Top 10 Doctor Who comic strips
I have a confession to make: I’ve never been a fan of comics in general. I’ve read the odd Tintin adventure and once attempted to read the popular Watchmen, but the medium leaves me cold. There is, of course, one big exception and given that this is a Doctor Who blog, you can guess what that is.
I discovered Doctor Who comics thanks to DWM, which I started reading in 1989. I say ‘reading’ but – and here’s the important bid – as a severely dyslexic child of seven, I could barely read a word of it. But I loved the pictures.
Doctor Who is rich in visual delights and I revelled in the photos of all the various monsters, characters and alien worlds, even if I had no idea of their context. Then, of course, there was the comic strip. I don’t think I read many of the captions even, but I was hooked by its fast and exciting visual storytelling. No doubt it helped that the first strip I saw, Nemesis of the Daleks, featured the Daleks and my beloved seventh Doctor (the combination of which had hooked me on the series in the first place a year earlier).
In the years since I discovered DWM, I bought up back issues, keenly followed the Classic Comics reprints magazine, devoured fanzines and found old comics and annuals in second-hand shops. Distilled from these decades of Doctor Who comics reading, I present ten of my favourite comic strips.
Warning: there will be SPOILERS ahead for very old comic strips!
*Sub Zero (Countdown #47-54, 1972)
I enjoy this strip for its imaginative/ludicrous storyline and the outlandish images that result, all beautifully drawn by Gerry Haylock, who does a nice Dalek. Dr Who, as he was then known, is visiting a US Navy base in the Antarctic, for reasons unspecified, when a group of Daleks that has been hiding out at the South Pole for hundreds of years launches its bid for world domination. They use a fleet of captured ships and submarines (what became of their own technology is also left unstated) and attack Australia, presumably with a view to spreading across the globe from there.
This premise results in such unusual images as Daleks being pulled on a sledge by their human slaves, and mind-controlled sailors from various periods in history building Daleks in workshops. Despite winning the day, Dr Who isn’t able to prevent a nuclear strike on Sydney harbour, though this appears to cause little damage bar severing the famous bridge. It’s all utterly preposterous but “most exciting” as another Dr Who once said.
The Planet of the Daleks (Countdown/TV Action + Countdown #55-62, 1972)
The Daleks were back in the very next adventure, and it’s a belter. This time Dr Who and his new pal Finney are captured by the Daleks, who use their ‘time vector’ to draw the TARDIS to Skaro. The Daleks hijack the TARDIS but, forcing a landing in the mutated jungles of Skaro, Dr Who and Finney fight back with the aid of some prehistoric monsters. With Daleks and dinosaurs, what more could any young fan want in a comic strip?
The story includes such dramatic turns as Dr Who seemingly taken over by the Daleks and made their leader, then plunging the Dalek-hijacked TARDIS into a sun in an attempt to wipe them out. Later, after a landing in the wilds of Skaro, Finney leads dinosaurs in a charge at the Daleks, riding on the back of a Triceratops.
Skaro is better realised here than ever it was on television, with vast jungles bisected by raised metallic highways for the Daleks to roll along. All the art (Gerry Haylock again) is impressive but most notable are the full colour painted pages which formed the front covers of their respective issues – and are absolutely wonderful.
Note that the comics claimed this title a year before the television series. The usage here includes the definite article, appropriately for a Skaro-based escapade, whereas the TV story lacks it, perhaps reflecting Spiridon’s status as merely a planet of the Daleks.
Ride to Nowhere (Countdown Annual 1973)
A race of aliens who shun the use of force kidnap leading electronics boffin Sir Henry Felton, who is on the verge of inventing a teleport, to avert the disaster of mankind using it to send themselves out to other worlds. Dr Who rumbles them but lets them depart peacefully and Sir Henry decides to think carefully about the potential implications of his work. It’s an unusually low key and contemplative story for a medium which thrives on action, all the more so for it being in a publication aimed at young children.
I’m not sure that the aliens are entirely wise to kidnap Sir Henry by installing a teleport in his limo, which they then leave behind, given that their intention was to prevent humanity developing a teleport in the first place… Nevertheless, Ride to Nowhere could almost pass as a UNIT television story, although Dr Who appears to be a well-known figure and the Brigadier-proxy character (the ‘Superintendent’ – not even an army rank), appears to be based on a publicity photo of the General Scobie waxwork from Spearhead from Space.
Death Flower! (TV Comic #1,204-1,214, 1975)
This, the first comic strip adventure of the fourth Doctor, might initially seem to have been inspired by The Seeds of Doom, but it actually predates the television serial by about a year. Nevertheless, the similarities are notable: a vegetable monster, humans seen in various stages of metamorphosis into plant matter (looking much as in the TV story), a building engulfed by the sinister vegetation, a contemporary Earth setting, etc. But with a remote agricultural plant being used to grow the army of deadly ‘Sarccoids’, the strip is more like a cross between The Day of the Triffids and Quatermass II.
Death Flower! sees a new, slightly more mature approach to Doctor Who in comic strip form. Real effort is made to adhere to the continuity of the TV series. The lead character is now the Doctor, not Dr Who, there’s an explanation of the recent regeneration, including a reference to the Brigadier, and Sarah-Jane Smith features as the companion. The conclusion, which seems to be modelled on the disappointing film version of The Day of the Triffids, is unsatisfactory in its simplicity, but even so I’d happily court controversy by rating Death Flower! above its close cousin The Seeds of Doom.
End of the Line (DWM #54-55, 1981)
I include this strip as an illustration of the range of the comic strips of DWM in its early years, and particularly as an example of the extremities of bleakness they occasionally embraced. In Steve Parkhouse’s story, atmospherically drawn by Dave Gibbons, the companionless fourth Doctor arrives in a polluted post-urban collapse city, where he battles a roaming gang of cannibals.
The ‘Angels’, a band of friendly vigilantes he briefly teams up with, are largely massacred by the cannibals but the Doctor enables the last few to escape via train to what they believe to be the paradise of countryside beyond the city. Arriving by TARDIS to join them, the Doctor discovers that there is no countryside left, just radioactive wasteland, and his new friends are nowhere to be found.
With the cannibals voicing a visceral delight at the prospect of eating human(oid) flesh, far beyond anything seen later in The Two Doctors, and body modifications such a chainsaw arm being used in combat, it’s a violent and dark tale. Its conclusion, which undercuts the earlier suggestion of a happy ending, is utterly bleak and without a glimmer of optimism, at odds with the usual ethos of Doctor Who in most of its forms.
Voyager (DWM #88-99, 1984-85)
A bit of a cheat this one, as I’m counting as one the lengthy run of strips, starting with the introduction to the DWM strip of the sixth Doctor and his shape-changing companion Frobisher (who largely took the form of a penguin) in The Shape-Shifter and ending 12 instalments later in Once Upon a Time Lord, which was later collected under the title of Voyager as a (newly coloured) Marvel graphic novel.
The story proper gets underway in the second strip, called The Voyager, in which the eponymous god-like entity makes his entrance, and the Doctor encounters Astrolabus, legendary thief of ancient star charts. It’s a dream-like tale, full of wonderful images such as Astrolabus making his getaway in a Leonardo Da Vinci-designed flying vehicle and the Doctor lashed to the wheel of a ship heading over the edge of the world.
The saga takes a breather for Polly the Glot, a lighter, more comedic story about the hunting of an endangered species of giant creatures living in space. The finale, Once Upon a Time Lord, has both the Doctor and Voyager catch up with Astrolabus and learning that the stolen charts were tattooed upon his body. It’s an inventive conclusion, with several pages realised in the style of Rupert the Bear strips, complete with rhyming couplet captions.
Written by Steve Parkhouse and drawn by John Ridgway, Voyager is an imaginative and visual tour de force. It is certainly the pinnacle of the sixth Doctor’s comic strip adventures and easily the equivalent of the more celebrated Tides of Time from the same writer.
Fellow Travellers & The Good Soldier (DWM #164-166, 1990 & DWM #175-178, 1991)
I’ll cover these two in one go. After Doctor Who ended on television in 1989, script editor Andrew Cartmel was brought in to the DWM comic strip to continue his work there. When we later learned of his provisional plans for season 27 the story ideas left me cold, but Cartmel’s comic strips were – and still seem – a fitting continuation of the adventures of the seventh Doctor and Ace: similar themes continued from the TV run but the stories were allowed to be a little more adult and unrestrained in their realisation.
In Fellow Travellers the Doctor and Ace encounter a pair of Hitchers, disembodied creatures from ‘the void’ which have hitched a lift in the TARDIS to contemporary Earth. It’s a good story for Ace, who finds a room full of weapons in the Doctor’s old country pile and gets to blow up a police car. It’s a dark tale, with human (and feline) hate and anger drawing the Hitchers to their hosts. The theme of racial tensions that often occurred in Cartmel’s period of the programme comes out again in an old woman’s resentment at her son’s choice of wife. The violent Hitcher-possessed granny is simultaneously hideous and amusing.
The Good Soldier sees the Doctor and Ace encountering Cybermen when they abduct a small chunk of 1950s Nevada, complete with a diner and squad of soldiers. It’s a fairly simple tale, with hints of cyberpunk in its conclusion, but is much more horrific than could have been realised on TV. In one particularly grim episode, the Cybermen make the soldiers’ commander think he is back in the Korean war shooting at the enemy, whereas he is actually killing his own restrained men. They then amputate his legs to fit him into their technology.
The art by Mike Collins is excellent, most notably the realisation of the Cybermen themselves as a Junkyard Demon-esque mix of the Tenth Planet and Moonbase varieties. The strip also, unusually, sees the TARDIS with a working chameleon circuit being driven in the form of a 1950s Cadillac. Wicked.
The Cybermen (DWM #215-238, 1994-96)
Mirroring the format of the legendary TV Century 21 Daleks strip of the 1960s, The Cybermen charted the history and evolution of the eponymous cyborgs on Mondas in one-page instalments. Alan Barnes’s stories drew on Doctor Who history to posit that a parallel race of Silurians and Sea Devils had a hand in the Cybermen via genetic enhancement of the ‘ape men’ – hence the Cyberman design incorporating a ‘third eye’. Barnes’s script is biblical in scope and character, spanning vast periods and spaces, and introducing fantastical, mythic elements, such as Golgoth, a Silurian god, and the release into space of an embryonic Cyberman.
Adrian salmon’s characteristic angular, high-contrast art is beautiful, and develops as the strip progresses. It evolves to incorporate colour from the seventh instalment and becomes more detailed and less angular towards the strip’s conclusion. The composition of each of Salmon’s frames is perfect, with striking character poses and dynamic action sequences. This is a Book of Genesis for Mondas, realised in a uniquely expressionistic style, and is absolutely breathtaking.
Crydonia (Reverse the Polarity! #17-20, #24-25, 2004-07)
It wasn’t only professional officially-licenced comics and magazines that published Doctor Who comic strips. Plenty of fanzines did too and Crydonia from New Zealand fanzine Reverse the Polarity! is one of the very best.
In the mythic, biblical style of The Cybermen, which was one of his inspirations, Peter Adamson presented the history of Mars, as told by a Martian historian. It includes not only the obvious in the Ice Warriors, but also the Osirans, Fendahl, a visit by Cybermen, and a pleasing nod to the Nigel Kneale canon too. It’s a sweeping narrative, covering thousands of years of civilisations, wars and devastation.
The slightly stylised but often impressively detailed artwork is informed by the work of Adrian Salmon and Phil Bevan (my two favourite fan artists), but has a unique character of its own. Adamson’s Ice Warriors and Cybermen in particular are beautiful. It really is a hugely impressive piece of work and deserves a much greater audience than it has received so far. What price a collected reprint of the whole saga?
All images above are now © Panini UK, except for the final one which is © Peter Adamson
This is an updated version of an article originally published in Plaything of Sutekh issue 4 from 2015, edited by John Connors and Richard Farrell. Visit John’s website here.