John Stokes (1)

Prime lays the smackdown. Its nice to see Big Red get to show why he's in charge. Of course, his tendency to flip between emo inaction and violent reaction indicates a disordered personality, which is odd because Transformers don't have parents. Perhaps it is developmental trauma caused by a lack of early parental stability, or maybe war trauma. Either seems quite likely.

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

This five-page comic was originally given away with Titan's 2018 Doctor Who comics Humble Bundle; at the time, it was billed as an exclusive, but the cover/first page (see right) was clearly composed for the The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano collection, which came out shortly thereafter, so that was a bit of a fib.

It's written by Paul Cornell, being one his four or five last-ever Doctor Who stories [note: link is to a members-only forum, though anyone can join it], and illustrated by show more John Stokes, who's one of those folks acclaimed as a classic British comics artist that I only know from their forays into American franchise work: The Transformers, L.E.G.I.O.N., The Sandman Presents, Starman, and so on. (He's worked on five things I've written up on my blog, but I haven't mentioned him in any of my write-ups, so I assume he must have been a minor contributor in each case.)

Well, it's solid stuff; had this actually been Cornell's last Doctor Who work, it would have been a good one. It's set in the 1963-64 season, with Ian and Barbara wandering around the TARDIS at night, at first alone, and then with Susan and the Doctor. It's a charming glimpse into the characters of everyone involved; Cornell and Stokes both do a great job of capturing the voices, likenesses, and personalities of the original TARDIS team. Stokes's black-and-white work reminds me of the early DWM era, which is of course a good thing. Cornell does that thing he likes to do, where he establishes a later Doctor's catchphrase was originally said by an earlier Doctor in slightly different form; in this case he adds a "Billy fluff" to it! The Doctor claims, "Asleep?! Eh?! Sleep is for butterflies -- and, I mean to say, tortoises!" Bit of a groaner, but I dug it.

Titan Doctor Who: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

This collection is a bit of a mixed bag.

It starts with two story arcs from the Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain Weekly anthology title which were ok, but nothing special.

Then has a fantastic two-part Marvel Team-Up story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne where Captain Britain actually teams up with Spider-Man (as opposed to just sharing title duties on a book) and they face off against Arcade in his first appearance ever. It's amazing seeing how many of the classic Arcade story beats show more and iconic character points are present right from this first story.

Then, finally, we move to Hulk Comic (another anthology title) and its Black Knight stories because, after the cancellation of Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain Weekly, CB was not seen as a viable or interesting character. But editor Dez Skin, writer Steve Parkhouse and artists Paul Neary and John Stokes wanted to give CB another shot so reintroduced him as a side character in the Black Knight series. They grounded the character further into Arthurian legend and successfully set him up for the upcoming seminal run by Alan Moore and Alan Davis and the introduction of the Marvel-616 designation for the main Marvel universe as part of the Jasper Warp storyline (coming up in volume 4).

Overall, worth the read for the Arcade story in the middle and the Captain Britain backstory which helps setup the best X-book ever: Excalibur! show less