Monday 17 October 2011

Doctor Who Magazine

DWM, or is was originally Doctor Who Weekly, is 32 today (or six days ago, but it was marked today). Its weekliness has now been taken up by Doctor Who Adventures but the grumpy old man in me feels that the standard of its comics isn’t quite up to the Wagner/Mills/Gibbons run starring the Fourth Doctor.

Seriously, the likes of The Iron Legion and City Of The Damned permanently affected my idea of what Doctor Who could and should be - space opera adventure stories, funny and scary and fast, brimming with great visuals and mad ideas. The show never really matched up with the comics until 2005.

So it’s a small regular delight that even though the kids have Adventures now and IDW have full-issue Who comics, DWM still carries on, and collections of the strips right back to The Iron Legion are available.

Gibbons’s run spanning two Doctors, backup strips by Alan Moore (sadly unreprintable), John Ridgway’s surreal epics for the Sixth Doctor, the ad hoc not-sure-we-can-afford-this Seven strips cycling back to higher quality, the eight-year run of the Eighth Doctor (and Izzy, as old as DWM itself) that almost became canon when Russell T Davies offered them the regeneration, the sadly slim volume for Nine that includes a dry run for The Shakespeare Code, as one of the three books for Ten shows the original version of The Lodger...

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