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Star Beasts and Spider-Gods: Doctor Who Comics of the Tom Baker Era
🕑 Added 2021-04-18 18:05:03 +0000 UTCBy Doris V. Sutherland
A science fiction series as long-running as Doctor Who could hardly avoid spawning its fair share of comics. By the same token, comics tying in with a science fiction series as long-running as Doctor Who could hardly avoid being just a little erratic.
From 1964 through to 1979, Doctor Who strips appeared primarily in Polystyle’s TV Comic, a publication that also carried the adventures of various other television characters; this led to some amusing crossovers on the covers, with the 1968 TV Comic Annual showing Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor riding a rollercoaster with Beetle Bailey and Popeye. For a period from 1971-3 the Doctor’s adventures migrated to sister comic TV Action in Countdown (also known under numerous variations on this title); meanwhile, the vagaries of licensing rights led to the Daleks having their own comic stories in rival publication TV Century 21.
Although the Polystyle Doctor Who stories were generally well-drawn, the scripts are more questionable. The earliest incarnation of the strip – aimed at a younger audience than the television series – is notorious for giving William Hartnell’s First Doctor a pair of never-before-seen preadolescent grandchildren named John and Gillian and sending him on oddly whimsical adventures including a trip to Santa’s workshop, where he helps the jolly old elf to meet demand for toy TARDiSes. Subsequent issues depicted the Second Doctor as a TV celebrity on twentieth-century Earth, while stories starring Third Doctor were reprinted as Fourth Doctor adventures, with Tom Baker’s face drawn over that of Jon Pertwee.
During Tom Baker’s time as the Fourth Doctor, however, things changed. The official Doctor Who magazine, which is still running today, started life in October 1979 as Doctor Who Weekly. It was originally published by the UK branch of Marvel Comics, and came complete with “Stan Lee Presents” at the beginning of its comic stories. The magazine’s debut marked a new era for Doctor Who comics, not least because of the talented creators it attracted.
Chief amongst these is Dave Gibbons, today best known as the artist of Watchmen, who would illustrate the Doctor Who magazine’s main comic stories for all but two issues of the Fourth Doctor era. Joining him were writers Pat Mills and John Wagner of 2000 AD fame. In an interview published in IDW’s Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 11 (and later reprinted in the trade paperback Doctor Who: The Iron Legion) Gibbons relates how he approached the two writers about turning rejected TV pitches into comic scripts:
I knew that Pat and John had submitted a slew of Doctor Who stories to the BBC, but there was a change of script editor and they hadn’t had any success selling them there. I knew they had these plots, so I suggested to Dez [Skinn, editor] that I might be able to get them to write the strips. I spoke to Pat and John, who thought it was a reasonable idea and a good thing to be seen to be working somewhere other than IPC as well.
In the same interview, Gibbons reveals that although Mills and Wagner were credited together, in practice they alternated scripting duties. Other creators were involved Doctor Who Weekly from the beginning: the first issue included the back-up comics “The Return of the Daleks” (by Steve Moore, Paul Neary and David Lloyd) and an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds from Marvel Classics Comics. But as far as the main features were concerned, the original team was Pat Mills, John Wagner and Dave Gibbons.
The first of these stories, the Pat Mills-scripted “Doctor Who and the Iron Legion”, ran from issues 1-8. It opens with the Doctor exiting the TARDIS onto an alternate Earth, one in which the Roman Empire has continued to reign into the twentieth-century: robot legionaries march through the streets, and various aliens are forced to fight in arenas. His eight-instalment quest puts the Doctor in touch with gladiators, galley-salves, decadent rulers and the other character-types that no pop-cultural depiction of Rome should be without, before his final confrontation with a species of pterodactyl-like alien that secretly controls the empire.
While “The Iron Legion” started out as a pitch for a television series, it is hard to imagine the story as seen in the finished comic ever occurring onscreen: the sheer amount of aliens, robots and elaborate settings would severely tax the BBC’s budget even today. There are other, more subtle distinctions between the comic and the general set-up of the series, however.
For one, “The Iron Legion” depicts a present-day Earth with an alternate history; parallel timelines have never been a common theme in the television series (at the time the comic was published, “Inferno” from 1970 was the screen Doctor’s only journey to an alternate Earth). Yet the story makes no indication that its premise is in any way unusual – for example, the ending has no implication that the Doctor will have trouble returning to his own timeline. Clearly, then, Pat Mills felt little obligation to follow the conventions of the television series.
The general impression given by “The Iron Legion” is that Tom Baker’s Doctor has got lost and ended up in the pages of 2000 AD – hardly surprising, given that Mills, Wagner and Gibbons were all vital players in the early years of that magazine. The comic inherits 2000 AD’s fondness for high-tech hardware and brash action, but the connection extends from the aesthetic to the thematic.
Pat Mills’ comics have often explored the theme of authoritarian regimes, and “Iron Legion” follows suite by drawing associations between the space-Romans and twentieth-century fascism. The most obvious case is the decision to name the Roman Emperor “Adolphus” but there are other, more subtle examples. The comic’s very first panel shows the robotic legionaries marching alongside an army tank while civilians cower, an image that evokes World War II as much as it does Ancient Rome or futuristic sci-fi; the figure protruding from the tank is delivering a Roman salute, further driving the association home. The story’s villains may have a Roman aesthetic, but the implication is that they have real-world analogues closer to the present day. It would be easy to picture the Iron Legionnaires starring in their own 2000 AD strip, appearing alongside Judge Dredd as satirical anti-heroes.
At the same time, however, “The Iron Legion” has a strong element of camp humour that places it closer to Doctor Who than to 2000 AD. The portrayal of Emperor Adolphus as a literal spoilt child; the gladiatorial battle ending with the Doctor telling a joke that incapacitates his alien opponent with laughter; the mumbling dustbin-like robot sidekick Vesuvius; even the early scene where a civilian is gunned down in a corner shop, with exploding tins of beans standing in for bloodshed – all of this makes it clear that the comic’s creators had their tongues firmly in their cheeks. Like the television series at its best, “Doctor Who and the Iron Legion” gets the level of humour just right.
After “Iron Legion” came “City of the Damned”, which ran from issues 9-16 and was written by John Wagner. This story takes the Doctor to a world in which the inhabitants have had their emotions forcibly removed and any show of feeling is punishable by death: “There is only one crime – the crime of emotion!” explains one of the city’s Moderators. “You are an outsider, Doctor. You do not understand the miracle of our society… long ago, we of the planet Zom were a violent criminal race! A race damned by our own petty loves and hates, our greed, our desires. […] At night in secret places it was the Brains Trust who found the final solution – the harmoniser! A machine that erases emotion from the brain!”
At first, the story looks like a straightforward runaround with a dystopian premise simple enough for younger readers to understand – and, indeed, Gibbons’ Metropolis-influenced artwork indicates that we will not be far from the familiar in “City of the Damned”. But as it develops, the story begins showing wryly humorous touches, even moments of outright camp. The Doctor falls in with a band of rebels who have chosen to embody forbidden emotions: Silly wears clown make-up, Nervous has a paper bag over his head, the three brothers Slightly Angry, Fairly Angry and Very Angry are always bickering with one another, and so forth. The villains turn out to be equally absurd: the Brains Trust running the emotionless dystopia are revealed to be men who literally have brains for heads, residing in an aquarium-like structure called (of course) the Think Tank.
Comparing it to the television series, we can make a case for “City of the Damned” being ahead of its time. When Sylvester McCoy took over as the Doctor in 1987, campy dystopias were very much in vogue. McCoy’s second adventure, “Paradise Towers”, took place in a hotel that had given rise to an entire society: cannibalistic (but awfully polite) elderly ladies lived at the top, an underclass of punk girls lived at the bottom, and SS-like hotel staff policed the corridors. Later came the notorious “The Happiness Patrol”, which was very nearly an inversion of “City of the Damned”. This time, the dystopia enforced positive feelings, executing malcontents with deadly confectionery; meanwhile, the forces of rebellion were represented by a blues musician.
A dystopian tradition going back at least as far as Metropolis involves conflict between constructive reformers and purely destructive rebels. In “City of the Damned” the latter is represented by the Hates, a caveman-like splinter-group from the emotional resistance, who unleash a plague of flesh-eating alien creatures on the city. The creatures are poisoned by adrenalin, meaning that they spare those who feel emotions while killing the cold Moderators; the downside is that they also set about killing the ordinary citizens. The Doctor finally sorts the mess out by restoring the populace’s feelings; regarding him as the messianic Great Emoter, the people of the city throw off their drab, government-ordained garb – and all start dressing in Tom Baker’s trademark coat-and-scarf combination. This is all very silly, but the story does nudge its young readers towards harder science fiction by incorporating brain chemistry into its plot.
The Mills-Wagner-Gibbons team took a break for issues 17-18, and a substitute team took over for the two-part story “Timeslip”. Editor Dez Skinn provided the plot, which was adapted into a script by Steve Moore – a writer who had been with the magazine since the first issue, penning stories for back-up comics; assistant editor Paul Neary took over from Dave Gibbons as artist. Skinn’s rather slim plot sees the Doctor regenerating backwards, a premise that appears to have been chosen purely as an excuse to put William Hartnell’s First Doctor in the comic. Neary’s panel layouts and strong rendition of Hartnell are the main draws.
When the regular team returned, they followed their two cliffhanger-filled romps through alien worlds with a more confined, close-to-home story. The Mills-scripted “Doctor Who and the Star Beast” (issues 19-26) introduces us to a pair of schoolchildren – fun-loving sci-fi enthusiast Fudge and his sober-minded friend Sharon – who investigate a crashed UFO and find a wide-eyed, hamster-like alien. This creature, the Meep, is being hunted down by the insectoid Wrarth – who, in turn, are being tailed by the Doctor – and so the children agree to help protect the Meep.
Once again, the Doctor Who comic was ahead of the pop-cultural curve. Two years after “Star Beast” was published, E.T. was released into cinemas and cute aliens became the latest must-have accessory for fictional children. Indeed, the story is so forward-looking that it succeeds as a parody of the alien-buddy genre: during the course of the story, we learn that the deceptively cute Meep is actually a brutal warlord on the run for crimes against the Wrarth.
Mills and Gibbons clearly had immense fun with this revelation. A flashback sequence reveals that the Meep race was indeed as sweet and harmless as appearances would suggest, until tragedy struck: “Their planet’s orbit mysteriously changed – it passed close to the black sun! The sun’s radiation mutated a race that was gentle and kind into cruel beasts that lived for conquest!” One panel shows a gun-toting Meep smoking a cigar in the heat of battle like Sergeant Rock, while another has a hooded Meep executioner preparing to behead a member of an unspecified alien race (“Hoppity hop! Boppity bop! Who’s next for the chop!”) Not only did it predict E.T., “The Star Beast” even managed to pip Gremlins to the post.
The story ends with the Meep apprehended and Sharon joining the Doctor in the TARDIS; as a Black girl, this makes her the Doctor’s first ethnic minority companion – the television series would not catch up in terms of diversity until its twenty-first century revival.
The final story from the Mills-Wagner-Gibbons team was the Wagner-scripted “Doctor Who and the Dogs of Doom” (issues 27-34). Here, the Doctor and Sharon land in a conflict between a band of space-truckers and a race of werewolf-like aliens called the Werelox. This is a plot that combines two stock premises that had served the television series well.
The early Tom Baker era had often functioned by placing the Doctor into the plot of a well-known monster movie or horror story (King Kong in “Robot”, Frankenstein in “The Brain of Morbius”, various Victorian and turn-of-the-century stories in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”). In the late sixties, meanwhile, Patrick Troughton’s exploits as the Doctor regularly fit the “base under siege” model, in which a human settlement or vessel was under attack by an alien species which, frequently, had the ability to control or infect victims’ bodies. Using werewolves to bridge the classic-horror-monster plot and the base-under-siege-from-infectious-invaders plot is an obvious trick, so much so that it is surprising the television series never tried it.
Halfway through its story, “Dogs of Doom” deploys the twist revelation that the Werelox are in league with the Daleks – thereby adding a third stock plot, the Dalek battle, to the mix. While not exactly original, “Dogs of Doom” does a good job of demonstrating that many beloved aspects of the television series can be adapted for comics – in some cases with better results than would have been seen on the small screen. The story’s climax, which has the Daleks attacked by various weird aliens they captured as test subjects, would once again have seriously strained a BBC effects budget.
After the departure of Mills and Wagner, back-up contributor Steve Moore took over as lead writer. Moore’s first story in this role was “Doctor Who and the Time Witch” (issues 35-8), where the Doctor and Sharon are transported to a “blank dimension” – the only other occupant of which is able to manipulate reality, filling it with objects and creatures from her imagination. Moore may have been unaware of the fact that essentially the same premise had been used in the Troughton-era TV story “The Mind Robber”, which included some markedly similar imagery (the TARDIS splitting apart near the start, the fantasy world starting out as an empty white space).
The main difference between the two, other than length, is the nature of the antagonist. The Mind Robber turned out to be a children’s author from Earth who populated his realm with specific fictional characters, like Gulliver and a comic-book superhero. The Time Witch, meanwhile, is an incarcerated alien woman whose fantasy minions are generic ogre-like creatures.
With only four instalments, “The Time Witch” is comparatively short and lacks the space to develop its villainess Brimo. The first page shows her being sentenced to eternal imprisonment for the rather vague crime of “using your subconscious mind to conspire with creatures unknown to pervert the course of destiny”, and the Doctor needs little persuasion that this was a just punishment: “Locked up? I thought there was something criminal about you! I won’t feel so bad when this is over then…”
Still, “Doctor Who and the Time Witch” was clearly not written as a character-based drama. Instead, it is built around strong visuals. The memorable prologue has Brimo trapped in her near-indestructible prison for millions of years, forced to watch as her planet dies, becoming so indifferent that she is able to sleep through her sun going nova, before being finally freed when a black hole sucks her into the blank dimension – whereupon she uses her newfound reality-bending power to create a stack of pies. The subsequent battle between Brimo and the Doctor, each summoning weapons from thin air, offers plenty of fun.
The story’s warping of reality has the side-effect of making teenage Sharon spontaneously age four years (“Blimey! I’ve suddenly grown up!”) She had already been wearing a futuristic jumpsuit since "Dogs of Doom"; with her aged-up look, this once-loose garment became seemingly bonded to her newly-muscular frame, looking like a superhero costume. Her co-creator Pat Mills was not impressed.
“I think Sharon worked very well when she was a black Grange Hill-style school girl”, he said in Comic Scene magazine issue 1, published in 2018. “That was my plan and I was pleased with the result. Great character. But I was horrified when – after I’d left the series – she was turned into a super heroine. She looked awful. What is this love that comic professionals have for comic super heroes? It certainly ain’t shared by the readers, no matter how much spin is put on it. And super heroines in Doctor Who? No thank you.”
Steve Moore’s next story as lead writer, “Dragon’s Claw” (issues 39-45), was longer and afforded him more room to explore his interests. The bare-bones premise – the warlike Sontarans distributing advanced weapons in Earth’s history – had again been done on television (“The Time Warrior”, the story that introduced the Sontarans in the first place). But Moore’s treatment is deeply idiosyncratic: most notably, he decided to set his story not in medieval England as “The Time Warrior” was, but in sixteenth-century China.
This is significant for multiple reasons. For one, Asia has always been an unusual setting for Doctor Who, with the television series setting no stories in the continent’s history between “Marco Polo” (1964) and “Demons of the Punjab” (2018). The comic’s closest comparison point in the Tom Baker era is “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” (1977), which was set amongst the Chinese diaspora of Victorian London and – regrettably – drew much of its inspiration from the Fu Manchu-style stereotypes of vintage detective fiction. Steve Moore, who was fascinated with many aspects of Chinese culture from the I Ching to wuxia cinema, had a very different perspective on the setting.
Unlike the racially prejudiced “Talons of Weng-Chiang”, “Dragon’s Claw” is romanticised but nonetheless strives to be authentic. Moore appears far more invested in the setting’s cultural details (an attack on a Chinese village by Japanese pirates, a Shaolin monk’s anguish at being forced into acts of violence) than in the business of the Sontarans. Indeed, the alien menace serves mainly to add a little extra intrigue, and could easily have been removed with little damage to the narrative. In this, “Dragon’s Claw” is reminiscent of the TV series’ earliest years, when William Hartnell regularly starred in straight historical adventures around the world.
While “Dragon’s Claw” was running, the Doctor Who magazine switched from weekly to monthly publication. With only a few pages published per month, it was no longer practical to serialise long-form stories, and so the magazine’s comic component began focusing on one-shots and two-parters. “Dragon’s Claw” was followed by the one-issue story “The Collector” (issue 46), a variation on the familiar aliens-keeping-humans-as-a-menagerie premise. Moore’s script is most notable for a conclusion in which the Doctor, whose misjudgment has led to the deaths of both K-9 and a guest character, rectifies matters by travelling back in time and punching his past self in the face – thereby preventing himself from making his deadly mistake. The idea that the Doctor can use time travel to cheat his way out of a tight situation in this manner breaks a fundamental (if only implicit) rule of the television series, and shows that Moore was interested in having fun with the comic format rather than hewing to onscreen continuity.
Next came “Dreamers of Death” (issues 47-8), which opens in a sword-and-sorcery land that turns out to be a virtual reality game played by denizens of a futuristic world. In an inventive touch, the game is created not through technology but by telepathic link-ups with furry creatures called slinths, which sit on the players’ shoulders.. This relationship has a downside, however, as the dream-worlds start turning into nightmares. “This is terrible! Slinths are good… they give us dreams…” says one character. “But you haven’t been giving them anything in return… and nothing’s free!” explains the Doctor. “During the dreams, they must have been feeding on people’s psychic energy… a little at a time at first… until they felt strong enough to make a mass attack! They’re psychic vampires!”
Once the virtual-reality-gone-wrong premise has been used up, the story moves in a different direction by having the slinths attack the physical world, bundling together in the shape of a gigantic Baphomet-like devil (“because fear and terror generate most psychic energy for them to feed on” as the Doctor says). An electric shock causes the devil to disintegrate into his component Slinths and the adventure is over; Sharon opts to stay behind, ending her time as a TARDIS companion.
From the imprisoned sorceress and her ogre army of “The Time Witch” through to the sword-and-sorcery world and rampaging devil in “Dreamers of Death”, Steve Moore’s scripts for the comic give the impression that he was more at home with fantasy and mythology than with even nominal science fiction. With “The Life-Bringer” (issues 49-50), he would explore mythological themes in more detail.
This story opens with the TARDIS landing on an unspecified planet, while the narrative captions deliver a Homeric allusion: “where and when our tale begins is not important… for there are vortices in the void which make nonsense of such things… just as once there were whirlpools which sucked ships down beneath the wine-dark seas”. Stepping out onto a shore, the Doctor encounters the titanic figure of Prometheus, bound to the side of a rock (once a mountain, but since eroded by the eons) as punishment for stealing the spark of life from the gods and creating mortal humanity.
After the Doctor frees Prometheus, the two travel together to the planet Olympus, where they meet other figures of Greek mythology. For the most part the comic uses familiar iconography of temples and togas, but these alien Olympians have a number of science fictional devices at their disposal: Aphrodite, the first to meet the visitors, arrives in a flying machine shaped like a clamshell.
The gods are not happy to be reunited with Prometheus. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to infect the galaxy with men again!” exclaims Aphrodite. “And why not?” pleads the prodigal titan. “Are they not beautiful like us? Do they not love? Is it not good to have poets, artists, philosophers?”
“They were too few, Prometheus”, proclaims Zeus. “The rest knew how to hate… stealing, killing, warring… they poisoned the universe… they have not been renewed.”
Prometheus is recaptured, while the Doctor is taken before Asclepius, god of medicine. “By the stars!” he exclaims. “A man! I thought they’d all died out centuries ago! Except for the samples I’ve been growing from the life spores, anyway…” The Doctor deduces that these “life-spores”, small (but visible) amoeba-like organisms floating in a large tube, are what Prometheus stole from Olympus. Asclepius, meanwhile, is bewildered by his first encounter with a Time Lord: “Doesn’t really look like one of mine at all! Still, evolution did go a bit wild in the old days…”
What follows is a largely straightforward run-down-the-corridors narrative, as the Doctor narrowly escapes being dissected by Asclepius before freeing Prometheus. The story ends with the titan leaping from the TARDIS to populate an unidentified planet with life.
The gods-as-aliens concept would have been well familiar by the time the comic ran in 1981. Erich von Däniken’s notorious book on the topic, Chariots of the Gods?, was published in 1968, and Moore even includes a joking reference to its title (“I’ve heard of chariots of the gods… but this is a bit primitive, isn’t it?” asks the Doctor upon seeing an Olympian vehicle drawn by two mechanical horse). The idea had already found its way into Doctor Who’s televised incarnation, with the 1972 story “The Time Monster” taking the Doctor on a journey to Atlantis where he encounters the Minotaur and the titan Cronus – uncle of Prometheus (once again, Moore gives no indication that he has seen the episodes in question; certainly, neither he nor Gibbons make any attempt at consistency between the two mythologically-inspired stories).
“The Life-Bringer” offers a playful treatment of the premise. The story establishes that Prometheus and Asclepius have already created humanity (and possibly all humanoid species), but that these creatures have since died out, only to be recreated by Prometheus at the end of the story. So, does the tale depict humanity’s future, or its past? Are we witnessing the prehistoric origin of our species, or a post-apocalyptic rebirth? This is left ambiguous, as the Doctor himself acknowledges at the very end, when he watches Prometheus flying towards an unidentified world: “As I still don’t know where abouts in time we are, I suppose I’ll never be able to puzzle it out… if that was Earth I found him on… or if that’s Earth he’s heading toward…”
Steve Moore went from mythological ponderousnesss to high silliness with his story “War of the Words” (issue 51). The first page says it all: a single splash panel depicts a vast spaceship battle, promising an action-packed space opera epic, while yet the narrative captions are taken up by a waffling radio presenter (“GBC Radio One… Argoz with the latest traffic news: the space-ways around the planet Biblios are still blocked in all directions…the war between the Vromyx and the Garyinths shows no sign of abating and travellers are warned to avoid the area at all costs”) In the bottom right corner is the tiny shape of the TARDIS, with a speech balloon reading “Oops!”
The remaining eight pages of the story deliver one wry concept after the other: an entire planet taken up by a vast library, staffed by robots; a This is Your Life parody; and a war about something so opaque that even the library robots, who have studied the conflict closely, have no idea what the two sides are fighting over. It transpires that the warring aliens are trying to prevent each other from reaching the library and benefiting from its knowledge, and the Doctor is able to end the conflict by tricking the fighters into think that the relevant section of the library has been destroyed – when, in fact, all he has done is blow up an empty storage room. “Actions speak louder than words”, declares the Doctor at the story’s end; “especially actions that make a very large ‘boomf!’” Douglas Adams, who worked on the television series in the late seventies may very well have approved.
Moore’s final story for the magazine, “Spider-God” (issue 52), traded silliness for bitterness. The Doctor falls in with a squad of gung-ho space soldiers led by a Douglas MacArthur lookalike as they land on an alien world; the inhabitants, peaceful humanoids who wear garments made of leaves and reside in an Edenic community, appear to have stepped off the stage of sixties Star Trek. The visitors then encounter another species: giant spiders that arrive to eat meat left for them by the humanoids.
To the horror of the space-soldiers, the humanoids appear to be offering themselves as sacrifices to the spiders, stepping forward to be willingly wrapped in cocoons made of web. The soldiers respond to this discovery by massacring the spiders.
“Stop! You don’t realise what you’re doing!” exclaim the Doctor. “You fools! The spiders never did any harm!” He explains to the soldiers that the humanoids are actually the larval form of a species; they were not allowing themselves to be wrapped in cocoons so that the spiders could eat them, but so they could metamorphose into their adult form. “And without the spiders, they couldn’t turn into the most beautiful life-form in the galaxy” concludes the Doctor, as a glistening butterfly-person emerges from a cocoon. The squad leader, aghast at his actions, drops his gun on the ground while the Doctor heads into the distance – and so ends Steve Moore’s run as writer.
The story’s mournful tone is perhaps appropriate, as it marked a changing of the guard in two respects. Not only was it Steve Moore’s final contribution, it was also the first comic published in the magazine following the end of Tom Baker’s run on the television series. By the time the issue saw print published, the fourth episode of “Logopolis” had aired, and audiences across the country had watched Tom Baker regenerate into Peter Davison. However, Davison’s first full series would not begin airing until the following year; the era of the Fifth Doctor had not yet begun in earnest, and so the comics continued to use the Fourth.
The next writer to take over was Steve Parkhouse. His debut “The Deal” (issue 53) has a starting point broadly similar to Moore’s final story, with the Doctor becoming an unlikely partner to a macho space-soldier, but the narrative that unfolds is wildly different in tone. After accidentally destroying his spaceship, the Doctor agrees to help the trooper escape his pursuers, but the arrangement goes sour when the trooper brutally destroys an enemy craft (“He’s a megalomaniac killing machine”, realises the Doctor. “I’m being used!”) Our hero responds to this development by breaking off the deal and departing in the TARDIS, leaving the trooper to be gunned down by his pursuers.
The story is thin, even for a one-shot Doctor Who Monthly adventure, and exists mainly as a vehicle for Gibbons’ skill at drawing sci-fi hardware. The trooper – who resembles a cross between a Sontaran and the Warhammer space marines who would enter pop culture later in the decade– is more imaginatively-rendered than the generic soldiers in “Spider-God”, and the sequence involving a scanning device that resembles a tentacled skull is memorable.
Parkhouse explored similarly brutal subject matter with his next story, “End of the Line” (issues 54-5), in which the Doctor lands in an underground train system below a post-apocalyptic city where the tunnels are stalked by roving bands of cannibals (an idea possibly inspired by the 1972 film Death Line). Sharing the underground is a small community of “vegetarians” – the most prominent being Angel, a beautiful blonde woman who uses her street-fighting skills to rescue the Doctor from a cleaver-wielding gang.
By the standards of Doctor Who, “End of the Line” is remarkably violent. The lead cannibal is a chainsaw-armed mutant who is shown bloodily slaying his victims, before eventually suffering a fatal electric shock – after which his former minions feast on his ready-cooked corpse. The television series had faced backlash from moral campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, and we can only imagine what reaction would have arisen had the BBC broadcast this sort of material. Also notable is the story’s downbeat ending: the few surviving vegetarians have the ultimate aim of escaping the city, and are last seen commencing a journey towards the pastoral countryside that they believe lies outside. The Doctor, forced to leave the others behind while he escapes in the TARDIS, heads outside the city himself. He finds the country a radioactive wasteland and, after waiting, realises that his new friends will never escape: “They’re not going to make it anyway. They’re not coming – I can feel it… and looking at this poisonous desert… perhaps it’s just as well.”
Parkhouse’s next story, “The Free-Fall Warriors” (issues 56-7), starts out looking like a return to this violent mode, with the first page depicting the Doctor blasting enemy spacecraft to pieces. However, we soon find that this is merely an arcade game and the Doctor is enjoying himself at an alien bar. A brief row with some other customers leads him to taking part in a spacecraft race, during which a fleet of invaders (not unlike the ones in the video games) put in an appearance. The story is deliberately silly – the Doctor’s racing partner is a comic-looking alien science fiction writer named Dr. Asimoff, while the opposing team includes a cyborg whose head is shaped like a miniature replica of his own spaceship – and makes for a stark contrast with the grimness of the previous outing.
The silliness continues into “Junk-Yard Demon” (issues 58-9), a story about two salvagers named Flotsam and Jetsam who make a pair of prize discoveries in an interstellar scrapheap: the TARDIS, and an obsolete model of Cyberman. Dave Gibbons is on fine form here, delivering strong caricatures for the salvagers while simultaneously recreating the cloth-faced Cybermen seen onscreen in 1966.
Indeed, Gibbons is the true star of the Steve Parkhouse-scripted Fourth Doctor comics, as Parkhouse’s stories are generally less imaginative than those of his predecessor, Steve Moore. This impression is strengthened by “The Neutron Knights” (issue 60), which is a retread of “The Life-Bringer” that substitutes Arthurian legend for Greek mythology. This time, the Doctor visits a retro-futuristic Camelot where he meets both Arthur and Merlin; the adventure ends with the whole place being destroyed by a nuclear bomb (dubbed the Dragon). The Doctor concludes that he has witnessed a time-loop, again raising questions as to whether the story takes place in the past or the future. This was, of course, years before the television story “Battlefield” established that Merlin was a future incarnation of the Doctor – a detail that adds an amusing subtext to the scene in the comic where Merlin’s shade announces that he and the Doctor shall someday meet again.
The Doctor Who Monthly issue containing “The Neutron Knights” was published on 10 December 1981. By the time the next issue came out, a new series of Doctor Who had begun on television, cementing Peter Davison as the current Doctor. Starting with the next issue of the magazine, Davison’s Fifth Doctor likewise replaced Tom Baker’s Fourth as the hero of the comics, as well.
Looking back at the Doctor Who comics of the Fourth Doctor era, from “The Iron Legion” to “The Neutron Knights”, one complaint that could be levelled is that the Doctor is often cast as a bystander in his own feature. “The Star Beast” is ultimately the story of two schoolchildren finding a furry alien creature, with the Doctor in a secondary role as helper. In “The Spider-God” his only purpose is to explain everything at the very end. Then we have “End of the Line”, where the Doctor conspicuously fails to save his new friends while the main villain ends up killing himself.
Granted, there are plenty of television stories that similarly cast the Doctor as a man trying to get out of trouble, rather than a world-saving hero. But these at least give him the responsibility of helping his companions out of danger, as well; this aspect left the comics once Sharon was written out.
All that being said, while the Doctor comes across as an ingredient rather than a story-driving protagonist, he is nonetheless a vital ingredient. Without him, these stories of robot Romans, alien werewolves, gung-ho space marines, chainsaw-wielding cannibals and nuclear-powered Knights of the Round Table would be largely indistinguishable from the violent, hardware-focused stories coming out of 2000 AD. With him, however, they take on a touch of light-heartedness.
The Doctor is a hero who can diffuse a situation without physical conflict: he can reduce a fearsome alien to helpless giggles with a well-timed joke, show a band of space soldiers that guns are not always the solution, and confound a wicked witch by telling her servant to make a cup of tea. This humorous aspect never descended into empty whimsy: the light-heartedness was always accompanied by an element of commentary, a combination that is distinctly Doctor Who.
In all important respects, then, the creators succeeded in translating the Doctor into comic format.
