Review by Tony Keen

Doctor Who Classics Volume 2 carries on, naturally enough, from Volume 1, reprinting Marvel UK’s Doctor Who strips from 1980. A number of changes took place. First writers Pat Mills and John Wagner left. Mills is only represented here by the last few pages of ‘Doctor Who and the Star Beast’, which were already reprinted in Volume 1, presumably reproduced here to establish who the Doctor’s companion Sharon is, and why she is travelling with the Doctor. There’s a full-length Wagner story, ‘Doctor Who and the Dogs of Doom’ (which, like all the stories by Mills and Wagner, is credited to both).

The new writer is Steve Moore. Like his predecessors, he came from 2000 A.D., where he invented the Future Shocks, so the 2000 A.D. feel to the strip persists, and there’s an understandable tendency for twist endings. Mills and Wagner plotted for thirty pages or more, but Moore prefers to write shorter pieces, with the exception of ‘Dragon’s Claw’, a fully-fledged epic, and the best story here. It was also at this point that Marvel’s Doctor Who publication went from a weekly to a monthly schedule, which means that episode length grows from the four or five pages that had been typical.

Moore captures the authentic voice of Tom Baker as the Doctor more effectively than Mills and Wagner, while longer stories benefit from the return of some recurring enemies (which had been used in the back-up strips already). To avoid spoilers, we won’t say which enemies return.

Art is by Dave Gibbons, in one of his best periods, here sympathetically recoloured for this printing (see sample image). Overall, these are generally enjoyable comics.

All can be found in Doctor Who Classics Omnibus Volume 1, and Doctor Who: Dave Gibbons Collection. If you’d rather experience them in the original black and white, they are split across the collections Doctor Who: The Iron Legion, and Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw, and all are in Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Anthology (‘The Dogs of Doom’ is also in Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection). The series continues with Doctor Who Classics Volume 3.