Geoff Senior (1) (1960–)

Rodimus Prime sees the value in capitalism. But here's a question - given that millions of years of civil war have clearly collapsed Cybertron's economy, where does Prime get the shanix from? Presumably the only commodity the Autobots have is bodies, so are Autobots selling their labour to other species in order to gain foreign currency and access to interplanetary markets. Maybe they rely on donations from sympathisers. Or perhaps there are other species whose governments channel funding to show more them because the Decepticons pose a threat to them too. We should be told. show less

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!

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

Megatron shoots his own head off because so that Straxus can't win. Now that's dedication. But if Straxus could build a new body with all the powers that Megatron had, why bother trying to take over Megatron's body, why not just take that one. Why make it look like Megatron? Why give it Megatron's personality? Was this whole Two Megatrons thing really the easiest way to bring Megatron back for the American readers without ruining UK continuity, when you were doing all sorts of other things show more to make UK continuity a gordian knot? Nevertheless, this is gloriously bonkers and incredibly confusing and a fine little story. show less

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

This is the first DWM graphic novel (in strip order) that has bonus features beyond an archival interview; it contains a new introduction by Richard Starkings (the strip's editor for much of this era) and a set of interviews with the writers and artists put together by John Freeman (the magazine's editor for much of this era). This means I have more insight into the production decisions behind the strip than in previous show more eras.

The big difference between this run and previous ones is that it has neither a consistent writer (as the strip did from #1 to #110) nor a consistent artist (as the strip did from #1 to 69 and #88 to 133). Starkings explains the decision: "it had often occurred to me that the strip should reflect the series and feature a different writer and director for each story" (p. 6). But I think this neglects a way in which television is a different medium than tv. On screen, the writer and director might always change, but the performance stays the same. Every episode has got Sylvester McCoy in. But in a comic, the artist isn't just the director, they're also every actor. This means that even when the strips are good, there's no throughline, and the lack of consistency leaves it all feeling like less than the sum of its parts. From #70 to 87, you had a consistent tone and style from Steve Parkhouse even if the art was always different; from #111 to 133 you had a consistent tone and style from John Ridgway even if the writing was always different. Here you have neither. And no companion! (The strip was last companion free from #49 to 77.) I cannot think of any other ongoing non-anthology comic that took an approach like this.

Now, this might all be rubbish, because I read this all in one go, whereas it would have come out across two years. Maybe it reads fine when you have a month gap every time the creative team changes? But this is how I read it!

A Cold Day in Hell! / Redemption!
These two strips transition out of the trappings of the sixth Doctor era: Frobisher departs the Doctor; when he leaves, new companion Olla is introduced, but she's gone within one more strip herself! The actual stories here are so-so, the Doctor running around after Ice Warriors and such, and doing a lot of goofy stuff that makes you suspect all Simon Furman had to go off was the script for Time and the Rani. Frobisher's writing-out is pretty perfunctory, as is Olla's.

The Crossroads of Time
So I've been reading the Marvel UK Transformers comics in parallel with the DWM strips, all because here they collide. At the end of the Transformers story "The Legacy of Unicron!" (in Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five), the robot mercenary Death's Head is tossed into a malfunctioning time portal; here we find out where he went, as he emerges in the Doctor Who universe. I don't object to this on principle; indeed, it strikes me as one of the USPs of reading the strip, and I was curious to see how this whole crossover thing would shake out.

Alas, in practice, it's freaking terrible. Death's Head, who in Transformers was a "principled" freelance peacekeeping agent in that he killed for money-- and not for pleasure-- here attacks the Doctor for no real good reason, just an accidental collision in the Time Vortex. The Doctor fights him with lethal force! It doesn't kill Death's Head, but he doesn't know that; I get that Death's Head had to be shrunk down to human scale if he was going to interact with other Marvel UK characters, but maybe the Doctor could have done it on purpose? And then the Doctor sends this homicidal bounty hunter to Earth in the year 8162 and is just like, "Ah, oh well, I'm sure it'll be fine." I think there could have been a great story about a clash of values between the Doctor and Death's Head... but this is manifestly not it. I can only hope that Death's Head's solo feature, which I plan on following him into, is better than this.

Claws of the Klathi!
This is a decent piece of Victoriana by stalwart DWM contributor Michael Collins. It feels to me like it has a bit too much going for its three parts: a freakshow escapee, a pair of alien refugees, a giant robot, a gathering of men of science, and the Crystal Palace struggle for space. The men of science, for example, kind of feel pointless. But it's certainly the best story in this volume thus far, and Kev Hopgood is one of DWM's better post-Ridgway artists.

Culture Shock! / Keepsake / Planet of the Dead / Echoes of the Mogor! / Time and Tide
This run of strips reminded me a lot of Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse's run from #46 to 60 (back in Dragon's Claws): it's all one- and two-part stories, often hinging on some kind of highbrow science fictional concept taken to a depressing conclusion. In Culture Shock!, the Doctor discovers a sentient race of bacteria who need his help; in Keepsake he (accidentally?) bullies a mercenary into helping him out; in Echoes of the Mogor!, he finds a long-dead species who embody their memories in crystal; in Time and Tide, he comes upon a dying species on a water planet. They are all varying degrees of fine, and the artists all have varying degrees of command over Sylvester McCoy's likeness. Culture Shock! had a cool hook, but I didn't really buy the Doctor's depression; I liked the idea of Keepsake but thought the humor didn't quite come off; Time and Tide was crazy depressing, and am not convinced it really fits the character of the Doctor. (There's a lot of standing around watching people die!)

Planet of the Dead has the Doctor encountering first dead companions, and then his own previous selves. I didn't think John Freeman really captured the voices of the companions and Doctors enough to pull this off, but Lee Sullivan was an excellent choice for illustrating it.

Follow That TARDIS!
The Doctor is forced by the Sleeze Brothers, a pair of private investigators, to chase the Monk's TARDIS throughout a series of historical disasters. I am convinced this could be funny, but I did not think the joke actually came off.

Invaders from Gantac!
Going into this, I was like, "Oh no... another comedy story." But it turned out to be the best story in the whole volume! The Doctor lands on Earth in the far future year of 1992 to find out that it's been taken over by aliens, and his only ally is a homeless man named Leapy. In its mix of big events and light comedy, it very much felt like something I could imagine Russell T Davies putting on screen as a big, bright two-parter in the Aliens of London/Rise of the Cybermen/Daleks Take Manhattan/The Sontaran Stratagem slot. There's some good comedy, but also a serious edge: more than any other story, I could imagine McCoy doing this on screen. It's pacey and twisty, and the only thing I didn't like was the kind of perfunctory ending. That said, Griffiths and Smith don't exactly nail McCoy's likeness. (But then, who does!?)

Stray Observations:

• If you were a hypothetical reader who never watched the show, I think you would imagine that after The World Shapers, the sixth Doctor, Frobisher, and Peri all went on an adventure where Peri left with Yrcanos and the Doctor regenerated. There's no indication here that, say, Frobisher was dropped off or anything.
• I read The Age of Chaos, even though it was written many years later, between The World Shapers and A Cold Day in Hell! Doing so revealed an inconsistency; the way Frobisher mopes over Peri in Cold Day makes it clear he hasn't been visiting her and her descendants as Age of Chaos established, and wound of her departure is obviously quite raw. But if you wanted to get quite convoluted, I think you could solve it by imagining that for Frobisher, Age of Chaos takes place after A Cold Day in Hell!! The sixth Doctor and Peri drop off Frobisher and experience the events of Trial of a Time Lord. Frobisher is then picked up by the seventh Doctor, who tells him what happened, and then he gets dropped off again on A-Lux. Then he gets picked up by the sixth Doctor, who takes him to Krontep and meet Peri again, along with the kids. Easy!
• Poor Olla: I am reasonably sure she is the only DWM-original companion to never appear or even be mentioned again. The Doctor doesn't call her up for help in The Stockbridge Showdown!
• I did notice that in A Cold Day in Hell!, Furman did something he also does in his Transformers strips: so that reading the recap isn't dull, it usually also includes new information. But that means if you only skim the recap, you might miss the new information! However, I am used to it now, and it doesn't throw me as much.
• Richard Starkings says the first thing he did when taking over as editor was fire John Ridgway because he cost so much... but back in the introduction to Voyager, Ridgway said he quit when the strip switched to McCoy so that he could focus on the steadier income from drawing DC's Hellblazer.
• Fun fact: In The Crossroads of Time, the Doctor sends Death's Head to the year 8162. This is because that was the setting of Marvel UK's Dragon's Claws series, but because Dogbolter showed up in the Death's Head solo series that span out of Dragon's Claws, that means a significant chunk of the DWM mythos must also date to the 82nd century. If that's when Dogbolter is from, it must also be when Frobisher is from; we know the Free-Fall Warriors are from the same era as Dogbolter; and we know Ivan Asimoff is also from that era. It also seems likely that Olla is from the era. Abel's Story and War-Game also go in this era. Much much later, The Stockbridge Showdown would place Sharon's new home era in the same time as all the others as well. All because Marvel UK wanted to spin Death's Head into his own series! Plus, this means Dragon's Claws takes place in the Doctor Who universe...
• Claws of the Klathi! commits one of my neo-Victorian pet peeves: there is no way a man of means who dabbled in science would call himself a "scientist" in 1851 as the gentlemen do here. It sounds like a job one might have!
• Culture Shock! was the last Doctor Who Magazine contribution from Grant Morrison, who is arguably the most famous person to have worked on the strip other than Dave Gibbons. (Alan Moore only wrote for the back-ups.) He would write creator-owned stuff like We3 (Homeward Bound with killer cyborgs) later on, but I know him best as a prolific DC contributor, writing things like JLA, Seven Soldiers of Victory, All-Star Superman, 52, Final Crisis, and The Multiversity.
• Bryan Hitch illustrates just one strip, but still gets cover credit; he would do some genre-redefining work in the 2000s on The Ultimates for Marvel and The Authority for Wildstorm.
• Doctor Who tie-ins often like to do a thing where the Doctor remembers his companions who died while travelling with him, but are hamstrung in this by the fact that on screen, that amounts to unmemorable and/or terrible ones like Katarina, Sara, and Adric. So DWM gains a slight boost from the events of The World Shapers in that stories like Planet of the Dead can now use Jamie, a dead companion who is both good and memorable.
• Echoes of the Mogor! is the first story to establish that the Doctor is trying to get to the planet Maruthea; in Invaders from Gantac! we learn he's attempting to attend the birthday of someone called Bonjaxx, but he doesn't make it within the confines of this volume.
• It also introduces the Foreign Hazard Duty team, a sort of future space police; evidently we will see them in future volumes.
• "Richard Alan" is a pseudonym for strip editor Richard Starkings; so is "Zed."
• Follow That TARDIS! is, I believe, the only DWM contribution of Andy Lanning, who would become a prolific contributor to Marvel and DC in the 2000s. My favorite work of his is a run on Legion of Super-Heroes, but he also contributes to basically every DC event, including Infinite Crisis, 52, and Flashpoint. He strikes me as one of those guys who is capable of great work, but will also happily contribute to drek if that's what you need.
• So far the Master has never appeared in a DWM strip; the Meddling Monk has appeared twice. Who is the real Time Lord nemesis of the Doctor?
• This volume contains the only Doctor Who Magazine contributions of Kev Hopgood, but he must have made a good impression on someone for his Sylvester McCoy likeness, as twenty-five years later he returned to Doctor Who to illustrate the seventh Doctor segment of Prisoners of Time! I liked his art here, but in my review of that volume I called it "stiff."
• The Sleeze Brothers went on to have their own comic series from Marvel. The Tardis wiki doesn't count it as part of the Doctor Who universe, but who knows why. Their rules for "inclusion" are typically pretty asinine, anyway. You can get it pretty cheap on the secondary market, but I am not sure I am motivated to do so...
• Alan Grant never contributed to DWM again, and hilariously he doesn't even remember that he did this strip. I know him best as the co-writer of L.E.G.I.O.N. from DC, with fellow Marvel UK contributor Barry Kitson. But of course his greatest contribution to comics was the seminal and influential Bob the Galactic Bum.
• Yes, that's a lot of "where are they now?" updates in this one! If your comic collection has twenty-one individual contributors (not counting letterers), I guess odds are a lot of them will go on to be famous.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less