Review by Tony Keen

In 1982, Peter Davison took over from Tom Baker as the lead (the Doctor) in the BBC’s long-running science fiction series Doctor Who, the fifth actor to play the role. Naturally, the comics being published by Marvel changed to reflect this. This actually caused some problems. Dave Gibbons found Davison initially much harder to draw than Baker, and the first strips appearing coincided with the broadcast of ‘Castrovalva’, Davison’s first television story, so no-one had much of an idea of what Davison’s Doctor was like.

Nevertheless, Steve Parkhouse, writer at the time, managed to capture something of the Davison Doctor’s personality. Parkhouse would go on to write all of the Peter Davison Doctor’s comics appearances, until in 1984 Davison was replaced on television by Colin Baker (and indeed Parkhouse would continue to write the Colin Baker Doctor for another year). This was a period of great innovation for British comics and some of this seems to have rubbed off on Parkhouse, whose stories show a level of ambition that, for all their quality, the Tom Baker Doctor comics had not quite reached. This is particularly true of the opener, the eponymous ‘Tides of Time’. This story, which had a prelude in the last Tom Baker comic (to be found in Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw), brings in Arthurian mysticism, time paradoxes, and advanced civilisations. And at least partly because of the stories’ greater ambition, this feels more like televised Doctor Who. The main difference is the absence of a long-term companion character for the Doctor to bounce off through much of this collection (something Parkhouse would fix early in the Colin Baker Doctor stories).

The artists are in a regular state of flux. Dave Gibbons draws the first two stories, then Parkhouse does his own art, before Mick Austin comes on board. Austin’s scratchy and impressionistic figure work is not quite what one might expect in a science fiction comic, but he has some spectacular imagery (see sample image). Steve Dillon, perhaps a bit more what one would expect, draws the final story.

This collection, following on from Iron Legion and Dragon’s Claw, collects all Peter Davison Doctor comics, all 209 pages of them, so it’s certainly a good value package. There’s also a bonus Tom Baker Doctor story, ‘Timeslip’, omitted from Iron Legion, presumably simply for being not by Gibbons. It’s nice for completists, though it’s pretty obvious filler.

If you want these comics in colour (which, apart from a two page spread reproduced on the inside covers here, is not how they were originally published), they are in Doctor Who Classics Volumes 4 and 5, and Doctor Who Omnibus Volume 2.