Alan McKenzie (1)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

After souring on Steve Parkhouse's approach to Doctor Who across the course of The Tides of Time, I was pleasantly surprised by this volume. I don't know if it's because Parkhouse found his enjoyment of the series revitalized by a new Doctor, or if it's because he was now writing toward the talents of John Ridgway (in the introduction, Ridgway discusses how Parkhouse tailored the strip to his interests), but suddenly the show more whole thing feels fresh and energetic in a way entirely unlike 4-Dimensional Vistas.

The Shape Shifter
This picks up right from The Moderator; the Doctor, having regenerated between strips (it's this kind of thing that makes the strip feel like a parallel universe to the show rather than something that slots in between it) is tracking down whoever hired the Moderator to kill Gus. But it doesn't just pick up in terms of plot but also style and tone: just as The Moderator was dominated by colorful, humorous narration from its title character, so too is The Shape Shifter. This story introduces us to Avan Tarklu, a shape-shifting private investigator who decides to find the Doctor for Dogbolter and turn him in for the reward money. The narrator is a delight, and yet again, I found myself wishing Big Finish's comic strip adaptations lasted longer than a single box set, because I would have loved to hear Robert Jezek read some of this aloud. The story is filled with a lot of genuinely humorous shape-shifting antics; I laughed out loud more than once. This is definitely one of those strips where story and writing are totally simpatico. Avan becoming a burger or hijacking the TARDIS, the panels where they imagine how Avan could make the Doctor's life hell hiding in the TARDIS, it's all a delight. After a number of one-off artists, John Ridgway has debuted as the strip's new long-term artist, and he nails it from the off; his Colin Baker isn't perfect, but otherwise, he has a great sense of tone, both grim and humor, and his storytelling is always clear.

I did find there was one big leap I didn't quite follow: why does Avan agree to collaborate with the Doctor to fool Dogbolter and split the reward money? We go from Avan having the Doctor over a barrel to the two teaming up to take down Avan's ostensible employer! But hey, it's a fun con, and I'll take it.

Voyager
In the time since The Shape Shifter, Avan has taken the name "Frobisher" "in deference to the Doctor's love of all things English" (and it's implied Avan might not actually be his real name, either); here he also adopts the penguin form that will become his default. His presence maintains the moments of humor that Parkhouse introduced with The Shape Shifter. (There's a great gag where Frobisher decides to disguise himself by putting on a fake mustache, for example, and I liked the bit about the gun the Doctor threatens Astrolabus with.) But otherwise this is very unlike what has come so far.

Reading The Moderator and The Shape Shifter, you might think the strip was moving off into a new storyline about Dogbolter in a sort of noir universe, but Voyager is a surreal, weird fantasy epic. The Doctor has a dream about being lashed to a doomed sailing ship, then he finds the ship, along with the mysterious Astrolabus, who's fleeing the strange entity known as the Voyager, apparently for a past crime.

It's weird stuff. I don't quite entirely get it. But it's excellent stuff, too; Parkhouse's occasional moments of surreality in The Tides of Time were great, and with Ridgway as his partner, this story leans into it completely. But unlike some surreal stories, you really feel a sense of danger and mystery. Astrolabus's da Vinci helicopter is awesome; the true identity of his TARDIS is awesome. This is Doctor Who as grandiose mythology, and I wish I got it just a tad more, but I otherwise enjoyed it a lot.

Polly the Glot
Ivan Asimoff of The Free-Fall Warriors reappears, having made his last DWM appearance nearly forty issues prior; I think this makes him the first original strip character to recur after an absence, and leads to a feeling of a DWM universe being built up.

Shortly after Voyager, the Doctor and Frobisher bump into Asimoff at a busy spaceport; Asimoff asks for help freeing a spacefaring life-form called a zyglot from captivity in his capacity as treasurer of the Save the Zyglot Trust. The plan the Doctor and Frobisher come up with is to kidnap Asimoff and send off a ransom demand so that the public will donate to the Trust to help fulfill the ransom demand! This plan seemed a bit wacky, and I was feeling uncertain about the whole deal, but once the three of them go about an Akker zyglot-hunting ship, the strip sparkles with the kind of humor that has partially defined it of late; the dull Akkers are great, the janitor robot pretending to be a warrior robot is a delight.

In the end, the Doctor donates his share of the money he and Frobisher ripped off from Dogbolter to the Save the Zyglot Trust. It's not a total tonal shift into the humorous, though; the moment where Polly the Glot is freed from captivity is one of beauty, and Astrolabus turns out to the president of the Trust, giving the Doctor glimpses of doom throughout the story, and then kidnapping the Doctor at the end. I think it would be easy for a writer's approach to seem tired as he approaches the end of his tenure (Steve Moore's did after just over a dozen strips), but Parkhouse I think has totally reinvented himself as a writer to play to Ridgway's strengths. (In the introduction, Ridgway said Parkhouse had grown tired; he wasn't even scripting even more, he'd just call Ridgway on the phone and tell him what to draw on a panel-by-panel basis, and then he'd do the dialogue once Ridgway submitted his art.)

Once Upon a Time-Lord
Steve Parkhouse departs the DWM strip in a story that wraps up the Voyager/Astrolabus storyline. This one too is a delight, as things all get a bit meta when Astrolabus uses his storytelling powers to slow down the Doctor, converting the strip into a children's story book! Surely "Frobisher Eats a Worm" and "Frobisher Wishes He Hadn't" is a highlight of the strip. When Astrolabus thinks he's escaped, he literally escapes the confines of the comic page, running across a blank space with no panel borders. In the end, though, the Doctor turns Astrolabus over to the Voyager, freeing himself from the feeling of doom he's had, but leaving him unsettled. This one is a little too quick to be as satisfying as Voyager, but I still enjoyed it.

War-Game
Alan McKenzie, formerly editor of the strip, takes over as write from this story, which sends the Doctor and Frobisher to a barbarian planet where they meet a Draconian who crash-landed and set himself up as a local warlord. The comedy is the best part of it, my favorite gag being one where the Doctor and Frobisher get wine, but then reveal they don't have any money. The Doctor says, "I'm sure I can explain.... After all, what can they do to us?" Next panel: the Doctor and Frobisher are being auctioned off as slaves. In this story, Frobisher is back to shape-shifting, making himself look like a barbarian. When they attack a castle, Frobisher makes himself big... only to discover that makes it easier to be stabbed in the leg.

Outside of this, though, I found this one to be fairly dull stuff.

Funhouse
The TARDIS materializes in a weird sort of space entity that takes the form of a haunted house; it feels like McKenzie trying to give Ridgway the kind of surreal stuff to draw that he did so well under Parkhouse... but I didn't really find it interesting, a couple nice moments aside. (I liked the Doctor's attempted use of an axe to resolve the crisis is fun; the use of string for the actual solution is cute, but feels like nonsense even by Doctor Who time travel standards.)

Kane's Story / Abel's Story / The Warrior's Story / Frobisher's Story
I wanted to like this story. Alan McKenzie takes a stab at the epic, with a four-part story about creatures called Skeletoids invading the Federation of Worlds. The Doctor and Frobisher are among a team of six who unite to stop the invasion; most of the other characters have very detailed backstories and become the strip's viewpoint characters... only it's three-and-a-half issues of set-up and just half an issue of actual action! All the set-up is made totally irrelevant, and the way the Skeletoids are defeated feels far too easy; I think you're supposed to feel bad about one character's sacrifice, but you barely know or care about him. One of the six is the Draconian warlord from War-Game, but at an earlier point in his timeline. If I had cared about him in War-Game, I might have found that more interesting.

Another of the six is Peri, making her strip debut-- which makes her the first human-played companion to appear. Peri doesn't do much, though the way she's folded in is interesting; the Doctor goes to pick her up, where she's working as a waitress in 1985 New York; she says, "I never thought I'd see you again!", so whatever circumstances she left the Doctor under, it felt like a final exit rather than a temporary break. I don't think Frobisher knows here, though, based on how he answers Kane's question about who she is. I don't know where you would wedge the Doctor's travels with her into the strip's continuity; before The Shape Shifter, I guess, but that would disrupt the way The Moderator flows right into it. I'm curious to see what kind of use the strip makes of her going forward; it didn't exactly make great use of its previous human companion.

Anyway, this means this volume, which begins quite strongly, ends with a fizzle. But, you know, tell John Ridgway to draw an ancient valley, and he will draw the hell out of it.

Stray Observations:

• Pedants should note that the first installment of Voyager claims the story title is The Voyager... but even I am not pedantic enough to do something like list it as The Voyager / Voyager. Interestingly, it is the first story where each individual part has its own subtitle ("It Was a Devil Ship.." / "The Light at the Edge of the World..." / "The Lighthouse" / "Dreams of Eternity" / "The Final Chapter"). Also, the cover of the first twelve DWM graphic novels usually used the title strip's unique logo as the cover logo, but the way "VOYAGER" is rendered on the cover is not the way it's rendered in the strip itself. These are the things that I notice and wonder about...
• In part two of Voyager, the TARDIS materialization noise is rendered as "VOORP! VOORP!" Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
• In the introduction, Ridgway talks about how Parkhouse gave Frobisher mono-morphia so he couldn't actually change form, probably because as a shape-shifter he had virtually unlimited power... Ridgway also complains that McKenzie ignored this, most prominently in War-Game. But as far as I noticed, the word "mono-morphia" is never actually used here! There are just a couple Parkhouse stories where Frobisher acts a bit awkward when someone asks him to shape-shift. I think if you weren't paying attention, it would be easy to miss. (Though, given McKenzie was editor on most of the Parkhouse/Ridgway strips, he should have been paying attention!)
• There was a small reference to the Freefall Warriors in The Moderator, but the reappearance of Ivan Asimoff in Polly the Glot definitively ties The Free-Fall Warriors to the home era of Dogbolter and Frobisher, beginning the creation of DWM cosmology of sorts. There's a reference to Dogbolter's company, Intra-Venus, Inc., in Abel's Story, implying that sequence (and thus War-Game) takes place in the same era, too, which would make this the same time period where Davros is active as Emperor of the Daleks (i.e., between Revelation and Remembrance, though at the time these strips came out, that would not have been known).
  
• I feel like on tv, the sixth Doctor was always bumping into old friends, so the appearance of Asimoff is appropriate. Except that on screen, they were always old friends we'd never actually met before (Azmael in The Twin Dilemma, Dastari in The Two Doctors, Stengos in Revelation of the Daleks, Hallett and Traves in The Trial of a Time Lord), but we actually Asimoff already!
• Steve Parkhouse departs the strip after a venerable run as writer (and sometimes artist) spanning three Doctors! I will see as I go, but I suspect no one will repeat this feat. After leaving DWM, he would go on to illustrate DC/Vertigo titles such as The Sandman and The Dreaming. He would also make one small but important contribution to Marvel UK's Transformers strip, writing its first original story, which was also the only UK story Marvel reprinted in its US book.
  
• For the last six strips, Alan McKenzie is credited as "Max Stockbridge." The pseudonym of "Maxwell Stockbridge" was first used back in 1981 according to the Tardis wiki, but this was its first use in the main DWM strip itself. Poking around in the Grand Comics Database informs me it was previously used on DWM back-up strips, in DWM specials, and in other Marvel UK titles such as Marvel Super-Heroes and Savage Action. I had thought the pseudonym was inspired by Maxwell Edison and Stockbridge, but given those didn't appear until late 1982, the pseudonym must have inspired them. (Tardis wiki also claims it was retired by 1984, but these strips were published in 1985.)
  
• In Kane's Story, Kane suggests fixing the damage done to the TARDIS in Funhouse by replacing the busted temporal component with the intact spatial one; Kane says they'll only need the spatial one for their mission to defeat the Skeletoids. But then they promptly travel back in time to 1985!
• Some people seem to think that Kane's Story indicates Frobisher had already met Peri, but I think it indicates exactly the opposite. The Doctor and Frobisher encounter an illusory version of Peri in Funhouse, which turns into a demon. The Doctor expresses concern for her but Frobisher says nothing to her; in Kane's Story, basically the same thing happens again. When Kane asks who Peri is, Frobisher says, "I just hope she doesn't change into anything more comfortable this time!" This makes me think Funhouse was Frobisher's only previous experience of Peri.
  
• It is sort of weird to note that the sixth Doctor had about half as many tv adventures as the fifth... but twice as many comic ones! As a helpful GallifreyBase commenter elucidates: "Davison was squished at both ends as Tom Baker was the lead in the strip right up to December 1981 and Davison didn't start until Castrovalva was broadcast. However with Twin Dilemma on air at the end of season 21, Colin went straight into the strip straight after Caves was broadcast and remained the lead until Time and the Rani went out, so he got both the gap between seasons 21 & 22, the hiatus and after 23 went out. Giving him much more time as the current Doctor." Good fact!

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Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

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 show more 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
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!

Black Legacy
Previously reviewed as part of Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection here.

Business as Usual
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.

Stardeath / 4-D War / Black Sun Rising
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.

The Touchdown on Deneb 7
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
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.

The Greatest Gamble / The Gods Walk Among Us / Devil of the Deep / The Fires Down Below
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.

Skywatch-7
Previously reviewed as part of Doctor Who Classics here.

Minatorius
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
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.

City of Devils
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:

• 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!

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"Doctor Who: Voyager" sees the end of Steve Parkhouse's five-year run on the DWM comic, and he certainly goes out...well...even weirder than he came in. The Voyager storyline, encompassing four separate stories, abandons the pretense at science fiction seen throughout most of his Davison strips and parades a real science-fantasy sensibility. Thankfully, that works, even if the results are pretty mind-boggling. Parkhouse's interpretation of Colin Baker's Doctor is roughly the same as his show more Davison - no bad thing, and possibly more appropriate here - and his introduction of the shape-changing companion Frobisher is sheer genius (bringing in some welcome levity to the strip). It's too bad that he chose to leave the strip when he did, but the timing was right and certainly not rushed.

Unfortunately, the second half of the graphic novel is where things start to get - at very least - less good. Editor Alan McKenzie's stab at the writer position is perfectly serviceable, and his Doctor is closer to what we saw on screen, but but his one- and two-part stories barely make any sort of impact with the reader. His attempt at an "epic" storyline spanning the four installments of Kane's Story/Abel's Story/The Warrior's Story/Frobisher's Story is interesting, but it just doesn't go anywhere - there's not enough time before the heroes simply have to get down to the business of fighting the fight and saving the day. And it doesn't seem especially Doctor Who-ish, either. It's more like a transplanted Star Trek storyline, as is McKenzie's earlier "War Game"; both have some strong similarities to Klingon-centric plots that TNG and DS9 would feature in the coming decade.

Fortunately John Ridgway's art is a real high point, bringing consistency to the strip for the first time since Dave Gibbons (and the last time for roughly a full ten years afterward). His work is looser and sketchier than Gibbons', but there's a lot of great detail worked in; you can really see it in stories like "Polly the Glot" and "Once Upon a Time Lord."

This is a great graphic novel for the collection, and I'm pleased to finish off the run of Parkhouse strips. I just wish the other included material didn't feel quite so much like filler. show less

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Reprinted from Doctor Who Magazine #88-#107, Voyager contains the adventures of the Sixth Doctor and his alien companion Frobisher, a shape-changing alien Whifferdill who prefers to look like a penguin, all illustrated by John Ridgway who gets a two-page interview at the start. The first half of the book has stories by Steve Backhouse, which are visionary and surreal and take the Doctor to strange places in inner and outer space, swirling show more around the sinister magician Astralabus, but including of all things a Rupert Bear pastiche. The second half, by Alan McKenzie, is a little (though not much) closer to the TV series, even bringing in Peri for the last story, but is still rather better than the TV show was at the time. Ridgway's art is superb as well. It is well established that I am not a Sixth Doctor fan but I recommend this volume. show less