards of Doctor Who, I don't think the idea of a universe with living things without death makes any sense, and this story didn't make it work any better.
• "The Voice of Many Angels" by Gavin Collinson (Maze Theory’s Into the Unknown web site, 18 Mar. 2021). My understanding is that the videogame Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins had a tie-in website called Into the Unknown, purporting to be a conspiracy theorist blog focused on the Weeping Angels. This was the final post on the site, a short story from the perspective of the guy who ran the site. The site and the story are gone now, but author Gavin Collinson was kind enough to share a copy of it with me via e-mail. I really enjoyed it; creepy and suggestive, and it expanded on Weeping Angels lore in interesting ways that I liked. Amazing to think there are new angles on them, but I loved the idea of a support group!

Since the time span covered in this post, there have been a least a couple more, tie-ins to another crossover event ("Doom's Day") but I haven't read those yet. These thirteen stories run over 250 pages if formatted like an official BBC Books anthology, so it makes for a nice set of readings. I wonder if any official publisher will ever be motivated to collect any of this work?

Doctor Who: How the Doctor Changed My Life by Simon Guerrier (ed.)

When Big Finish's license to produce prose Short Trips anthologies ended, they did a big sale to get rid of their remaining stock before they would be unable to sell it. I snapped up the ones that sounded interesting to me but had never gotten around to; over fifteen years later, I've finally read the last of that lot.

I went into How the Doctor Changed My Life feeling a bit nervous; over the past couple years, I've read three Short Trips anthologies and, to be honest, found my enjoyment of each fairly limited. On top of that, I knew the book was the result of a fan writing contest; Big Finish had originally reserved one spot in Short Trips: Defining Patterns for a previously unpublished writer, but had gotten so many good entries that they'd published twenty-five runners-up in their own volume. But if the three volumes of Short Trips by professional writers I'd read had been mediocre, what did I have to anticipate from a volume by people who'd never been professionally published?

Well, to my delight, the book not only defied my low expectations, but it turned out to be one of the very best Short Trips volumes I can remember reading. Surely it at least partially benefits from the fact there are so many stories here: with twenty-five stories in 184 pages, that means they average six-to-seven pages in length. So the good ones are punchy, and the bad ones are mercifully short! (Not that, however, there were honestly very many bad ones.) Additionally, the book very much benefits from the theme, which you can see right in the title: the stories had to be about the Doctor changing someone's life. This encourages perspectives from characters who are not the Doctor and his companions, and telling stories about key significant moments in those characters' lives, which plays to the strengths of the medium of the short story—no one here makes the mistake a lot of first-time Doctor Who short story writers do, and tries to cram a four-part 1970s-style serial into 6½ pages.

Doctor Who: Short Trips #26: How The Doctor Changed My Life
edited by Simon Guerrier

Published: 2008
Acquired: May 2009
Read: October 2025

I enjoyed a lot of these, as I said, so here I'll just try to gloss some of the ones I particularly liked and why.

Many of the stories focus on ordinary people who encounter the Doctor and find some kind of courage within in themselves, a trope that I think probably owes something to the original Russell T Davies television era (which this book came out during), but is here imported back into "classic" Doctor Who (at the time this was published, Big Finish's license only went up to the 1996 tv movie). It's a trope that works well, especially when it leans into one of my favorite things about the Doctor Who format, the juxtaposition of the fantastic with the mundane. Ones along these lines I particularly liked included "Change Management" by Simon Moore:

Fair enough, it would be bad for the economy if the Flux Beast was allowed to devour the tourist worlds, but there must be a better way of containing the Beast than trapping it in space and feeding it lots of poor people. Pip had been going to complain, but when the guy sitting next to him got vaporised while raising similar concerns, he decided to keep his head down. He would definitely do something about it if he ever got into management.

Along these lines, I also really liked "The Shopping Trolleys of Doom" by Caleb Woodbridge, where the Doctor intervenes when shopping carts begin attacking people; "The Man on the Phone" by Mark Smith, told from the perspective of someone working in a call center selling mediocre kitchens who accidentally dials the TARDIS; and "£436" by Nick May, about a cab driver who drives the Doctor and Peri around as they fight off an alien invasion.

(In one story, this even kind of happens without the Doctor turning up; in John Callaghan's "The Andrew Invasion," a guy named Andrew gets mistaken for the Doctor, and hilarity ensues. I think John Dorney's The Diary of River Song story "My Dinner with Andrew," about a guy who looks exactly like the fifth Doctor and is played by Peter Davison, is a stealth sequel to this story, but maybe I am crazy because no one else seems to have noticed this if so.)

Even though this is probably the book's most common approach, other stories go in different directions. I liked "Second Chances" by Bernard O'Toole a lot, which follows a maniacal mad scientist after he is defeated by the Doctor and Charley. How does an adult man move back in with his parents and rebuild his life after all his dreams of conquest have been crushed? Or there's Michael Montoure's "Relativity," where a kid loses his twin brother in a weird time accident thanks to the Doctor and Ace, but eventually has an even weirder chance to get him back. I also liked Violet Addison's "Those Left Behind," about one of Susan's classmates at Coal Hill School meeting the fourth Doctor. (One oddity of the book, if I'm not mistaken, is that among its twenty-five stories, it has one from every "classic" Doctor... except the first!) There's also "Evitability" by Andrew K Purvis, where the Doctor finds someone who's going to do a terrible thing as an adult and shows them the future as a child to help put them on a better path. Michael Rees's "Swamp of Horrors (1957) – Viewing Notes" is inventively told in the form of a blog post about a B-horror movie that costars the Doctor and Mel!

One of my very favorites was "The Monster in the Wardrobe" by James C McFetridge, about a man who dies every day defending his daughter from a monster in the wardrobe, but always comes back to life the next, when he always has a new job that he's not very good at but enjoys a lot, like ice cream taster or bikini inspector.

It feels a bit churlish to complain about ones you don't like, especially when they come from first-time writers, but I did find a few unsatisfying and/or undercooked: "Curiosity" by Mike Amberry and "The Last Thing You'll Ever See" by Richard Goff among them. The only outright bad one, though, was "Time Shear" by Steven Alexander, where two alien kids see their mother brutally gunned down in front of them, and the story and the character just shrug this off as a minor inconvenience in its rush to get to a happy ending.

If there's an overall fault to the volume, it's that, despite what Paul Cornell hopes for in his foreword, few of these writers ever went on to make many more contributions to Doctor Who; there were just two Short Trips volumes after this, and some contributed to one of those, and some others I think wrote for the Bernice Summerfield anthologies. Other than that, though, the only writer to go onto publishing more Doctor Who stories is LM Myles, who here writes the story "Child's Play," and has since written a number of Big Finish audio dramas. But that's not a slight on this book, it's a slight on the stale community of Doctor Who tie-in writers, whose bright young things of the 1990s and early 2000s have never moved on thirty years later.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Prisoner of the Daleks

Young Avengers Presents by Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction, Paco Medina, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis, et al.

After Civil War, the Young Avengers next appeared in a miniseries called Young Avengers Presents. This is collected in the Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung omnibus, but I picked it up on its own in a used bookstore way back when, so I read that copy instead. Much easier to hold a trade paperback than a giant hardcover!

Young Avengers Presents

Collection published: 2008
Contents originally published: 2008
Acquired: December 2012
Read: July 2025

Writers: Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction

Artists: Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks & Jaime Mendoza, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis & Mark Farmer

Colorists: Nathan Fairbairn, Jay David Ramos, Christina Strain, Brian Reber, Paul Mounts

Letterer: Cory Petit

The miniseries consists of six issues, each focused on a single member of the Young Avengers (except for #3, which teams up Wiccan and Speed) in the wake of Civil War. I'm not as plugged into big Marvel events the way I am into DC ones, so I had to work out some stuff here from context that must have happened in titles not focused on the Young Avengers: mostly they are working on the side of the Avengers who have gone underground because they are illegal, except for Cassie "Stature" Lang, who is working for the Initiative, which I think is the legit, government-registered superhero team? Since (or in?) Civil War, Captain America is dead, the Young Avengers met Bucky, and Hawkeye and Captain Marvel came back to life. Mostly this fine, though; I was able to follow along, except it would have been nice to know what made Cassie part from her comrades and pick the Initiative instead. 

Each story has a different creative team, but there are no duds here. The writing in each story is great, and in most cases the art is too. I'll take it story by story; the first is Ed Brubaker, Paco Medina, and Juan Vlasco's tale of Patriot. This is one of the highlights of a strong volume; Eli "Patriot" Bradley is questioning his own name. How can he be a "patriot" for a country that did what it did to his grandfather and so many others, that refuses to see patriotism unless it's jingoism? With Hawkeye's help, he seeks out—in the absence of Captain America—his erstwhile sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Bucky can't give him any answers, which I think makes the story all the stronger: two people trying to find the America they aspire to. Brubaker is generally a strong writer but not one I'd associate with teen heroes, to be honest, so it's pleasing to see him do such a good job here, and the art by Medina and Vlasco matches him well, detailed and realistic, with good command of faces, which is needed in a dialogue-heavy story. A strong opening to the volume.

Is that really an appropriate outfit for a high school teacher? (It definitely is very mid-2000s, though.)
from Young Avengers Presents #1 (script by Ed Brubaker, art by Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco)

The second story, about Hulking, is equally strong. In the original Young Avengers story, Hulkling discovered that his mother wasn't really his mother, but that he was the son of the Kree warrior Captain Marvel and a Skrull princess; his supposed mother was killed. At the time, his parentage was academic because Captain Marvel was dead—but this is comics, and Brian Reed and Harvey Tolibao's story begins with him seeking out his recently resurrected father. I found this really sharp and astute, a boy and a man trying to reach out and forge a connection where none exists. Sure, they are father and son, but they share only DNA, not any kind of emotional bond. It's quite sad, and really well done. I think of the five OG Young Avengers, Hulkling and Wiccan were the two who felt the least fully formed to me, and this does a good job of remedying that when it comes to Hulkling.

Not too surprising he has father issues, I guess.
from Young Avengers Presents #2 (script by Brian Reed, art by Harvey Tolibao)

We then move onto a story of Wiccan and his twin-from-another-mother, Speed; they theorize that they are the lost souls of the children of the Scarlet Witch, and in this story they set out together to find her. Once again, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Alina Urusov really nail it. It's good to see some actual interaction between the twins, there are great jokes, and I appreciated getting some depth on the often glib Speed. Urusov's art is strong, and I really liked the way the two interacted with a former Avengers villain.

Merriam Webster says transmogrify is a word, going all the way back to Aphra Behn... but its origins are a mystery!
from Young Avengers Presents #3 (script by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, art by Alina Urusov)

Next comes Paul Cornell, Mark Brooks, and Jaime Mendoza's story of Vision, who has the consciousness of the former Iron Lad (and future Kang the Conqueror) loaded into him, though it's almost equally a story of Stature, with whom Iron Lad shared a kiss before he returned to his doomed place in the timestream. Cornell of course does a great job by both characters; I have been a little skeptical of including the kind-of adult Vision as one of the Young Avengers, but Cornell sold me on him for the first time here. Particularly strong is the depiction of Cassie, though; it seems more like her story than his to be honest! It is let down a bit by the art, which struggles to depict Cassie's size-changing in general, and a moment where she size changes at the same time the Vision phases in particular.

I can't complain about the "reused identical artwork" trick because I didn't even notice it until I made this scan!
from Young Avengers Presents #4 (script by Paul Cornell, art by Mark Brooks & Jaime Mendoza)

The actual Stature-focused story is also a good one. Kevin Grevioux centers the story around her family: Cassie is struggling with her mother and stepfather much as they are struggling with her, and her emotional state causes her to progressively shrink further and further. I liked the focus on the Young Avengers as friends here; the story isn't just about her, but also Kate, Billy, and especially Eli trying to help her, and it's well done. Cassie is probably my favorite Young Avenger. I did find Mitch Breitweiser's art a bit stiff, not always up to the emotional moments.

Lots of fun stuff with scale in this one: Stature and Patriot are on the microscope slide.
from Young Avengers Presents #5 (script by Kevin Grevioux, art by Mitch Breitweiser)

Finally, we end on a story about Hawkeye finally meeting Hawkeye, that is to say, Kate Bishop finally meeting Clint Barton. It's written by Matt Fraction; I think this is the first time he wrote either character, and he would go on to write an acclaimed run featuring Clint with Kate as a co-star. It's a bit predictable but fun enough; Kate is my second-favorite Young Avenger, and he captures her well. And, of course, you can't go wrong with Alan Davis and Mark Farmer on art.

Hm, but do I buy that Kate actually needs Speed to persuade her to "do some crime"?
from Young Avengers Presents #6 (script by Matt Fraction, art by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer)

Overall, it's a strong volume; I had expected to like maybe half of the stories, not all of them! Handing characters largely the work of one creative team off to others can be a fraught undertaking, but every writer here demonstrated a great grasp of their Young Avengers, and in all but a couple cases they were well-matched by the art. In the absence of ongoing adventures for the Young Avengers, I'm glad Marvel saw fit to release this.

This is the second in a series of posts about the Young Avengers, Loki, and Hawkeye. The next installment covers part 3 of Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung, part 1 (2005-06) 

Hugos 2024: The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo

The Witches of World War II

Published: 2023
Acquired and read: April 2024

Writer: Paul Cornell

Art: Valeria Burzo

Color Artist: Jordie Bellaire

Letterer: Simon Bowland

This Hugo Award finalist takes several real historical witches or magicians who were alive during World War II and posits what they might have done if they were to use their magic to take down Adolf Hitler; it's written by my longtime favorite Paul Cornell and illustrated by a new-to-me artist, Valeria Burzo. (It's in six chapters, so I had thought it was a collection of six issues, but it seems to be an original graphic novel.)

Ever since I read Captain Britain and MI13, I have known that Cornell is a good comics writer, and this is among his better work. The concept is super fun, and the historical notes at the back bring a lot of enjoyment to the story, as you work out what really happened and what he embellished. All the protagonists pop off the page, and the story has a number of good twists and turns and audacious moments and big payoffs. I particularly liked what Cornell did with Aleister Crowley's "wickedest man in the world" shtick (though for some reason he consistently misquotes it), Doreen Valiente's struggle to believe in her own magic, and Rollo Ahmed's perpetual outsider status. This is a neat group of characters in reality, and it's neat to see them come together in fiction in a way they did not in reality.

It's an easy read but an interesting one too, and I liked Burzo's artwork a lot; combined with Jordie Bellaire's colors, it's simple but effective in communicating both character and action.

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:

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

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:

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

The Uncollected Doctor Who Christmas Short Trips

Over the past decade, I've had a tradition of reading a Doctor Who Christmas book every Christmas. (Scroll down on this page to see the complete list.) Last year, I reached the endpoint of that tradition when I read the last one I hadn't read, Dave Rudden's The Wintertime Paradox.

Except that there are a number of Doctor Who Christmas short stories only available on the Internet or in various periodicals that have never been collected or reprinted. Once I finished The Wintertime Paradox, I spent some time tracking them all down, and this Christmas I read that "book." Here is a handy guide to all of them, along with my thoughts. (This is an expanded version of a GallifreyBase post; thanks to the commenters there for cluing me into an extra one.)

Doctor Who Magazine

Somewhat surprisingly, I think DWM have only ever done just one prose Christmas story.

• 
  Prelude to The Left-Handed Humminbird by Kate Orman (Doctor Who Magazine, no. 207, 22 Dec. 1993). Most of Virgin's The New Doctor Who Adventures had exclusive preludes published in DWM; this one happens to be set on Christmas. It's very much scene-setting for the novel, and the Christmas elements are incidental. But, you know, it's by Kate Orman, so it's well-written and horrific. Someday I'll read the book. Like all the preludes, it's been copied out on the unofficial Doctor Who Reference Guide, so it is easily accessed.

Newspaper Stories

Two times Paul Cornell published a Doctor Who short story around Christmas time. This sort of became a trilogy; see below under Unofficial but Interesting.

• "Deep and Dreamless Sleep" by Paul Cornell (Sunday Times, 24 Dec. 2006). The tenth Doctor encounters a five-year-old boy who hijacks the TARDIS in search of a perfect Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's pretty good. The ending in particular is great. It has some bits that made me think he had to condense it to fit the newspaper's space, but overall you can't go wrong with Paul Cornell doing Doctor Who at Christmas. (His anthology Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury is a thing of beauty.) [Link takes you to an archived copy of part 1 of 6. To get all six part, I think I signed up for a Times account and cancelled before the free trial ended.]
  

• "The Hopes and Fears of All the Years" by Paul Cornell (Daily Telegraph, 22 Dec. 2007). Another story of the tenth Doctor at Christmas; this one is about him popping in to see a single family at multiple Christmases across the course of a boy's life. I really liked this one: sentimental without being mawkish, and I'm always a sucker for a bildungsroman, even in miniature.
  

Adventure Calendar

From 2006 to 2017, the BBC's official Doctor Who web site always promoted the upcoming Christmas special with the "Adventure Calendar," where every day from December 1st to Christmas Day, you could go to the official site and receive some kind of treat: desktop wallpapers, Flash games, interviews, commentary tracks, artwork, and fiction. Not all of this fiction was seasonally themed, but I've included here a list of all the stories that have Christmas or winter links. (Someday I'll do another post looking at the others.)

• "The Frozen" by Rupert Laight (2 Dec. 2007). The tenth Doctor takes a graduate student from the future back to the February 1814 frost fair, the last time the River Thames froze over. (Luckily he doesn't bump into the first Doctor or the twelfth; see Frostfire and "Thin Ice.") A lot of these Adventure Calendar stories are, to be honest, pretty mediocre. No characterization to speak of, just dialogue and actions, like a television script, with often awkward prose.
  
• "The Advent of Fear" Part One and Part Two by Mark B. Oliver (6 & 10 Dec. 2009). The tenth Doctor encounters a girl with an advent calendar that keeps sending her through time. To be honest, I was into this one at first, but in the end I found it rather confusing and disjointed. This is the first one to have a juvenile companion stand-in, which is true of most of these.
  
• "The Doctor on My Shoulder" Part One and Part Two by Daniel Roth (17 & 23 Dec. 2009). The Doctor gets shrunk down and ends up wrapped in someone's present. To be honest, that's a lot more interesting sounding than the story actually is. Again, a pedestrian runaround without a prose style, and I didn't find the alien plan very believable even by Doctor Who standards.
• 
  "Snowfall" by Gavin Collinson and Mark B. Oliver (9-10, 17, 20, & 23-24 Dec. 2010). This is actually two short stories with a frame; they feature the eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory in the frame. It was released across several days (each of the embedded stories was divided in half), but then collected as a complete novella. In the first, Mark B. Oliver's "Cold Snap" the Doctor bumps in a couple kids he met before in a previous web exclusive story (a Halloween one, so not relevant to this project) and also meets a guy named "Big Jack." They work together to stop a heat-draining alien on Christmas. The second, "Vampire Hurricane" by Gavin Collinson, is about the Doctor and a guy named David working together to stop a toy magnate from accidentally creating a vampire army on Christmas. The frame, also by Collinson, is about Big Jack and David—estranged brothers—reconciling... on Christmas. The embedded stories are fine, if a bit shallow like all the other Adventure Calendar tales. I didn't find the estranged brother thing worked at all.
• 
  "Attack of the Snowmen" by Mark B. Oliver (20-21 & 24 Dec. 2011). The kids, Louie and Millie, from "The Night after Hallowe'en" and "Cold Snap" are back, this time facing evil killer snowmen with the eleventh Doctor, a year before Moffat did evil killer snowmen on tv. Once again, it has the same issues as all the others of these.
• "Behind You" Parts One, Two, and Three by Mark Williams (19-21 Dec. 2014). Original fiction took a few years off, but returned with this twelfth Doctor story. Again, par for the course in terms of quality, but enlivened by a couple good jokes about how Peter Capaldi's Doctor hates panto.
• "Haunted" Parts One, Two, and Three by Joseph Lidster (21 & 23-24 Dec. 2015). The Adventure Calendar continued a couple years after this, but without original fiction, alas. But! The last of these stories was undoubtedly the best of them. Of course it was—it's by one of my favorite Doctor Who writers, Joseph Lidster, who gives us a child protagonist with meaningful struggles, a sparky twelfth Doctor, and some good twists.

That was it for Doctor Who advent calendars, I guess because that was also it for Doctor Who Christmas specials. And also that was it for the BBC web site doing anything interesting, and that was also it for the producers of Doctor Who being interested in promoting the show. (Actually, we got a lot of cool web content during 2020 in Lockdown, but I don't think any of it was Christmas-related.)

BBC Studios Web Site Stories

We did, however, get two Christmas stories from the BBC Studios Doctor Who web site, in 2016 and 2020.

• "Christmas Special" by Cavan Scott (23 Dec. 2016). This ninth Doctor and Rose short story ties into Titan's then-ongoing comic series, also featuring the original companion and a recurring character from that series. (It's set between the two stories collected in Official Secrets.) The story is pretty minimal, and it's a tie-in to a series I found pretty ho-hum. If this was meant to promote the comic series to a wider audience, maybe Tara should have been given any indication of being interesting at all.
• "Canaries" by Dave Rudden (15 Oct. 2020). Okay, not released seasonally at all, but it is set on Christmas. It was a tie-in to both Time Lord Victorious and the anthology The Wintertime Paradox—and indeed, doesn't quite count as "uncollected" because it was added to Wintertime Paradox for its ebook and paperback releases, and thus I have read it already. It's a prequel to Wintertime Paradox that sets up the book's villains.

Unofficial but Interesting

Lastly, this category is made up of things that are not officially licensed (so they are technically fan fiction) but have some kind of claim to quasi-official status, usually based on who wrote them.

• "The Last Doctor" by Paul Cornell (13 Dec. 2009). Cornell posted this story on his blog. It's about what seems to be the last incarnation of the Doctor, at the very end of the universe, as the last humans experience the last Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's good—really captures that Doctor Who at Christmas vibe of hope in the face of the coldness of the universe. I really liked it, and it nicely caps off an emotional trilogy continuing from Cornell's two stories above, about the Doctor's emotional engagement with people.
  
• "Mrs Wibbsey's Festive Diary" by Paul Magrs (21-27 Dec. 2013). Across seven blog entries in 2013, Paul Magrs serialized a Christmas story about Mrs Wibbsey, who was the fourth Doctor's companion in his Nest Cottage Chronicles series of audio dramas; in 2014, he rereleased it as a single post. It's told in the form of Mrs Wibbsey's diary as she waits for the Doctor to come back one Christmas in Hexford, but gets a very different Christmas visitor instead... It's by Magrs, so it has some good jokes, and is a bit meta about storytelling in a way that worked for me, especially at Christmas. (Some day I must actually listen to my Nest Cottage Chronicles box set!) Magrs collected this in an anthology of original fiction, but edited it to be about characters and situations not copyrighted to the BBC, so it became "Mrs Frimbly's Festive Diary."
• 
  "Who the Dickens...?" by Juliet E. McKenna (Paul Cornell's blog, 14 Dec. 2019). This third Doctor and Jo adventure was intended for Paul Cornell's Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury in 2004. However, it got cut because it conflicted with an episode of the upcoming screen revival: it features the Doctor going back in time and meeting Charles Dickens for the first time! So it was cut at the last minute, and posted to Cornell's blog fifteen years later. It's a cute story that I enjoyed reading; good handle on the Doctor and Dickens.

And that's it! It runs almost three hundred pages if formatted like the BBC's own anthologies. I have to say some of the stories are better than others—I tended to prefer ones that actually were Christmas stories rather than stories with Christmas trappings—but on the whole it makes for a nice Christmas treat to read them all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Doctor Who Yearbook 1993

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

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

from Doctor Who Magazine #305

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

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

Stray Observations:

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



from Doctor Who Yearbook 1992


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

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

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File