Steve ParkhouseCritiques

Doctor Who: Voyager collects comics that first appeared in Doctor Who Magazine featuring the continuing adventures of the sixth Doctor as portrayed by Colin Baker written by Steve Parkhouse with art by John Ridgway. It includes the stories “The Shape Shifter,” “Voyager,” “Polly the Glot,” and “Once Upon a Time Lord.” The first introduces Avan Tarklu, a Whifferdill shapeshifter, who begins tracking the Doctor for a bounty. He ends up joining the doctor on his travels, adopting the form of a penguin and the name Frobisher. Across the four stories, the Doctor and Frobisher seek after Astrolabus, a magician who stole star maps from the Voyager. The Voyager claims to be a Lord of Life much as the Doctor is a Lord of Time. He tasks the Doctor with retrieving the star maps as they enter on a journey through imagination, demonstrating all the psychedelic storytelling the comics medium makes possible. Ridgway’s art resembles that of Bill Sienkiewicz, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, or Dave McKean in its abstract embellishments, though he faithfully replicates Colin Baker’s appearance as well as that of his TARDIS. Frobisher is good fun as a sidekick and given plenty of expression so that he livens up the story. Doctor Who fans will find this story entertaining, but it will particularly appeal to fans of the Sixth Doctor and that era of Doctor Who storytelling.½

Another interesting mystery for Harry to solve. Plus bonus Neil Gaiman Easter egg.

Several unrelated (?) mysteries big and small for our favorite alien amateur detective to solve. These are resolved. But another bigger, more personal mystery pops up and we get more of Harry's backstory.

An interesting mystery and satisfying payoff

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 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!

The first half of this book isn't very good. But then Alans Moore and Davis take over and bloody hell does it get good and powerful and heartwrenching quickly and effectively. The end of this book (Marvel Super Heroes 386(last page), 387-389 & The Daredevils 1-11) is the beginning of the seminal Captain Britain story arc by Moore & Davis known as the Jaspers Warp and includes a throwaway line in Daredevils #6 that established the main Marvel universe as Earth #616. A number that has since become synonymous with Marvel comics continuity.

I'm excited to read the end of the Jaspers Warp in volume 5.

The Bojeffries are a unique family with supernatural characters and British humor.

Each person in the family is a little strange. I have seen some reviews comparing them to the Addams Family but in my opinion, they lack the Addams charm. The missing charm and the way the stories change abruptly confused me a bit.

I wish I had more to say about this graphic novel but it has taken me months to just write this. I do not hate the stories but I don’t love them either. I wish there was more explanation about the family and each their differences.

I am beginning to think Alan Moore is not my cup of tea after this and The Lost Girls vol.1. They just were not that enjoyable.

This doesn't really make any sense given the long view. In a couple of years there will be transformers coming and going between Cybertron and Earth by spaceship or space bridge and blowing up this one seems a lot of work for very little reason!

Nice shooting Bluestreak!

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 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!

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

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This volume represents a new approach to the Doctor Who Magazine strip, one that pretty much comes to dominate it for much of its run. Steve Parkhouse writes what are ostensibly six separate stories, but each one builds on the previous one, and runs into the next-- and that's a series of linkages that even continues on either side of this collection. Its first story follows up the last story of Dragon's Claw; its last story sets up the first story of Voyager. That said, though I like the idea of an ongoing story in principle, and I remember Scott Gray being a strong practitioner of it during the eighth Doctor years, the way it's done here is pretty slipshod at best...

Timeslip
This little story wraps up the appearances of the fourth Doctor in these graphic novels (for now, anyway; I think he'll be back during the "multi-Doctor" years). I don't know the circumstances of its creation, but it feels like someone whipped it up real quick when The Star Beast was delayed or something. It's much more continuity-focused than most other DWM strips, actually (albeit barely) explaining where Romana is, and giving a footnote about the randomiser. Most notably, the Doctor degenerates because of an alien influence, quickly passing through Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton again before spending four pages as William Hartnell. Unfortunately for the long-term fan, all of the Hartnell fans are referenced from incredibly common publicity photos, which stops the art (which I would say otherwise looks quite nice, especially its vast cosmic horrors) from having any sense of life.

The Tides of Time
This story starts off pretty neat: time disturbances interrupt the Doctor's cricket game, so he goes back to Gallifrey to check out what's going on, only to learn that all reality is at stake. Steve Parkhouse and Dave Gibbons make Gallifrey seem amazing by basically ignoring the way the tv show approached it. Rather than talk to Time Lord officiants, the Doctor goes into the Matrix, ostensibly "home of the Celestial Intervention Agency"-- which I guess is headed by Rassilon and two guys named Morvane and Bedevere (whom the Doctor supposedly already knows), and they all hang out with "High Evolutionaries," which are highly advanced specimens of other races, including Merlin from The Neutron Knights. Like, this is nothing like what we saw on screen, but hey, it gives the whole thing a great sense of grandeur. Gibbon's art for Gallifrey is amazing, looking nothing like how it appeared on screen, but like an epic sci-fi city-- I love it.

The trip to Gallifrey is followed by a surreal visit to another dimension, which Gibbons handles real well... and after this, The Tides of Time totally fizzles out. The Doctor mostly stands around as people deliver exposition and Shayde does all the work. Literally the Doctor's only contribution to this whole big story is to fly Shayde into position. It looks cool, but once the whole thing is over, it seems faintly pointless.

Sir Justin and Shayde are the Doctor's companions for this story. The idea of Sir Justin is fun, but he doesn't have much to do other than stand around and be baffled up until his heroic sacrifice; I found it difficult to summon up much feeling at that point. I don't know if I would count Shayde as a companion at this point, but he does look cool, a Matrix construct with a (detachable!) black globe for a head. We'll be seeing more of him going forward.

Stars Fell on Stockbridge
Dave Gibbons's lengthy run on the strip finally comes to an end here with a neat little two-part story. Here we learn that the village from The Tides of Time where the Doctor is hanging out and playing cricket is Stockbridge, and we meet one of its inhabitants, Maxwell Edison. Maxwell is a UFO and conspiracy nut who ends up drawn into an adventure with the Doctor; the Doctor takes him up into a mysterious spaceship orbiting the Earth. It's a foreboding, atmospheric tale, and I enjoyed it a lot. Undoubtedly the best adventure in this volume, with a charming ending.

The Stockbridge Horror
This story, to me, entirely reads like Steve Parkhouse made it up as he went along. It starts out about mysterious goings-on in Stockbridge, including the TARDIS making its own trip to the Carboniferous Period, but then becomes about the Doctor battling a strange elemental on the TARDIS. Shayde turns up to do the actual defeating of the elemental while the Doctor just watches; then the Doctor's being attacked by the Time Lords, then Rassilon and the other Matrix Lords are putting him on trial for some reason, but he gets off because Shayde destroys the evidence. (Apparently a society of time travellers can't travel back to when the evidence still existed.) It doesn't settle on any one thing long enough to be effective, and despite some cool concepts, the Doctor once again feels like a side character in a story about how cool Shayde is!

Also this story introduces SAG 3, an elite UK military unit who do exactly nothing.

Lunar Lagoon
This feels a bit like one of Parkhouse's fourth Doctor tales: a downbeat story of an ineffective Doctor. He's trapped on a Pacific island with a Japanese soldier who's been there for a long time; despite the Doctor's efforts, the soldier dies... partially because of something the Doctor does to defend himself. I'm not sure what I think of it, to be honest. I think it's well done for what it is... I'm just not sure this is what I want Doctor Who to be doing! I didn't care for Fuji's stilted dialogue or the weird proportions Mick Austin gives him, but otherwise he is a pretty well-drawn character.

4-Dimensional Vistas
Another Steve Parkhouse Time Lord epic, another load of nonsense. Like most of them, it's got some good ideas (the way the Monk and the Ice Warriors work together to make a giant crystal by just waiting is neat), but the overall story is random junk again. The Doctor is joined by Gus, the American pilot who killed Fuji, and realizes he's in an alternate timeline where World War II continued until at least 1963 (though in Lunar Lagoon we're told it's 1983). Trying to figure out what's going on, they discover airplanes are vanishing and the Meddling Monk is there and there are Ice Warriors and SAG 3 is back and... stuff... look, I don't even know how or why.

We also learn the Time Lords sent the Doctor to Stockbridge to figure out the time anomalies resolved in this story. So, 1) why was he always trying to play cricket and/or fish, and 2) why did the Time Lords get mad at the Doctor for hanging out in Stockbridge back in The Stockbridge Horror. Like I said, Parkhouse tries to pull all these tales together, but it's nonsensically done. (The Doctor says that he never went back to the real Earth after leaving it in The Stockbridge Horror, which is plainly not true; he must have been on the real one to see Shayde destroy the evidence of the malfunctioning TARDIS.)

I do like how Mick Austin draws the time vortex.

The Moderator
It's interesting, reading all of these, and realizing for all his weirdnesses as storyteller, Steve Parkhouse got one thing right about the fifth Doctor as a character: he is knocked about by tragedy to a degree not true of previous incarnations, something we saw on screen most prominently in Earthshock, Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks, and The Caves of Androzani. The different between the strip's approach and the show's approach, though, is that the tv fifth Doctor would still get these moments of triumph, either within the stories, or in the other stories, but the comic fifth Doctor rarely feels like he's accomplished anything. This is all brought to its utmost in The Moderator, where Gus is gunned down at the moment the Doctor returns him to his own time as a punishment for the Doctor mouthing off to a reprehensible villain.

Here it worked for me, though. Maybe it's the black comic touch of the titular Moderator himself. Maybe it's the slightly unusual structure Parkhouse employs. (The story bounces back and forth between the Moderator hunting the Doctor and the Doctor and Gus on an adventure, but the Moderator is hunting the Doctor for something the Doctor does at the very end of the adventure.) Maybe it's the delightful despicability of Josiah W. Dogbolter. This story is dark, but it feels meaningful in a way some of Parkhouse's other dark tales (like End of the Line or The Neutron Knights) did not. There's tragedy, but also the Doctor and Gus stand up for something despite it all.

Stray Observations:

• Something I like is that the strip kind of doesn't even care that there's a tv show. Oh, it picks up references to it, obviously (the Doctor is seemingly president of Gallifrey because of the events of The Invasion of Time, or maybe The Deadly Assassin), but this is a continuous run of stories for the fifth Doctor where the first one picks up from a fourth Doctor tale and the last one leads into a sixth Doctor one. Which makes no sense from a continuity standpoint! There's no sense at all that these slot in between tv episodes or even really care about the existence of contemporaneous tv episodes, except that the Doctor's appearance (almost incidentally) changes between installments.
• I like the way that the DWM fifth Doctor is kind of, but not quite, the character played by Peter Davison. He occasionally gets lines you can perfectly imagine Davison delivering (his exasperation at a running-away Max in Stars Fell), but the whole idea that the Doctor really just wants to hang about playing cricket (or fishing) seems much more influenced by the Doctor's costume than anything else! He's also more... morose than the tv fifth Doctor; there's a bit where he almost commits suicide when he thinks he's lost in the wrong dimension! Again, not the tv version, but an interesting incarnation of the Doctor of his own. It's a shame Big Finish's Comic Strip Adaptations line seems to have ended after a single box set; I'd've liked to have heard Peter Davison tackle this slightly different take on his character.
• Apparently Gallifrey's military is normally completely separate from the Time Lords (the Doctor says, "What's a Time-Lord doing slumming around the military? Good heavens...you'll be in politics next!"); that they have a TARDIS and Tubal Cain is assigned to them is depicted as abnormal. The way time torpedoes work here would be used in the audio adventure Neverland.
• Steve Parkhouse seems to think all TARDISes look like police boxes.
• Toby Longworth's performance as Dogbolter in The Maltese Penguin and The Quantum Possibility Engine has indelibly impressed itself upon my mind; I can't not imagine him delivering the lines.
• After inaugurating the DWM strip with a three-year run, Dave Gibbons would go on to do a lot of work for DC on lower-tier superhero comics such as Legion of Super-Heroes, L.E.G.I.O.N., JSA, Rann-Thanagar War, and something called Watchmen.

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

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This volume transitions us out Mills & Wagner era into that of first Steve Moore and then Steven Parkhouse; at the same time, the Doctor Who magazine goes from a weekly to a monthly, and the stories decrease in length. I'm guessing this is because it's one thing to serialize a story in eight parts when that means it takes eight weeks, and another when when that means it takes eight months! Later the mag would reverse this decision-- which I think was the right call, based on this volume.

Dragon's Claw
This is the last of the big fourth Doctor comic stories; in a way, it feels like Steve Moore's attempt to do a Mills & Wagner, so to speak. Interesting setting, big enemy, long-form storytelling... yet this never clicked for me. I'm not sure I could say why. (Dave Gibbons actually says something similar in the intro to Iron Legion.) Maybe it's because the Doctor and Sharon and K-9 spend most of the story sitting around? For a story about ninja warrior monks (there's your RTD connection again!) and Sontarans, it's surprisingly light on action; compare this to The Iron Legion or The Dogs of Doom, which are constantly moving moving moving. The stakes feel very abstract too. I guess the emperor is threatened, but so what? Anyway it seems to me that this story marks the beginning of a slump for the strip. The Time Witch was a wobble, but could have been an aberration; this story confirms it.

The Collector
This one starts out pretty good: the Doctor and Sharon land in Blackcastle, but get sucked to an asteroid by a guy who's been kidnapping humans and putting them on display for centuries. Trying to get him free from a deranged computer, the Doctor accidentally gets him and K-9 killed... so he just goes back in time and undoes it, the end. Sure, there's some bafflegab to justify why he can't always do this, but it's a big cheat regardless. Plus he never actually sets the victims of the Collector free! (The bit of bafflegab is lettered in a slightly different hand, which makes me think it was added at the last minute when someone objected that the Doctor would do this all the time if it were possible.) I think it debuts a formula we'll see through the rest of Steve Moore's time on the strip: more on that later.

Dreamers of Death
The TARDIS lands on an Earth colony planet where the Doctor has some old friends; the use of alien creatures to create shared dream experiences has become all the rage since his last visit. Well, it turns out the alien creatures are evil. You probably could write an interesting story about this concept, but this isn't it; the dream stuff is abandoned in favor of the creatures merging into a giant devil-shaped gestalt creature and stomping through the city. The Doctor defeats it with a hose.

This is Sharon's last story; suddenly she's decided to start a new life with a guy she meets in the story, even more sudden than Leela falling in love with Andred, which is saying something. It's disappointing but not too disappointing because introductory story and maybe Dogs of Doom aside she's never really had much to do except stand there while the Doctor explains things. She feels a very RTD companion, like I've said, but without storytelling actually focused on her as a character, she quickly becomes generic. The idea that she could go straight from 14 to 18 raises more problems than it solves... and now she's settling down!? It's all a bit weird. (Sharon says there's nothing for her in Blackcastle now that she's grown up... yet in one of these stories, she mentioned having a father! I am pretty sure Big Finish made her into an
orphan.)

The Life Bringer! / War of the Words / Spider-God
Here we settle into the Steve Parkhouse pattern (into which you could also insert The Collector and, to a lesser extent, Dreamers of Death): mediocre sci-fi adventures that feel like rejected Twilight Zone scripts with some kind of sting in the tail. In The Life Bringer!, the Doctor meets and liberates Prometheus. Is he the real god? At the end, Prometheus heads to Earth to make life. Is this the origin of humanity in the distant past, or its resurrection in the distant future? I feel like the end wants you to go "spooky..." but frankly I didn't
care.

War of the Words is about aliens fighting over a library; it has a pretty dumb resolution. Spider-God is about a weird alien biology, where the whole story is built around a twist ending that feels like it comes from a mediocre American sf story of the 1930s. At least Dave Gibbons draws the hell out of everything!

The Deal / End of the Line
Here is the debut of Steve Parkhouse as strip writer, who quickly makes his style known: bleak stories of an ineffective Doctor. In The Deal, the TARDIS and an alien soldier get stuck on a battlefield, and team up to get off, but the Doctor ditches the soldier and he dies when the Doctor realizes he's a monster. In End of the Line, the Doctor faces zombies in a ruined cityscape; he helps some survivors escape but the story ends with him realizing there's no place for them to escape to... and they all die en route anyway! Ouch, geeze, way to cheer me up, New Steve. The dark brooding cityscapes of End of the Line are pretty neat, though.

By this point, things that remind me of the RTD years have largely vanished from the strip... with the exception of the fact that End of the Line is about a bunch of people trapped in a dystopian urban center yearning to get out to an edenic countryside, but who need the Doctor to repair their transport system. So, yeah, "Gridlock" again!

The Free-Fall Warriors
This is like one of those episodes of a tv show where the main cast does little except meet some people who are clearly being set up for a spin-off. The Doctor's on vacation, where he meets a science fiction writer named Ivan Asimoff (!). The two of them then meet a group of stunt pilots called the Freefall Warriors (that's how it's always written in the story, though part one is called "the Free-Fall Warriors" and part two "the Free Fall Warriors"). One is a big tiger and is named "Big Cat"; another has a machine head and is called "Machine Head"; one is named "Bruce." You can tell Parkhouse put a lot of work into this. The Doctor and Asimoff mostly sit there while the Freefall Warriors thwart a raider attack in contrived circumstances. I barely get why the Doctor is in this story; the purpose of the Asimoff character is even less clear!

Like I said, it feels like the Freefall Warriors are being set up for bigger things, but if so, they didn't amount to much; Big Cat reappeared solo in the Doctor Who Summer Special for 1982, and there was a four-issue back-up strip in Captain Britain in 1985 showing how they all met. None of this material has been collected as far as I know.

Junk-Yard Demon
For the first time in my DWM journey, we have a strip not drawn by Dave Gibbons. (I know he didn't draw #17-18, but I haven't got there yet!) Mike McMahon and Adolfo Buylla have a drastically different style: lots of dark, distorted proportions, sparse backgrounds, detailed mechanics. I love their boggle-eyed Tom Baker. The story is fun, probably the best Parkhouse-written tale in this volume. Actually, the best-written tale in this volume full stop. The Doctor meets some scavengers who repurpose Cybermen as servants; one is accidentally reactivated and it steals the TARDIS, along with one of the scavengers. It's a neat, atmospheric story, slightly injured by some unclear storytelling from McMahon and Buylla; there are times I didn't follow the action right away.

The Neutron Knights
The fourth Doctor departs DWM at his most ineffectual in Steve Parkhouse's most depressing tale yet: the Doctor stands and watches as barbaric space knights invade a castle; everyone dies when Merlin overloads an atomic reactor! Wow, Steve Parkhouse really hates happy endings, huh? This one foreshadows The Tides of Time but I didn't think it really worked on its own. Which, to be fair, it's not meant to be read on its own. I might be pausing a bit before picking up my next volume, but back in the day, it was straight from this to part one of The Tides of Time in Feb. 1982!

Stray Observations:

• I am reliably informed that The Collector features the introduction of that old Doctor Who comics convention, the use of "VWORP! VWORP!" to represent the sound of the TARDIS materializing. This is a surprisingly hard thing to research on the Internet; I found one article on BuzzFeed that clarified it dates back years... all the way to the Matt Smith era! Wow.
  
• The Free-Fall Warriors features, I believe, the debut of the long-running DWM future space currency, the mazuma.
• Weirdly, The Neutron Knights's narration captions are in the past tense. I feel like this almost never happens in comic stories (unless there's some kind of retrospective frame). I found it jarring, but I think it's just a Steve Parkhouse thing, as I noticed he did this in some of his Transformers strips as well.

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

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3301917.html

The second volume of Fourth Doctor strips from Doctor Who Magazine, in between those published in the collections The Iron Legion and The Tides of Time. These are all solid stories, with the two standouts for me being "The Life Bringer" also by Moore and Gibbons, which brings the Doctor into the Prometheus legend, and the grim "End of the Line" by Steve Parkhouse and Dave Gibbons, in which there is no happy ending. I enjoyed them a lot when I first read them almost forty years ago and I enjoyed revisiting them.

A fun little bit of British lower-middle-class comedy mixed with Lovecraft and The Addams Family. Too brief and joke-based to have much lasting power, but cute nonetheless.

I really really love this series. I love the doctor more and more and I love Asta more and more. I've said it before, but it has a lot of depth and I love that.

I really do love this series. I love the art, and I love the doctor and Asta. I also like that even though it's science fiction and about a stranded alien, it's also about reality and real people. It's got depth.

I liked the first story and the last story; everything in the middle kind of felt like a big ole mess.

I liked the first story and the last story; everything in the middle kind of felt like a big ole mess.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1818244.html#cutid2

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 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.

perhaps the doctor's worried face on the front cover should have warned me, but i'd assumed this was five's version of that thing ten's always doing with his hand in promo shots. alas, no. this collection of 'comics' is the most depressing thing i've read in a long time (i can't be more precise than that, because i just had a look at the books i've read recently, on facebook, and none of them have been this depressing). with any fifth doctor story you expect a certain amount of five being a bit useless and generally dooming his friends and the universe, but this was unreal. he kept trying to take holidays to get over how awful the last episode had been, only to be plunged into another disaster, largely of his own making, which somebody else would fix for him after a couple of people had died, while the doctor himself lay broken somewhere just going - god, this is a bad week, even for me. i wasn't prepared for this. there had been no mention of it in the amazon.co.uk reviews - nobody had said, on his final page you will actually have to look at five crying with anger and pain :(

really dark and nasty, and the doctor rarely has any agency. not really recommended, though it's sort of interesting in a really weird, epic way - i have the first volume of eight's comics too and, although less upsetting, they were also totally entrenched in weird AUs and rassilon's matrix council and crazy shit that not even i, a reasonably hard-core fan, understood. can't imagine what peter davison (who apparently bought a copy of five's book having recorded his lighthearted stockbridge audios) thought of his doctor's 'adventures'. actually, i dare say he didn't read it very carefully. hopefully he only flicked through and saw the bits where the doctor was playing cricket and having a nice-ish time.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1696263.html

This is the collected Fifth Doctor comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly #61-87, all written by Steve Parkhouse and with the best art done by Dave Gibbons (Mick Austin and Steve Dillon also contributing). It's a very impressive effort - Big Finish fans will have heard Peter Davison a year or so ago admit that he had had no idea these existed, and then more recently saying how much he had enjoyed them once he finally got hold of them. What DWM and Parkhouse managed to do here was to establish a completely different Fifth Doctor continuity, where he has two spiritual bases - the quaint late twentieth-century English village of Stockbridge, and a high-tech, sinister, somewhat mystical Gallifrey - and has adventures being dragged between the two, and to other places. I remember now thinking at the time that one of the disappointments of Arc of Infinity was that the TV Gallifrey was so much less awe-inspiring than the Gallifrey that Parkhouse and Gibbons had summoned into being in the pages of the magazine. The whole sequence of stories has more unity of style and spirit than the TV series was managing at this point, and is all the better for it; and I may now go back and listen again to the recent Big Finish stories set in Stockbridge with the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa (which were all rather good - the "Autumn" segment of Circular Time, and the Castle of Fear / The Eternal Summer / Plague of the Daleks sequence).

In a later story here we also have the Meddling Monk returning, in alliance with the Ice Warriors, not so different from his alliance with the Daleks in the recent Big Finish audios (though obviously played by Peter Butterworth rather than Graeme Garden). Otherwise the Fifth Doctor has various male hangers-on - two warriors of different time periods (Sir Justin and Angus Goodman), übergeek Maxwell Edison, and the sinister Time Lord construct Shayde, with brief appearances from the mysterious psycho-military group SAG 3; almost no female characters at all here. (Someone who looks a bit like Zoe makes an appearance but doesn't speak.)

NB also a short sequence at the end featuring the Fourth Doctor regressing to the First Doctor, originally published in 1980 in Doctor Who Weekly #17-18, presumably having escaped from the earlier collected volumes, and also rather good.

This was a gift during a visit to our local comic shop with my best friend. I got this volume and in return I paid for Chinese take out only having plastic money for my need. I’m not the biggest fan of these magazine size collections but the story is the thing after all. And if IDW does get to re-coloring and collecting these classic stories I will be buying them all over again. That’s my life as a Doctor Who fan. Voyager is collection of very alien and hit or miss stories which fit perfectly in my eyes with the Sixth Doctor.

C.½

"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 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.

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