Review by Tony Keen
The annual Summer Special produced for Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Magazine was generally an expanded version of the regular magazine, with a collection of features on the long-running British television science fiction show. In 1985, Marvel did something a little different. They issued a slim squarebound volume, collecting comics, originally produced in black and white, that had been reprinted and coloured for the US market; essentially a small graphic novel. All this was behind a new cover by John Higgins.
The centrepiece is ‘Doctor Who and the Iron Legion’, the first story to appear in Doctor Who Weekly in 1979. It’s also one of the longer stories that Marvel would publish, which gives it space to breathe, though reading it all at once you do notice that it is structured to have a cliff-hanger every four or five pages. It was originally credited jointly to Pat Mills and John Wagner, but in fact the two wrote alternating stories, and ‘Iron Legion’ is Mills’ work, credited as such here.
‘Iron Legion’ is a story of robotic legionaries in a world where the Roman empire never fell, and went on to conquer time and space. Like all of Mills and Wagner’s Doctor Who serials, it had been submitted to the Doctor Who production office, but rejected. Mills takes the opportunity of being free of the budget restrictions to expand the action, and it’s doubtful the BBC could have realised the Ectoslime, which can be seen on the cover. It has to be said, the feel of the milieu into which Mills drops the Doctor is more reminiscent of 2000 A.D. than of the mid-Tom Baker era of the TV show. However, it anticipates the way the show would go in the 1980s, and particularly how it would be since the 2005 reboot, written by people who often had grown up with Mills and Wagner’s comics. In particular, there’s a robot here who could easily have walked out of Ro-Busters. Overall though, if you accept it as the Doctor in a 2000 A.D.-style world, the story works.
The art is not quite Dave Gibbons at his best, but it’s still good, and he captures the look of Tom Baker’s face. In some places the art has been tinkered with to remove recaps that appeared in each weekly episode, but this is probably not revealing otherwise hidden Gibbons artwork. It has also to be admitted that the four-colour colouring by Andy Yanchus is a bit on the garish side (see sample image), and if you want a coloured version of the story you might be better seeking out one of the IDW Doctor Who Classics volumes.
The page count is made up by ‘K-9’s Finest Hour’, a short strip by Steve Moore and Paul Neary about the Doctor’s robotic canine companion, originally a back-up strip not featuring the Doctor, or not as main protagonist. ‘Iron Legion’ has been reprinted multiple times, in black and white in Panini’s Doctor Who: The Iron Legion and Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Anthology, and in colour in IDW’s Doctor Who Classics Volume 1, Doctor Who Classics Omnibus Volume 1, and Doctor Who: Dave Gibbons Collection. This is, however, the only graphic novel that collects ‘K-9’s Finest Hour’, as the back-ups are often neglected in this respect.
