Review by Tony Keen

Tom Baker played the Doctor in BBC’s long-running science fiction series Doctor Who from 1974 to 1981, the fourth actor to play the role. In 1979, Marvel UK began publishing a magazine including black and white comic strips. Although not the first Doctor Who comics, these were perhaps the first to be taken seriously. This collection, released in 2023 to coincide with the show’s sixtieth anniversary, brings together two and a bit years of the run from 1979 to 1982, all the lead strips featuring the Tom Baker Doctor. Back-up strips in which the Doctor occasionally appeared, but which mostly explored other corners of the Whoniverse, are not included. These comics had previously been collected in Doctor Who: The Iron Legion and Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw. Those volumes can fetch quite a bit on the secondhand market, so the release of this new collection is to be welcomed.

The main writers were people who had worked on 2000 A.D., Pat Mills, John Wagner, Steve Moore, and then Steve Parkhouse. Not surprisingly, therefore, the tone is very much as if the Doctor was a 2000 A.D. character, removing him from the feel of television Doctor Who, furthered by the absence of a lot of the Doctor’s regular cast. Only robot dog K-9 from his television companions turns up here, and a lot of the time the Doctor travels across space and time on his own. Nevertheless, over the years the influence of these stories has grown. A couple were made into audio stories starring Baker, and in 2023 ‘Doctor Who and the Star Beast’ was adapted into a TV episode starring David Tennant. And it was in these pages that the term ‘vworp’, now universally employed to describe the sound of the Doctor’s ship, the TARDIS, first appeared.

Artwork throughout this volume is by Dave Gibbons, except for a couple of stories, one by Paul Neary and one by Mike McMahon. Gibbons was an artist very much getting into his stride at this point, and, whilst Watchmen and the Martha Washington strips are in the future, some of Gibbons’ best work is to be found in these pages (see sample image).

If you would prefer these stories in colour, they can be found spread across IDW’s Doctor Who Classics Volumes 1-4 and Doctor Who Classics Omnibus Volumes 1-2, while all except the Paul Neary and Mike McMahon strips are also in Doctor Who: Dave Gibbons Collection. ‘The Iron Legion’ also appeared in the somewhat garish colouring used for a US Marvel reprint in Doctor Who 1985 Summer Special Classic, whilst ‘The Dogs of Doom’ can also be found in black and white in Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection.