Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel Reading Order (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 57)

From the inside, the reading order for the Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels seems pretty clear... but there are quite a lot of the things, and the release order of the collected editions is nothing like the release order of the original strips, so I imagine it can seem pretty intimidating to an outside reader. So to cap off my ongoing series of posts about the DWM comic strip (for now, anyway), I've written up a reading order for the collections.

Basically, the short answer is to do the volumes in the release order of the original strips. For example, the back-up tales go best by original publication, because characters from them eventually cross over into the main strip, so it's nice if you already know them. The past Doctor volumes best go by publication order, because they usually reflect what's going on around that time in publication order; most notably, the stories in Ground Zero lead straight into End Game.

In most cases, I would just read the strips in the order they are reproduced in the books, but in a couple cases, I've suggested a different order in my notes.

I've given issue numbers, but in a simplified form; if a single issue is being skipped, or put in a different volume, I'm not being pedantic about its positioning.

1. 
   Fourth Doctor: The Iron Legion^a (#1-38)
   
2. Back-Up Tales: The Return of the Daleks^b (#1-46) 
3. Fourth Doctor: Dragon's Claw^a (#39-60)
4. Back-Up Tales: Black Sun Rising^b (#31-64)
5. Fifth Doctor: The Tides of Time (#61-87)
   
6. Sixth Doctor: Voyager (#88-107)
   
7. Sixth Doctor: The World Shapers (#108-29)
   
8. Seventh Doctor: A Cold Day in Hell! (#130-50)
   
9. Seventh Doctor: Nemesis of the Daleks (#152-62)
   
10. 
    Seventh Doctor: The Good Soldier (#164-79)
    
11. Seventh Doctor: Evening's Empire (#180-92)
    
12. Seventh Doctor: Emperor of the Daleks (#193-211)
    
13. Multi-Doctor: The Age of Chaos^c (#305)
• "Under Pressure"
• "Metamorphosis"
• "The Last Word"
• "The Age of Chaos"
14. 
    Multi-Doctor: Land of the Blind (#212-26)
    
15. Multi-Doctor: Ground Zero (#228-43)
    
16. Eighth Doctor: End Game^d (#244-71) 
17. Eighth Doctor: The Glorious Dead^d (#273-99)
18. Eighth Doctor: Oblivion (#300-28)
    
19. Eighth Doctor: The Flood (#329-53)
    
20. Ninth Doctor: The Cruel Sea (#355-64)
    
21. Tenth Doctor: The Betrothal of Sontar (#365-80)
    
22. Tenth Doctor: The Widow's Curse (#381-99)
    
23. Tenth Doctor: The Crimson Hand (#400-20)
    
24. 
    Eleventh Doctor: The Child of Time (#421-41)
    
25. Eleventh Doctor: The Chains of Olympus (#442-50)
    
26. Eleventh Doctor: Hunters of the Burning Stone (#451-61)
27. Eleventh Doctor: The Blood of Azrael (#462-74)
    
28. Twelfth Doctor: The Eye of Torment (#475-88)
29. Twelfth Doctor: The Highgate Horror (#489-500)
    
30. Twelfth Doctor: Doorway to Hell (#501-11)
    
31. Twelfth Doctor: The Phantom Piper (#512-23)
    
32. Multi-Doctor: The Clockwise War^e (#524-30) 
33. Thirteenth Doctor: Mistress of Chaos (#531-48)
    
34. 
    Thirteenth Doctor: The White Dragon (#549-77)
    
35. Multi-Doctor: Monstrous Beauty^f (#579-83)
36. Fourteenth Doctor: Liberation of the Daleks (#584-97)
    

Notes

1. The contents of these two volumes were later collected in one as The Fourth Doctor Anthology.
   
2. 
   I suggest reading each collection of back-up tales immediately after the main strip volume its contents were (largely) published simultaneously to. In particular, this maintains chronology for the character of Ivan Asimoff, who appears in Dragon's Claw, Black Sun Rising, and Voyager.
3. Reading the volume here and in my suggested order means you start with three Virgin New Adventure–era stories (tying up that phase of the strip) and end with a "past Doctor" one (setting up the next era of the strip).
4. Note that the strips in this collection are arranged out of order, but best read in original publication order; just pay attention to the original publication details.
5. This volume is the finale to the twelfth Doctor strips, but is branded as "multi-Doctor" because it contains some unreprinted past Doctor material to get the volume up to full length. You can read that material here if you want, but if you wanted to experience it closer to original publication sequence, that would be between Land of the Blind and Ground Zero.
6. 
   This volume is the finale to the thirteenth Doctor strips, but is branded as "multi-Doctor" because it contains some unreprinted past Doctor material to get the volume up to full length. You can read that material here if you want, but if you wanted to experience it closer to original publication sequence, that would be between Land of the Blind and Ground Zero, except for Monstrous Beauty, which would best go before The White Dragon.

Jumping-On Points

Obviously you can always start at the beginning with The Iron Legion! But there are other good places to kick off. I think mostly any Doctor's first volume is a safe enough bet. In particular, though, I would suggest:

• End Game. For a modern reader, the eighth Doctor stuff may read better than the fourth and fifth Doctor material, despite its classic status. It has a more of a character focus, and is better, I think, at using continuity with light callbacks that enhance your reading pleasure, as we are used to from, say, Buffy or the 2005-22 series. If you find yourself intrigued, you can jump back and read books like The Tides of Time to discover the stories this era is drawing on.
• 
  The Betrothal of Sontar. If you are a new series person, you may find it easier to jump on board with a new series Doctor. In that case, I would suggest skipping The Cruel Sea (for now), as I don't think the strip really got to grips with the new series style until David Tennant came on as the Doctor. The Betrothal of Sontar, The Widow's Curse, and The Crimson Hand are three strong volumes showing off the diversity of the DWM strip at its best, and you can continue on from there. Eventually, the strip will slowly drop in older continuity that you can eventually loop back to and explore. Similarly, I think The Chains of Olympus, Doorway to Hell, and Mistress of Chaos are all good points to begin for their respective Doctors.

Should I Work in Other Stuff?

If you look at my own sequence below, you'll see I worked in a lot of other stuff from outside the Doctor Who universe. In general, I would say, "No," you don't need any of this stuff to enjoy the DWM strip, especially if it's your first time through it. Make things easy on yourself, and just do the Doctor Who parts. Some specific notes on stuff I added in:

• 
  The Transformers UK. I read this because the character of Death's Head begins in The Transformers and appears in DWM strips collected in A Cold Day in Hell! and The Good Soldier. Those strips will work on their own if you haven't read Transformers, because the Doctor doesn't know who Death's Head is either. It's quite a commitment to read The Transformers UK, partially because the UK TF strip incorporated the American comic, so you would "need" to work that in too!... and you would thus actually be reading more Transformers than Doctor Who, I think.
• Death's Head. Marvel has collected (most) of the original Death's Head series in a volume called Freelance Peacekeeping Agent; there's also a modern series collected as Clone Drive. If Death's Head's appearance in the DWM strip leaves you curious, sure go ahead and read this stuff... but I doubt it will, since DWM is not Death's Head at his best. Technically speaking, the first seven issues of Death's Head volume 1 do take place in the Doctor Who universe. Everything else takes place in the Marvel universe. If you are very much a completist, the one I would recommend tracking down is "Time Bomb!" from Death's Head vol. 1 #8, reprinted in The Incomplete Death's Head #9 (but not in any trades, alas), as it features key roles for the seventh Doctor and Josiah W. Dogbolter, and is written by DWM's Steve Parkhouse.
  
• 
  The Daleks. The 1965-67 Doctor-less comic strips from TV Century 21 are fun enough and collected in a convenient Panini "bookazine"; you can read them pretty much whenever, but in particular, you may benefit from doing them prior to Liberation of the Daleks, which uses some of their iconography to good effect.
• The Sleeze Brothers. Against all my expectations, I did find this kind of charming. These characters debuted in a story collected in A Cold Day in Hell! before getting their own series. Definitely nonessential but fun enough.
• 
  The Ultimate Comic Strip Collections. Panini have collected all their Dalek strips in two volumes and all their Cybermen strips in a single large volume. For the most part, these volumes contain nothing you can't get from the collections I've listed above if you include the back-ups... except that volume 2 of the Dalek collection includes a single eight-page story about the Peter Cushing Doctor from the DWM 1996 spring special, Daleks versus the Martians, collected nowhere else. It seems a shame Panini couldn't have included this alongside their other Cushing story in Monstrous Beauty; it's probably not worth chasing down, though.
  

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

4-Dimensional Vistas: The DWM Comic Strip by the Numbers (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 56)

The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, as I have chronicled extensively on this blog, has a very long history. Thus, we can compile all kinds of interesting numerical facts about it! Note that for all of these, I'm just focused on the "main" strip, not the back-ups.

Longest Runs by a Writer

Here, I'm looking at the longest runs as the writer of sequential strips. These runs have to be unbroken, either by a fill-in writer, or by the strip itself taking an issue (or more) off.

• 1. Scott Gray on #512-52 (41 issues)
• 2. Scott Gray on #442-80 (39 issues)
• 3. Steve Parkhouse on #53-84 (32 issues)
• 4. Scott Gray on #308-29 (22 issues)
• 5. Scott Gray on #333-53 / Dan McDaid on #400-20 / Jonathan Morris on #421-41 (21 issues)
• 8. Scott Gray on #284-303 (20 issues)
• 9. Steve Moore on #35-82 (18 issues)
• 10. Pat Mills & John Wagner on #1-16 and on #19-34 (16 issues)

Unsurprisingly to anyone who has been reading all this time, our man Scott Gray has five of the ten longest runs as the comics main writer! He racked up long runs during the McGann, Smith, Capaldi, and Whittaker eras. And if you read him, you'll know why; I don't think there's anyone else who has ever "got" what makes Doctor Who work as a comic better than him.

Longest Runs by an Artist

• 1. John Ridgway on #88-133 (46 issues)
• 2. Dave Gibbons on #19-57 (39 issues)
• 3. Mike Collins on #355-76 / David A Roach on #359-80 / David A Roach on #467-88 (22 issues)
• 6. Dave Gibbons on #1-16 (16 issues)
• 7. David A Roach on #451-64 (14 issues) / Lee Sullivan on #584-97 (14 issues)
• 9. Martin Geraghty on #244-55 (12 issues)
• 10. Mick Austin on #73-83 and John Ross on #524-34 (11 issues)

Somewhat surprisingly, to be honest, John Ridgway's run as an artist is longer than any of the runs by a writer! He provided the art for every Colin Baker strip and then into the Sylvester McCoy era (and also returned a few times after that). Mike Collins and David A Roach have overlapping runs because Collins was penciller when Roach was inker.

Both of these rankings just cover the strips in the collected editions; I think both Barnes and Sullivan continue on the strip after #597, so they should climb a bit.

Most Strips by a Writer

But who has actually done the most overall, regardless of number of sequential strips?  

1. Scott Gray (184 issues)
   
2. Steve Parkhouse (46 issues)
3. Alan Barnes (27 issues)
   
4. Pat Mills & John Wagner (32 issues)
5. Jonathan Morris (28 issues)
6. Dan McDaid (26 issues)
7. Dan Abnett (24 issues)
8. Jacqueline Rayner (20 issues)
   
9. Steve Moore (18 issues)
10. Gareth Roberts (17 issues)

Impressively, Scott Gray has written four times as many strips as his nearest competitor! It's hard to imagine anyone overtaking his record in the near or even distant future. 

Most Strips by an Artist

1. David A Roach (162 issues)
2. Martin Geraghty (143 issues)
3. Mike Collins (75 issues)
4. Dave Gibbons (66 issues)
5. John Ridgway (61 issues)
6. Robin Smith (55 issues)
7. Lee Sullivan (44 issues)
   
8. John Ross (31 issues)
   
9. Adrian Salmon (18 issues)
10. Colin Andrew (14 issues)

Regular inker David A Roach dominates here; he's inked many Martin Geraghty strips and many Mike Collins ones, allowing him to surpass both pencillers. John Ridgway still does well here, landing in the top five. Robin Smith, a bit of a forgotten inker to be honest, is in sixth.

Longest Gaps between Contributions

I think it was when John Tomlinson popped up as the writer of a David Tennant strip, having previously written one back during the Sylvester McCoy era, that I first got interested in this statistic. I am going to count people who came back for #500 but are otherwise not regular contributors outside of my ranking.

• X. Dave Gibbons (431 issues between Stars Fell on Stockbridge and The Stockbridge Showdown)
• X. John Ridgway (289 issues between Uninvited Guest and The Stockbridge Showdown)
• 1. Lee Sullivan (267 issues between Children of the Revolution and Liberation of the Daleks)
• 2. John Tomlinson (210 issues between Nemesis of the Daleks and The Betrothal of Sontar)
  
• 3. Alan Barnes (204 issues between The Warkeeper's Crown and Liberation of the Daleks)
  
• 4. Sean Longcroft (156 issues between A Life of Matter & Death and Mortal Beloved)
• 5. Mike Collins (152 issues between The Good Soldier and The Nightmare Game)
• 6. Adolfo Bullya (126 issues between Junk-Yard Demon and The Grief)
• 7. John Ross (104 issues between Bus Stop! and Spirits of the Jungle)
• 8. Alan Barnes (95 issues between TV Action! and The Warkeeper's Crown)
• 9. Scott Gray (89 issues between The Flood and The Chains of Olympus)
• 10. Lee Sullivan (78 issues between ...Up Above the Gods... and The Last Word) 

Tomlinson held onto that record for a long time, but the second David Tennant era finally saw him dethroned by the return of Lee Sullivan after a twenty-year absence. It's pretty amazing that the strip has been running so long some of the people who have contributed the most can also be on the list for longest gaps between contributions!

Longest Runs as Main Companion

This one I'm counting a bit differently. Instead of looking at individual strip appearances, I'm looking at how long each companion was the "main" one for the strip. So, for example, Izzy gets a point for Unnatural Born Killers in #277 despite not appearing in it because she was the main companion during that era (appearing in the strips immediately before and after it). Along those lines, I did not count one-off reappearances (e.g., Ace in Ground Zero, Rose in Monstrous Beauty) or reappearances where a former companion serves a different narrative role (e.g., Fey in The Clockwise War).

1. Izzy in #244-328 (85 issues)
2. Frobisher in #88-133 (46 issues)
3. Yaz in #531-52, 559-62, 570-83 (40 issues)
4. Clara in #462-99 (38 issues)
5. Ace in #164-92, 203-10 (37 issues)
6. Amy in #421-55 (35 issues)
7. Sharon in #19-48 (30 issues)
8. Peri in #104-29; Fey in #257-71, 318-28; and Ryan & Graham in #531-52, 559-62 (26 issues)

It was honestly surprising for me to realize how long of a run Yaz had, the longest of any tv companion.

This post is the fifty-sixth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers a reading order for the collected editions. Previous installments are listed below:

Monstrous Beauty (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 55)

Monstrous Beauty: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Dan Abnett, Colin Andrew, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, Russ Leach, Paul Peart, Jacqueline Rayner, Gareth Roberts, John Ross, and Brian Williamson

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1991-2022
Acquired and read: November 2024

Like the final Peter Capaldi volume, the final Jodie Whittaker one is a weird catch-all one that has the "Collected Multi-Doctor Comic Strips" branding, with its Doctor's last two stories combined with a miscellany of material from previous Doctors: the first, third, fourth, seventh, and ninth, plus Dr. Who. As I usually do, I read the book's stories in original publication order, not internal order.

This book is a landmark volume, though! In plugging in the two gaps of uncollected strips (one during The White Dragon, the other between The White Dragon and Liberation of the Daleks), it means that every Doctor Who Magazine strip from issue #1 to issue #597, from 1979 to 2023, has been collected! In a mere thirty-four volumes! What an achievement—but more on that in a future post.

The Man in the Ion Mask, from Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special 1991
script by Dan Abnett, art by Brian Williamson, letters by Helen Stone

This is a slight-but-charming story of the Doctor visiting the Master in prison after the events of The Dæmons; the Master claims to have reformed, but the Doctor of course is wary, and rightly so. There's not much action (in a good way), and artist Brian Williamson is quite good at handling the dialogue and characterization the story requires.

Are You Listening? / Younger & Wiser, from Doctor Who Magazine Summer Special 1994
written by Warwick Gray, art by Colin Andrew, lettered by Amer Anwar

A linked first Doctor story and seventh Doctor story; the first visits a mysterious city with Vicki and Steven and runs off, while the seventh returns with Benny, finally understanding what's going on. They have their moments, but there's not a lot of conflict in Younger & Wiser, which is basically the Doctor and Benny just chatting.

from Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special 1994

Plastic Millennium / The Seventh Segment, from Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special 1994 & Summer Special 1995
stories by Gareth Roberts, art by Martin Geraghty and Paul Peart, letters by Elitta Fell

The first of these is fun, a stylish Martin Geraghty–drawn story about the seventh Doctor and Mel (in her DWM debut, I think) taking down some Autons. It's not very complicated, but the art really sells it. The second is also carried by the art—or rather, the art is the best part, because I found this noir pastiche featuring the fourth Doctor and the first Romana utterly impenetrable.

from Doctor Who Magazine #557

Monstrous Beauty, from Doctor Who Magazine #556-58 (Nov.-Winter 2020)
story by Scott Gray, artwork by John Ross, colouring by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

This Time Lord Victorious tie-in brings back the ninth Doctor and Rose, and plunges them into the "Dark Times" of the ancient Time Lords' war against the vampires (see State of Decay). Scott Gray is usually good value, and John Ross a strong artist, for sure, but something about this didn't sing. I think the stakes are ultimately too abstract. There's not a lot of sympathetic characters here, so ultimately it's kind of hard to care about any of this. Looks great, though (Ross does very well by Christopher Eccleston; actually, so does Gray), and I appreciated the very obscure (but footnoted!) callback to Tooth and Claw from the End Game collection. The DWM universe gets its tentacles everywhere!

Dr. Who & the Mechonoids, from Doctor Who Magazine #578 (July 2022)
story by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, colour by Mike Summers, lettering by Roger Langridge

Maybe this would have been funny if I had more than a dim memory of one Cushing film, or if I got the reference to the actor "cast" as the one-off male companion here. But I didn't and it wasn't.

from Doctor Who Magazine #579

Fear of the Future / The Everlasting Summer, from Doctor Who Magazine #579-83 (Summer-Nov. 2022)
story by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, colour by Mike Summers, lettering by Roger Langridge

Unfortunately, I don't think Jac Rayner (or, perhaps, her editors) ever got to grips with the format of the six-page DWM strip, especially with the reduced panel count. The first story here is too slight even at six pages: Dan sees vaguely bad things, the Doctor realizes why, the end. The second story, on the other hand, like Rayner's last attempt at a thirteenth Doctor epic (Hydra's Gate), attempts to squeeze in too much and thus is basically impossible to follow. Which is a shame, because all the thematic ideas she gives in the backmatter sound great... but what's on the page is a confusing jumble of ideas, too many of them. Russ Leach will never go down as one of the DWM greats, with a strong tendency toward confusing panel transitions and weak storytelling skills. I get that COVID was at fault in very real ways, but #570-83 is surely the weakest run of the strip in the history of the mag since... well, I was going to say the early McCoy strips, but skimming back over my reviews, those were at least inconsistently enjoyable, whereas these are consistently unenjoyable. Maybe since the mid–Colin Baker run (#100-19)? But even those had John Ridgway!

Stray Observations:

• Alas, the original idea Scott Gray recounts in the notes for Are You Listening? and Younger & Wiser, that they'd be told in different orders from the perspective of the Doctor and the alien city Xenith, is better than what we got. Similarly, it's hard to read the notes on Monstrous Beauty and not wish that Scott Gray had got to write the eighth Doctor and Destrii story he'd originally pitched.
• Reading Plastic Millennium only a day or two after Business as Usual, I couldn't help but thinking the Auton and plastic factory here ought to have been the same one as in that story.
  
• I've charted the DWM strip's influence on Russell T Davies in the past; the line from Plastic Millennium to "Rose" seems pretty obvious!

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

Black Sun Rising (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 54)

Black Sun Rising: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 2
by Mick Austin, Vincent Danks, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, Alan McKenzie, Mick McMahon, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Peel, Gary Russell, Geoff Senior, John Stokes, et al.

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1980-92
Acquired: September 2024
Read: November 2024

Unlike its predecessor volume, this contains only two strips that had been previously collected, and only one of them by Panini at that; Black Legacy was in the Cyberman Ultimate Collection, and Skywatch-7 in a volume of IDW's Doctor Who Classics series. So the amount of new-to-me material is much higher here, making it feel more worthwhile. But on top of that, I also found that the material here was more diverse and unusual than what was collected in the previous volume. 

The stories here come from an era where the back-ups went from a regular feature to a more sporadic one, before fading out entirely. The last couple aren't from DWM itself, but special tie-in issues, one from a decade after all the others, which date from 1980 to 1982.

As usual, I am only writing up stories I hadn't read before. On top of that, I did read all the stories in publication order, but here I am going to sometimes review them out of that order... you'll see why.

Yonder...the Yeti, from Doctor Who Weekly #31-34 (May-June 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

A group of hikers in the Himalayas end up encountering the robot Yeti and the Great Intelligence. Some DWM stories manage to cram a lot into a little space to good effect, but this one just felt crammed to me; I struggled to follow the art or copious plot twists. Maybe I was tired when I read it... maybe I'm just getting old!

Business as Usual, from Doctor Who Weekly #40-43 (July-Aug. 1980)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by David Lloyd

This won't set your world on fire, but I found it an effectively creepy use of the Autons. Moore does a good job of extrapolating how an Auton story would go with no Doctor; David Lloyd's talents are put to good use with some of the more horrific moments.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #47

Stardeath / 4-D War / Black Sun Rising, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #47, 51, & 57 (Dec. 1980–Oct. 1981)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by John Stokes and David Lloyd

This trilogy of stories from Alan Moore chronicles some of the early history of the Time Lords, and is the first depiction of a "Time War" in the Doctor Who mythos. (The existence of a "Last Great Time War" of course implies earlier, less great Time Wars.) In Stardeath, Moore really dives into the history, showing the moment alluded to in The Three Doctors where Omega gets trapped in a black home; I think this is the first story to unite that idea with the fact that in The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords use a black hole as a power source for their time travel operations. The hardware is beautifully drawn by John Stokes and, the story uses the same design for Rassilon that we would later see in The Tides of Time. On top of that, someone comes back in time to stop the Time Lords from becoming masters of time... and in doing so accidentally gives the Time Lords a key piece of time-travel technology. Timey-wimey, as we would now say.

Such temporal shenanigans are what drive the last two stories here, which focus on the Time Lord "Special Executive" trying to maintain Time Lord influence in the face of opposition from both contemporary and futuristic enemies. Moore is typically inventive, but I didn't find the agents of the Special Executive very Time Lord-y, to be honest. Cool concepts but I feel like they needed a bit more of a Doctor Who veneer.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #48

The Touchdown on Deneb 7, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #48 (Jan. 1981)
written by Paul Neary, art by David Lloyd

This is a K-9 story. Like K-9's Finest Hour from the previous volume, the Doctor is in it a bit but it focuses on K-9; like K-9's Finest Hour, it's not very good. If there was some kind of explanation for the key plot point that K-9 is acting totally out of character, I missed it!

Voyage to the Edge of the Universe / Crisis on Kaldor, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #49-50 (Feb.-Mar. 1981)
written by Paul Neary (with David Lloyd) and Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd and John Stokes

The idea of taking a group of Dæmons and sending them on a trip to the edge of the universe seems pretty random, to be honest, but if you buy that, this is a pretty good story, in that it really lets David Lloyd cut loose with some crazy visuals. The Kaldor story was less interesting to me (I have never really been into the cut-rate Asimov of most Kaldor stories), but it did have a very macabre twist ending. The main strip in this era, under writers Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse, really loved its stories based on weird concepts that ended with a real downer, and these stories totally fit into that vibe.

from Doctor Who Monthly #64

The Greatest Gamble / The Gods Walk Among Us / Devil of the Deep / The Fires Down Below, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #56 & 59 / Doctor Who Monthly #61 & 64 (Dec. 1981–May 1982)
written by John Peel; art by Mick McMahon, David Lloyd, and John Stokes; letters by Elitta Fell

To be honest, I have never much rated John Peel as a Doctor Who writer (or, for that matter, a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine one, having suffered through Objective: Bajor, which seems to owe more to Jon Pertwee Virgin Missing Adventures than the tv show it's supposedly based on). His stories often have that fatal combination of being bad and dull, of being fundamentally misconceived in some unenjoyable way. So I was surprised how much I liked this run of tales, which brings in the Celestial Toymakers, the Sontarans, the Sea Devils, and the Quarks. What he's quite good at here is shifting into different genres; none of these feel like Doctor Who stories without the Doctor, but stories from other universes with Doctor Who monsters stuck in: a gambling parable, a tomb exploration story, a pirate story, a military thriller. This is exactly what I want out of the DWM back-up strip! He is helped, of course, by a stable of very strong artists who do a great job adapting themselves to each genre. I really enjoyed all of these.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981

Minatorius, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981
written by Alan McKenzie (as Maxwell Stockbridge), art by John Stokes, letters by Elitta Fell

Like The Stolen TARDIS from the previous volume, this is branded as being from "Tales of the Time Lords"; there never were any more. Based on this, we dodged a bullet. I don't think McKenzie really gets Time Lords; why does the one in this story have a wise-cracking robot drone? John Stokes draws some great alien vistas, though.

The Fabulous Idiot / A Ship Called Sudden Death, from Doctor Who Summer Special 1982
written by Steve Parkhouse, art by Steve Parkhouse & Geoff Senior and Dave Gibbons

These two stories take some characters from the main strip's The Free-Fall Warriors and explore what they get up to when the Doctor's not around, part of that building of a coherent DWM universe that was going on during the Peter Davison strips. The first one is fun enough; I always enjoy a bit of Steve Parkhouse art, and there's some good jokes here about Doctor Ivan Asimoff. The second, about the Freefall Warriors, I found less interesting. There are too many of them in too little space. But you know, give me some Dave Gibbons anyday and I am a happy man.

from Doctor Who Magazine Holiday Special 1992

City of Devils, from Doctor Who Magazine Holiday Special 1992
written by Gary Russell, art by Vincent Danks, letters by Annie Halfacree

I do love Sarah Jane Smith, and Vincent Danks does great on art here, but like most Gary Russell–penned comics, this one is pretty pointless. Sarah and K-9 basically stand around while we go through the usual Silurian story. The story doesn't climax so much as just stop.

Stray Observations:

• Other included stories and what previous collections to find them in: (see below for links to my reviews)
• Black Legacy (in Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection)
• Skywatch-7 (in Doctor Who Classics vol. 2 #13)
• Does the existence of "The Original Writer" imply the existence of "The Unoriginal Writer"? And if so, who is it? Anyway, I get it if Alan Moore doesn't want his name on the cover or credits page, but I do find it amusing when the behind-the-scenes material has to contort around giving his name. Like, can he really object to people relaying the fact that he wrote something?
• A couple years after this, Moore would introduce the Warpsmiths to his Marvelman comics, and I could imagine the Special Executive fitting right in there. The backmatter reveals they would be reused in his Captain Britain run; whenever I get around to reading my Captain Britain Omnibus, I look forward to encountering them again. If I'd known ahead of time, maybe I would have incorporated those comics into this project, as I did Transformers, Death's Head, and The Sleeze Brothers!
• Supposedly the Dæmon in Voyage to the Edge is the same guy who shows up running a bar in that really bad Gary Russell story from the McCoy-era strip (see The Good Soldier). God knows why, though.
• I am pretty sure I have read that DWM's The Betrothal of Sontar (2006) was the first use of "Sontar" in the Doctor Who mythos (1993's Pureblood used "Sontara"), but actually it's used in The Gods Walk Among Us way back in 1982.
• For those of us who love the DWM universe, surely the female UNIT commander in The Fires Down Below ought to have been Muriel Frost. Or rather, surely the female UNIT commander in The Mark of Mandragora ought to have been Major Whitaker! The story is set in 1984 and says that Lethbridge-Stewart is in charge of UNIT, which I have to imagine causes some problems but I try to not think about UNIT dating very much these days.
• Back when I wrote up Skywatch-7, I expressed some confusion about the "Maxwell Stockbridge" pseudonym that Alan McKenzie used for his back-up strips, in that it seems like a clear reference to The Stars Fell on Stockbridge et al., but not only predates that story, but DWM itself! The backmatter here goes into that; McKenzie says it was his pseudonym of choice, based on the house pen names used on The Shadow and The Spider (Maxwell Grant and Grant Stockbridge, respectively), and that Steve Parkhouse told him the creation of a DWM character named Maxwell from Stockbridge is a total coincidence!
• The Freefall Warriors went on to appear in a Captain Britain back-up in 1985. I am guessing rights issues mean this has never and will never be collected. These issues go for an average of $13 apiece on Mycomicshop.com; I imagine at some point I will give in and buy them to complete my DWM journey. If I do, you all will be the first to know!

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

The Return of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 53)

The Return of the Daleks: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 1
by Steve Dillon, David Lloyd, Steve Moore, and Paul Neary

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1979-80
Acquired and read: July 2024

This is an exciting volume. Well, it should be. At long last, having (largely) collected the main strip, DWM is turning its attention to the (largely) Doctor-free back-up tales. The only problem is that, for some of these stories (the Abslom Daak and Kroton ones) it's my third time paying for them to be collected! This isn't so much a knock against this book, I suppose (it would probably be silly to do a volume containing all back-ups except those ones), as against the now utterly redundant Dalek and Cybermen "ultimate comic strip collections." Or, perhaps, a knock against me for buying them. But then, I kind of suspect that if those books hadn't sold well, this book probably wouldn't exist.

As always, I only read the new-to-me stories.

The Final Quest, from Doctor Who Weekly #8 (Dec. 1979)
written by Steve Moore, art by Paul Neary

A Sontaran warrior, shamed by his sole defeat (which he has kept hidden from all others), goes on a quest to find the ultimate weapon. If you've read any other Steve Moore story, you won't be surprised there's a dark comeuppance awaiting him. Decent enough, let down by the fact the the usually dependable Paul Neary seems to struggle to draw Sontarans.

The Stolen TARDIS: A Tale of the Time Lords, from Doctor Who Weekly #9-11 (Dec. 1979)
written by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon

Set on Gallifrey (seemingly in the distant past), this one begins badly: a traveling circus materializes, and the Time Lords are just like, "Wow, let's watch! This isn't suspicious at all!" It's very kiddie. But it soon becomes a cat-and-mouse time-travel game between Sillarc (an alien trying to steal a TARDIS) and the TARDIS technician Plutar (a failed Time Lord), with some clever four-dimensional thinking of the kind we never got on screen until The Curse of the Fatal Death. Fun stuff.

from Doctor Who Weekly #12

K-9's Finest Hour, from Doctor Who Weekly #12 (Jan. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by Paul Neary

The idea of a K-9-focused tale is a fun one; unfortunately, in this one, he saves the day thanks to the incompetence of his opponents more than anything else. I would have liked to have spent more time on him doing something, rather than being carried around!

Warlord of the Ogrons, from Doctor Who Weekly #13-14 (Jan. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon

Despite the efforts of Doctor Who tie-in authors everywhere, nothing will ever be interesting about the Ogrons.

from Doctor Who Weekly #21

Twilight of the Silurians, from Doctor Who Weekly #21-22 (Mar. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

This is a pretty decent story about the last days of the Silurians (or Eocenes). Another decent Steve Moore "dark comeuppance" story; its real strength is how David Lloyd draws the lithe, lizard-like bodies Silurians, without the restriction of having to fit a suit around a person.

The Outsider, from Doctor Who Weekly #25-26 (Apr. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

I found this kind of dull, a story about an astrologer collaborating with an invading Sontaran to subjugate his own planet, who of course gets his comeuppance. David Lloyd, at least, draws better Sontarans than Paul Neary.

Stray Observations:

• Other included stories and what previous collections to find them in: (see below for links to my reviews)
• The Return of the Daleks (in Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 1)
• Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman and Ship of Fools (in The Glorious Dead)
• Deathworld (in Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection)
  
• Abslom Daak... Dalek-Killer and Star Tigers (in Nemesis of the Daleks)
  
• Most of the stories are narrated by Tom Baker's Doctor. In Throwback, he says the story comes from "this tape I found in the Time-Lords' records..." He seems to be speaking directly to the reader; in The Final Quest, he says, "You may remember my battles with a Sontaran called Lynx," and in Twlight of the Silurians, he mentions, "your own world, Earth." K-9's Finest Hour makes this clear, because he tells that story in response to people wondering why K-9 wasn't in the main strip! (The story doesn't really answer that question, though.)
• DWM's famous materialization sound effect, "VWORP VWORP" first appeared in issue #46's The Collector (Nov. 1980), but a predecessor, "VR-A-A-W-P! VR-A-A-A-W-P!", appears in part one of The Stolen TARDIS. Not quite as striking.
• I was surprised to learn from the commentary on The Outsider that the Sontarans weren't established as clones until The Invasion of Time. Is that really true? I had never noticed if so. Hard to imagine how such a bad showing for the Sontarans established such a now-definitive piece of lore.

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

The White Dragon (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 52)

The White Dragon: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, Russ Leach, Jacqueline Rayner, and David A Roach

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 2020-22
Acquired and read: March 2024

It's finally here... but one can't help being disappointed. While The Mistress of Chaos gave us eighteen months' worth of comics, which came out to eighteen strips, The White Dragon is over two years of comics... yet only fifteen strips. The factors involved are no one's fault, of course, but it's disappointing that Jodie Whittaker was the incumbent Doctor for four years yet received the smallest run of strips since Eccleston; it's also disappointing that these volumes have been getting progressively slimmer since The Crimson Hand and that this one couldn't extend to collecting all of Jodie's run.

I have read all of this before, but distribution of DWM in America was particularly erratic during this era, and I read many of these stories stretched out over months or even out of sequence; I think I got one of the later issues of Hydra's Gate before the first. In particular, I was pleased to get to read The White Dragon in one go.

The Piggybackers, from Doctor Who Magazine #549-552 (Apr.-July 2020)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The Doctor and the fam land in America during the Cuban Missile Crisis; aliens are of course afoot. You can always count on Scott Gray for a decently put together story with interesting visuals and nice moments, and marry him to Martin Geraghty, and of course it's a recipe for success. I enjoyed this story, particularly the titular piggybackers and how they looked. Geraghty does some great work throughout (right from the first page, with the "Duck and Cover" riff), but I did feel like it didn't totally come together; there's an attempt to subvert expectations that kind of left it fizzling out at the end when it ought to have been exploding. The climax is over very quickly. I do like how careful Gray is to give everyone something to do; not to spend all my time ragging on the show, but it was rarely so deliberate during this era.

from Doctor Who Magazine #560

The White Dragon, from Doctor Who Magazine #559-62 (Jan.-Apr. 2021)
story & art by Scott Gray, colour art by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Scott Gray bows out of DWM with the third story that he both wrote and illustrated; I enjoyed both of his previous goes, but this is the best of them, and it's a good way to bow out. No big torturous epic involving the history of Gallifrey; just a sharply done celebrity historical in an interesting location with a cool guest star and a bunch of nice moments for Ryan. (Ryan spent a lot of The Piggybackers mute, so it's good to see him get a meaty part here to balance things out.) This to me is pure DWM, one of those stories I find it hard to comment on because it doesn't do anything flashy but it does everything right. A story of kung fu is perfect for Gray's cartoony dynamism, and this story has a lot of great visuals and good beats. If the tv show ever did a Bruce Lee episode, we would be lucky if it was half this good.

from Doctor Who Magazine #571

The Forest Bride / It's Behind You!, from Doctor Who Magazine #570-72 (Dec. 2021–Jan. 2022)
story by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, coloring by Pippa Bowland and Mike Summers, lettering by Roger Langridge

I get that the strip is working under constraints here. As Rayner spells out in the extras, there had to be fewer pages, fewer panels per page, and even fewer words per panel! (The last one surprised me; does that let them pay Roger Langridge less?) But whatever the reason, I found these weird, unenjoyable stories. The writing clearly struggles with the space alloted; in The Forest Bride, the Doctor knows all about someone's daughter, but going over and back over the strip, I can't figure out where she actually learned this. The conclusion is too cursory and quick to work. Similarly, I didn't really get what It's Behind You! was going for; there's just a bunch of scrambling about and then the story's over. Even though it's a premise clearly tailor-made for jokes about pantomime, there are almost no jokes about pantomime, just fairly pointless action. And if you've heard Oh No It Isn't!, you'll know this isn't because Jac Rayner doesn't know how to makes jokes about panto.

I don't think Russ Leach's art is quite supporting what Rayner's writing is doing. In the notes, Rayner talks about the creepy vibe she wanted for The Forest Bride, but I didn't think the art gave it that, especially the coloring, which is all too bright and cheerful. (On part two, the coloring is credited to Pippa Bowland, but there is no credited colorist for part one.)

from Doctor Who Magazine #575

Hydra's Gate, from Doctor Who Magazine #574-77 (Mar.-June 2022)
story by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, colour by Mike Summers, lettering by Roger Langridge

Unfortunately, giving Rayner and Leach a bigger canvas doesn't result in better work. This four-part story is a bit of a jumpy struggle; I think they're trying to make it all work with economic storytelling, but too often it's just confusing. "Yaz has found the Legionary!" Hang on, was she looking for one? Since when? It's not just the writing, but also the art; I had to reread a sequence on the last page of part one several times to figure who was speaking and where a kid had come from, and in part four there's a bit where a robot loses its head but the Doctor catches it in a net I kept going back over to puzzle out. Again, things seemed terribly underexplained, and the climax rushed, introducing a new jeopardy only to resolve it instantly more than once. Reading Rayner's notes in the back, I think there's a good story here, but it probably needed eight pages per installment and a lot more panels per page to tell it.

Stray Observations:

• Liberation of the Daleks didn't say "Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel" in its indicia, and that this is #32 to The Age of Chaos's #31 indicates Liberation doesn't count. But in this era of triple dipping (the Abslom Daak strips have appeared in Nemesis of the Daleks, Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, and soon Return of the Daleks), I can't help but worry this means someday we're going to get a "Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel" that does have Liberation in it...
• For some reason, part two of The Piggybackers is six pages instead of the usual eight. I don't think we can blame COVID for this, based on the dates.
• We'll never know (well, hopefully we will someday, but I imagine not in the short term) what plans Gray might have had had he stayed on the strip: who was Mother G? Rereading The Piggybackers, I feel like he was setting up some stuff here too. The US's Brideport is compared to the UK's Stockbridge, and the story ends with the Doctor making a comment about how Abner Endicott was going to keep watch over the town, which felt unusually significant. Was this all going somewhere? Anyway, my bonkers theory is that Mother G was Mother Goose!
  
• If you read the extras hoping for some insight into Gray's departure from the strip, you won't find it here. But I suppose we've got one more graphic novel with his content forthcoming, whenever Monstrous Beauty ends up being reprinted, so he's not done yet.
• The departure of Ryan and Graham (between The White Dragon and The Forest Bride) gives them 26 strips as main companions, which ties them with Peri and Fey for eighth-longest run. (Yaz's run, which will top out at forty when she finally leaves after The Everlasting Summer, puts her in third, behind only Izzy and Clara!)
• Russ Leach's comments on Hydra's Gate actually cover his entire run on the strip, so I imagine we won't be hearing from him in future volumes.
• Martin Geraghty mentions in his notes that it's January 2024 as he writes them, which seems like an astonishingly quick turnaround for a book that was shipped by the end of February!
• This volume gives almost every contributor cover credit, even the inker and two colourists. Interestingly, it does so in alphabetical order, as opposed to the usual precedence/prominence technique used on previous volumes. This makes it one of few DWM graphic novels to give first billing to a non-writer on the cover, and the first to do so in a very long time. (The others, fact fans: The Iron Legion, Dragon's Claw, The Tides of Time [all Dave Gibbons], Voyager, The World Shapers [both John Ridgway], and End Game [Martin Geraghty]).
• I didn't notice until I shelved it, but even though this collection doesn't have the cover design the graphic novels have used since 2012, it does (unlike Liberation) maintain the spine design.
  

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

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:

Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 50)

Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Alan Barnes, Andrew Cartmel, Mike Collins, Steve Dillon, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, David Lloyd, Alan McKenzie, Mike McMahon, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Ridgway, Adrian Salmon, et al.

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 1979-2005
Acquired: September 2023
Read: October 2023

As with the Daleks collections, I obviously had to read this out of sequence based on when it came out. Like with those, I just read the new-to-me stories. If I was integrating this into my marathon from the beginning, I'd just do the backup strips and read it after Dragon's Claws, saving the Doctor-focused strips for reading in the main volumes.

Deathworld, from Doctor Who Weekly #15-16 (Jan. 1980)
script by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

Some Ice Warriors get attacked by some Cybermen. David Lloyd draws the hell out of an Ice Warrior for the most part (somewhat less convinced by his spindly Cybermen), but this—like a lot of monster-focused DWW back-up strips to be honest—reads to me like the kind of thing that would be thrilling if you were ten, but is more of an interesting curiosity if you come to it as an adult.

Black Legacy, from Doctor Who Weekly #35-38 (June-July 1980)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by David Lloyd

Look, okay, maybe it's by Alan Moore, but I just can't take a Cyberman story where one shouts "What? Who... No! Blood of my ancestors, NOOOOOOOOO...." seriously. Like, this just isn't how it works.

from Doctor Who Weekly #16

Stray Observations:

• New-to-me strip content: a whole sixteen pages! But also we get some new commentary by Paul Scoones on Junk-Yard Demon, Exodus/Revelation!/Genesis!, and The World Shapers. I particularly liked getting to hear from Grant Morrison about The World Shapers (in an archival interview from 1987), and David Lloyd is always interesting. Kind of funny they can't even say "Alan Moore" in the commentaries. Does he appear like Voldemort if you say his name?
• As a complete package, though, it's fairly attractive; I like getting one bumper volume better than the two slim Dalek ones. And there have been some great Cyberman strips in DWM history. I'm not sure I would count The Glorious Dead as a Cyberman strip even though it's got Kroton in it, but I guess it would be odd to leave it out of a book containing literally every other Kroton strip. The best one remains, of course, The Flood.
• List of all other stories and what collections they were previously printed in: (see links below to read my reviews)
• Junk-Yard Demon (in Dragon's Claw)
• Exodus / Revelation / Genesis! / The World Shapers (in The World Shapers)
• The Good Soldier (in The Good Soldier)
  
• Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools / Unnatural Born Killers / The Company of Thieves / The Glorious Dead (in The Glorious Dead)
• The Flood (in The Flood)
  
• The Cybermen / Junk-Yard Demon II (in The Clockwise War)
  

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