A look at the Seventh Doctor's earliest comic strips in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine as he battles the Ice Warriors, and lends a hand to a microscopic species.
Transcript below:
It's time to set your TARDIS time coordinates for 1987, then we're going to take a look at the start of the Seventh Doctor's comic run in Doctor Who Classics: Volume Seven just ahead.
Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
As I mentioned in a previous podcast, going back to the late 1970s' Doctor Who Magazine was the home of Doctor Who comic strips, and this continued into the Seventh Doctor era. The Seventh Doctor was portrayed by Sylvester McCoy who took over at a very difficult time. Colin Baker had been fired as the Doctor at the request of the BBC – quite unfairly in my opinion – and hadn't actually appeared in a regeneration story with McCoy donning Baker's costume and a blond wig. Definitely a bumpy way to begin an on-television run. Are the comics that bumpy? Well, we'll take a look here. We're going to be reviewing Doctor Who Classics: Volume Seven from IDW.
Back in the earlier part of the Twenty-First Century IDW landed the Doctor Who license for comics and they not only printed new comics with the Tenth and the Eleventh Doctor, as well as a Fiftieth Anniversary Special series, they also did Doctor Who Classics which reprinted stories from the Doctor Who Magazine. Doctor Who Classics: Volume is not the only way to read these stories. You can actually buy Panini's Collection which is now the one who will print all of the previous classic Doctor Who comic collections. A big difference with the Panini Collection is that the books are in their original magazine size and they're also in black and white. I like the Doctor Who Classics presentation because they're more typical American comic size which I'm used to, plus they're also colorized. The colors are done by Charlie Kirchoff who just does a fantastic job on here. They feel very true to the type of color choices that the artist would have made had they had the option of doing color comics back in the 1980s. The only downside to reading this in the Doctor Who Classics version is you don't get the commentary at the back, which the Panini version is kind of nice but we can forego that. The book is about 120 pages long. The comics and Doctor Who magazine at this point were eight pages in length, so you have fifteen strips collected in here and a total of eight Doctor Who stories.
The first story is A Cold day in Hell which finds The Doctor travelling to a planet that is supposed to be a tropical pleasure planet along with Frobisher who was best known as a Sixth Doctor companion. He is a shape-shifting, hard-boiled private investigator who, through most of his Doctor Who comic run, took on the shape of an anthropomorphic, talking penguin. Give the comics credit for introducing a companion they couldn't have done on TV. As the title implies the Doctor and Frobisher find that the planet is now in the midst of an Ice Age and the Ice Warriors are present on the planet.
This is a fairly decent, if not spectacular, Ice Warrior story. It hits most of the highlights though the Ice Warriors lacks some of the complexity and nuance that can make them interesting in the TV series. The one big problem with this is I'm not entirely sure this was originally written with the Seventh Doctor in mind. The story serves as a goodbye point for Frobisher but is somewhat confused as to chronology, partially because Peri traveled with the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher, and so this is assuming that this is right after they dropped off or said goodbye to Peri, when in fact the Sixth Doctor had a fair amount of living left to do before he regenerated.