The Doctor Who TV Movie aired on British TV screens on 27 May 1996 to impressive ratings. The following week, the Radio Times launched its new Sci-Fi page which included a short Doctor Who comic strip each week featuring the new Doctor, which was presumably intended to bridge the gap between the movie and a series proper.

Alas, it was not to be...

SCRIPT: Gary Russell
ART: Lee Sullivan (art)
COLOUR: Alan Craddock
LETTERS: Elitta Fell

ISSUES: 1-7 June 1996 - 3-9 August 1996

1. Stacy Townsend and Bill are running through the corridors of a deep space haulage ship called Dreadnought. Bill is dragged down through the floor by something unseen. Stacy meets the Doctor but they both encounter the Cybermen.

2. Stacy and the Doctor run for the TARDIS, but the Cybermen capture it.

3. They are taken to the Cyberman hive aboard the Dreadnought, where the crew, including Bill, are being converted into Cybermen. The Cyberleader says that the Doctor, with his Time Lord secrets, will become the first of a new breed of Cybermen.

4. Placed in a conversion capsule, the Doctor enters a cybernetic version of the astral plane where he attempts to fight back against cybercontrol.

5. The Doctor refuses to submit and give them the secrets of time travel, so the Cyberleader threatens to kill Stacy.

6. The Doctor gives in and takes the Cybermen to his TARDIS.

7. As the Cybermen examine the TARDIS, the Doctor and Stacy attempt to talk to the partly converted Bill, but he raises his arm to kill them.

8. Stacy appeals to Bill, forcing him to remember when the Cybermen attacked the ship and their planned wedding.

9. Bill attacks the Cybermen while the Doctor gets busy at the TARDIS controls.

10. The Doctor makes the Cybermen magnetically repellent to the TARDIS and they are magnetically disassembled, leaving the Doctor and Stacy free. He decides to try to get her home.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - STACY TOWNSEND

Stacy worked aboard the deep space haulage ship Dreadnought as a loader, which means her main skill was moving crates from A to B. After this tour of duty, she had planned to marry fellow crew member Bill in a little church called St. Christopher’s in Norfolk (presumably the county in England rather than the city in Virginia). She had planned to wear white, though whether this tells us anything about her is open to debate. She appears to be a shrewd judge of character, correctly identifying the Martian queen as a traitor. In Victorian London, an era she had little interest in, she rescued an Equinoid (purple horse with yellow spots) from a freak show, but was captured and replaced by a shapeshifting alien intent on getting home. The Doctor quickly realised though and demanded her return.

Stacy had slightly odd taste in men and eventually fell in love with Ssard the Ice Warrior. They left the TARDIS together and got married in 3999 AD on Micawber‘s World, events which are detailed in the first Eighth Doctor novel Placebo Effect. As this novel was written by Gary Russell, Stacy is almost certainly the only comic strip companion, apart from Ssord, ever to be written for by a single person.

SCRIPT: Gary Russell
ART: Lee Sullivan (art)
COLOUR: Alan Craddock
LETTERS: Elitta Fell

ISSUES: 10-16 August 1996 - 12-18 October 1996

1. The Doctor and Stacy are on Mars discretely observing an Ice Warrior ceremony to make a young noble into an Ice Lord, but they are captured by the Ice Warriors and sentenced to death.

2. The sentence is not carried out and the warriors instead apologise. Until the rites are over, they are charged with protecting the young noble Izaxyrl from an approaching rival Ice Warrior faction.

3. A battle ensues between the rival factions. The Doctor, Stacy and the Ice Warriors are cut down in the crossfire.

4. The Doctor, Stacy and Ice Warrior Ssard recover and discover that Lord Artix has kidnapped Izaxyrl.

5. The Doctor, Stacy and Ssard go to the palace of the High Lord Uzoxx where the Doctor is blamed for the abduction of Uzoxx’s son Izaxyrl. The Doctor offers to find Izaxyrl. But Uzoxx’s queen Luass is scheming and plans to tell her brother Artix what is happening.

6. The Doctor, Stacy and Ssard plan to find Izaxyrl, but Queen Shssur has had their air car sabotaged.

7. As they travel, the Doctor, Stacy and Ssard discuss the situation. Ssard believes there must be a spy in the palace as the ceremony was secret. Stacy thinks it’s the queen, but the Doctor disagrees. Then the air car blows up.

8. The Doctor awakes in Artix’ palace. Stacy and Ssard are prisoners, as is Izaxyrl who has missed the ascension ceremony and so can now never claim his father’s throne, leaving Artix as ruler. Artix wants the Doctor to take Izaxyrl home in shame. If he refuses then Stacy will die.

9. The Doctor takes Izaxyrl home. He knows someone in the palace sabotaged the air car, and would be dead had Artix not matter transported them to safety. Just then an Ice Warrior bursts in firing his weapon.

10. Izaxyrl kills the assassin. Although he can never be an adult, he is determined to find the traitor in the palace and also to help the Doctor rescue Stacy and Ssard from Artix.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The problem with going from a story featuring the Cybermen to one featuring the Ice Warriors is that it looks like you don’t have any original ideas to offer, and this strip’s traditional court intrigue plot does little to alleviate that fear. It is also extremely slow, which is surely a crime in a weekly strip.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - SSARD

Ssard is an Ice Warrior from an early period of Martian history. Along with Risstaal and Tusstokk, Ssard was a guard at the Ascendance Rite for Izaxyrl, the son of High Lord Uzoxx of Balarzus Mons. With the Doctor and Stacy, he got involved with the treachery of High Lord Artix and of Luass, wife of Uzoxx and mother of Izaxyrl. At the conclusion of these events, Ssard was invited on a 'holiday' by the Doctor and gladly accepted the offer to travel with him.

Ssard was not best pleased with Victorian London where he had to wear a cloak to hide himself. He was a capable engineer as he helped to fix P'fer'd's spaceship. Unlike the Doctor, he failed to notice when Stacy was swapped with a shapeshifter. With Stacy, he eventually left the Doctor in 3999 AD. The two became engaged and invited the Doctor to their wedding on Micawber's World, as detailed in the first Eighth Doctor novel Placebo Effect.

SCRIPT: Gary Russell
ART: Lee Sullivan (art)
COLOUR: Alan Craddock
LETTERS: Elitta Fell

ISSUES: 19-25 October 1996 - 21 December 1996-3 January 1997

1. As the Doctor and Izaxyrl travel by aircar to confront Artix, Queen Luass plots with her brother Artix to kill both them and King Uzoxx...

2. While Artix threatens Stacy and Ssard, the Doctor and Izaxyrl discover a secret passage leading to his fortress... but there is something in  the passage...

3. The Doctor and Izaxryl escape from a large purple monster but fall into phosphorescent slime...

4. The Doctor and Izaxryl emerge into the dungeon but are instantly spotted.

5. Captured by Artix, Izaxryl realises that his mother is in league with Artix. In a rage, he attacks his uncle.

6. Izaxryl and the Doctor force Artix to submit. Meanwhile, Queen Luass realises that something may have gone wrong and prepares to flee... but not before she has killed her husband.

7. Releasing Stacy and Ssard, the Doctor and Izaxryl return to Uzoxx’s palace, but Luass is waiting for them.

8. Killing her own body guard, Luass claims he was an assassin attempting to kill her on the orders of the Doctor’s party.

9. Izaxryl prevents their execution because Artix has made a full confession. Luass kills Artix and prepares to escape, but someone has other ideas.

10. It is King Uzoxx. He kills his wife. The threat is ended. The Doctor invites Ssard for a trip in the TARDIS and the Ice Warrior accepts.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
And so the snooze-athon continues for another ten weeks, with barely enough plot to fill a quarter of the time. The first four instalments are essentially nothing more than padding and the actual threat posed by Artix is resolved in just a few panels. Stacy and Ssard spend most of the time chained to a dungeon wall so enjoy no development, and the Doctor rabbeting on about Enid Blyton and the Famous Five feels not only out of character but also monumentally irrelevant.

SCRIPT: Gary Russell
ART: Lee Sullivan (art)
COLOUR: Alan Craddock
LETTERS: Elitta Fell

ISSUES: 4-10 January 1997 - 8-14 March 1997
COVER DATES: As above

1. In Victorian London, the Doctor, Stacy and Ssard investigate an alien spaceship that none of the local inhabitants can see.

2. The owner of the spaceship invites the Doctor, Stacy and Ssard aboard. He is using a Mark III Image Inducer to disguise the ship as a solicitor’s office. But they are observed by other aliens, shapeshifters disguised as policemen with glowing eyes.

3. The ship’s owner, P’fer’d, who is in reality an Equinoid, a purple horse with yellow spots, explains that their ship got lost and ended up here out of fuel. Since then, his wife, M’rek’d, has been kidnapped by the owner of a freak show.

4. P’fer’d is using urchins to help him track down his wife. Noting the policeman outside, the Doctor goes to ask questions, but Stacy is snatched by someone unseen.

5. Stacy has been snatched by urchins who have found M’rek’d in a freak show in Kennington Park. The Doctor notices Stacy’s absence.

6. Stacy and the urchins rescue M’rek’d, but the freak show owner, who is also a shapeshifting alien who wants a spaceship to get home, grabs the two urchins and threatens to kill them.

7. Stacy rescues one of the boys, but the alien kills the other one with a massive electric shock. He then closes in on Stacy...

8. The Doctor and Ssard repair P’fer’d’s ship. The urchin and M’rek’d arrive and explain Stacy’s predicament. The Doctor and Ssard head off to save her, but she is already free, carrying the dead boy. From the nature of his death, the Doctor realises there are other aliens in London.

9. P’fer’d and M’rek’d leave in their spaceship and the Doctor determines to discover the planet of origin of the remaining aliens. Stacy hands him an alien device that she says she took from the alien she killed at the freak show. The shapeshifting policeman claim everything is going according to plan.

10. Suspicious of Stacy, the Doctor gets a fix on the homeworld of the aliens. But Stacy is not Stacy but another of the aliens.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The Victorian setting initially makes a refreshing change from Mars, but is terribly underused and so adds no atmosphere at all. The Equinoids, clearly taken from the description given by the Third Doctor in Frontier in Space of an alien delegate at a peace conference, look as ridiculous as you’d expect from the Doctor’s original description and only serve to undercut any drama. The murder of the urchin is probably the high point of the whole run of Radio Times strips, but is frankly irrelevant to the actual plot.

SCRIPT: Gary Russell
ART: Lee Sullivan (art)
COLOUR: Alan Craddock
LETTERS: Elitta Fell

ISSUES: 15-21 March 1997 - 22-28 March 1997
COVER DATES: As above

1. The Doctor presses a switch on the TARDIS console that forces the aliens to reveal themselves - including the fake Stacy.

2. The Doctor demands the return of the real Stacy before he takes the aliens home, sealed in a sonic bubble.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The Radio Times strip was curtailed at this point due to a change of editorial team. Coda was a hastily written conclusion replacing a proposed ten-part story set on an ice planet and featuring the Zygons (who were intended to be the shapeshifting aliens in Perceptions) and a final ten-part strip called Deceptions which was set on the Zygon homeworld (Part One of which was printed in an article in DWM 272). Given the general quality and derivativeness of the strip, perhaps we should be thankful that more pilfering of the past did not take place.

SCRIPT: Alan Barnes
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks), Robin Riggs (page 1 inks)
LETTERS: Elitta Fell
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Scott Gray

ISSUES: 248 - 249
COVER DATES: 12 February 1997 (though the cover gives the year as 1996) - 12 March 1997
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Endgame, published November 2005.

The Amazon Basin, 51st Century, the Earth is a barren war-torn ruin beneath a failing sun. The Doctor and Izzy track an SOS to a ruined dome but are immediately shot down and imprisoned by Uber-Marshal Run Run Hsui Leng, who suspects they have come from a place called the Keep, which holds a treasure that he wants them to help him acquire. However, before he can ‘persuade’ them, they are matter transported away to the Keep itself by an android named Marquez. Marquez takes them to meet his master, Crivello, the greatest scientist of the age but an aged and dying man, who asks the Doctor to save the human race. Marquez then shows them Crivello’s Cauldron, the nucleus of an artificial sun, which will become the centrepiece of a new solar system. However, the Doctor’s role becomes clear. He is to be a sacrifice to the Cauldron. Marquez throws him into it.

The sun is alive and does not kill the Doctor, and he emerges from it after twenty minutes. Marquez explains that Crivello’s attempts to commune with the Cauldron aged him sixty years in six seconds. It required a time traveller to commune and now the sun is primed and awaiting instructions, which the Doctor gives it. They transmat away from the Keep, but are intercepted by Uber-Marshal Leng still demanding the Keep’s treasure. However, that treasure soars up into the sky, heading for an unpopulated area of the Crab Nebula. Crivello says he did it for all humanity, to give them a chance. The Doctor and Izzy slip away. Alone with Crivello in his arms, Marquez murders the old man and throws his body from a cliff. There is a storm coming...

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
If there is one thing the comic strip era of the Eighth Doctor should be known for it is involved story arcs and plenty of internal continuity, and the first of those arcs starts here. It is perhaps surprising then that The Keep is also a reasonably satisfying read in its own right, despite being only two parts long. There is a surprising amount of detail crammed in here, and Magnus Greel (from The Talons of Weng-Chiang) gets a name check, as does T-Mat (from The Seeds of Death) and the Dogbolter Corporation (see Dogbolter’s last encounter with the Doctor here). However, it is the last page of this strip that really whets the appetite as we realise the story is far from over and that the Doctor is due to cross paths with some aspect of this story again.

SCRIPT: Alan Barnes
ART: Sean Longcroft (and Martin Geraghty)
LETTERS: Elitta Fell
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Scott Gray

ISSUE: 250
COVER DATE: 9 April 1997
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Endgame, published November 2005.

After the TARDIS appears to die, the Doctor and Izzy find themselves in the Courtroom of the Limbo Inbetween. General Ironicus (from Fourth Doctor strip The Iron Legion), Josiah W. Dogbolter (first seen in Fifth Doctor strip The Moderator), and Beep the Meep (from Fourth Doctor strip The Star Beast) give evidence against the Doctor and it looks like the Doctor will be condemned to Hell when they are saved by a mysterious hooded lady who urges them to safety through a portal. There she explains that the TARDIS was attacked in the vortex by a parasite, leaving the Doctor and Izzy in a state between life and death. With the TARDIS dying it created copies of the Doctor and Izzy from its memory banks to defeat the parasite. Both the Doctor and the parasite dredge the TARDIS’ memory banks to create opposing armies. The Doctor strikes the final blow with Sir Justin’s sword, slaying the parasite and freeing the TARDIS and her crew.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
And now the story arc kicks in big time (indeed, an arc within an arc), with more twists and turns and shock reveals than one could reasonably expect of even the sharpest of blockbuster movies. The return of the Threshold changes the whole nature of the story and, though it gets a little complicated in later instalments, it always remains gripping, comprehensible and exciting. The artwork is generally very good (though colour would have lifted a strip like this enormously), and the wasp Daleks (owing something to the designs by Amblin) are a striking invention, though the representation of the Eighth Doctor (as in previous strips) is less an accurate likeness and more an acceptable representation with some essence of the character, much like Parkhouse’s Fourth Doctor or Ridgway’s Sixth Doctor.

SCRIPT: Alan Barnes
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks)
LETTERS: Elitta Fell
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Scott Gray

ISSUES: 251 - 255
COVER DATES: 7 May 1997 - 27 August 1997
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Endgame, published November 2005.

Aboard satelloid Icarus Falling, Communications Seer Ptolemy Muttonchops looks into the Gazing Pool and sees a black sun rising, the end of everything. He reports to Sister Chastity who instructs him to say nothing. The TARDIS lands aboard Icarus Falling and the Doctor and Izzy are immediately captured and taken before the Leaderene. The Doctor identifies Icarus Falling as one of six satelloids orbiting the sun created by Crivello’s Cauldron two hundred years before (see The Keep). He sees it as an unlikely coincidence that he should land here and wonders who has brought him here, but further rumination is dirupted by attacking spaceships which easily penetrate Icarus Falling. The ships contain Daleks.

The Leaderene seals the bulkheads, but it will be only a matter of minutes before the Daleks cut their way through. The Doctor goes with Muttonchops to examine the Gazing Pool, which contains matter from the heart of Crivello’s Cauldron. The Doctor takes a sample for analysis but is curious about why Muttonchops hasn’t aged like Crivello did. However, he glimpses the Daleks’ new weapon - a wasp-like Dalek - in the pool. The wasp-like Daleks burst into the Leaderene’s chamber and infect her with nanites that puts her and most of her crew under Dalek control. Izzy and Sister Chastity escape and meet up with the Doctor. The Doctor entrusts Izzy with the sample of Cauldron matter before surrendering himself to the Daleks. But they exterminate him.

The Dalek fire transmats the Doctor to the Dalek ship where he is taken before the Dalek Supreme. There are enemy forces aboard Icarus Falling which is why the Daleks faked the Doctor’s execution. However, with the Dalek Supreme is Marquez. Meanwhile, Izzy and Sister Chastity are forced to flee when the wasp-Daleks burst in and consume Muttonchops. Marquez explains to the Doctor that three centuries before a space craft emerged from a spatial rift containing an alternative form of Dalek from a parallel universe. All but one of the creatures was destroyed, but the Daleks cannot entertain the idea of a mass attack, so plan to cross into parallel space and wipe out their rivals. To do so they must cross the event horizon of a collapsed star. Only Crivello’s Caudlron is controllable, and they used the Doctor to forge a link with this living sun. Now they will take what they need from the Doctor, allowing them to collapse the Cauldron into their own black hole and navigate across the event horizon. They will invade all realities. Back aboard Icarus Falling, Izzy plans to rescue the Doctor, but Sister Chastity isn’t all that she seems - she is a member of the Threshold (see Seventh Doctor strip Ground Zero).

Having cut free the connection that they need from the Doctor’s living brain, the Daleks prepare to collapse the Cauldron. Chastity appears before the Doctor. The Threshold cannot allow the Dalek plan to succeed. She claims her people are no longer aggressively interventionist and now observe, protect and influence, having funded Crivello’s work and safeguarded the new sun. Izzy watches this from the Threshold’s ship, but doesn’t believe the Doctor will fall for Chastity’s story. When he apparently does, the Threshold reveal to Izzy that they have tampered with the Cauldron so that when the Daleks prepare to pass through it will collapse and trap them. But the Doctor’s life will be lost too. They are working on the orders of very special clients who have promised them secrets from a sealed container. Guided by Chastity, the Doctor is manipulated into stopping the Daleks with his own sacrifice, but then the Daleks enter. They have no need of the Doctor anymore - they have Muttonchops who is a child of the Cauldron. He opens the way through.

Through the portal come alternate Daleks from countless parallel worlds, and the Daleks of this universe are no match. Izzy, meanwhile, unleashes the sample of Cauldron matter, creating an entity that allows her to transport to the Doctor and save him. She has with her the box of secrets and the Doctor recognises the seal on it - the Prydonian seal of Gallifrey: someone on Gallifrey has hired the Threshold to wipe out the Daleks. The Doctor joins with Muttonchops to overcome Dalek control and send the Cauldron nova. He and Izzy then escape in the TARDIS as the Threshold and Marquez fight for the Time Lord secrets. But as the box opens, the Cauldron explodes into a fully fledged sun, destroying the Daleks, sealing the portal and taking the secrets with it. The Doctor and Izzy are safe, but the Threshold promise a rematch. They’ll be just around the corner.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The era of the Eighth Doctor comic strip may be characterised by big story arcs, but these are always offset by lighter one-issue strips that allow for a bit of a breather. By Hook Or By Crook is certainly not one of the best of these, feeling more like irrelevant filler, but it does nicely characterise the developing relationship between Izzy and the Doctor. The artwork is occasionally striking but more often slightly messy, not quite in Adrian Salmon’s usually crisp and distinctive style.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Adrian Salmon
LETTERS: Elitta Fell
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes

ISSUE: 256
COVER DATE: 24 September 1997
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Endgame, published November 2005.

Landing in the city state of Tar-Ka-Nom in the year 2708, Izzy wants to finish a chapter of Tar-Ka_Nom: A History of a City State but the Doctor wants to explore. He is soon in trouble, charged and sentenced with the murder of seven jam merchants. Izzy attempts to rescue him by planting the sonic screwdriver inside a birthday cake, but only succeeds in getting herself imprisoned too. As the Doctor is led away for execution, she realises the date and demands a phone call. The Doctor’s conviction is overturned when the police receive an anonymous tip off and arrest the real murderer. Izzy confesses that she got the name of the real killer from her book, which isn’t published for another twenty-three years, and simply told the police his name and address.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - FEY TRUSCOTT-SADE

Undercover agent of the King George VI, and Katharine Hepburn lookalike Fey Truscott-Sade has met the Doctor before in an adventure as yet unrecorded involving the psychic weasels of Russell Square. During this encounter, he gave her a Stattenheim Summoner disguised as a tin whistle as a favour in case of emergency. He meets her again on an island in the Indian Ocean in 1939 where she is masquerading as an art detective whilst investigating the affairs of Varney and Lycett. Along with Izzy, she took the dying Doctor back to Gallifrey and helped stop the ambitions of Luther. However, unknown to her, she had been kidnapped by the Threshold in 1937, following her first encounter with the Doctor, and implanted with a perceptual relay unit that allowed them to spy on the Doctor’s every move. The Doctor quickly suspected this as Fey was able to pilot the TARDIS using the manual, even though this book was written in a Gallifreyan script. When Shayde was mortally wounded by the Pariah in Wormwood, Fey refused to let him die and instead bonded with him, becoming ‘Feyde’.

FEYDE’S STORY CONTINUES HERE.

SCRIPT: Alan Barnes
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks)
LETTERS: Elitta Fell
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Scott Gray

ISSUES: 262 - 265
COVER DATES: 11 March 1998 - 3 June 1998
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Endgame, published November 2005.

As Fey and Izzy pilot the TARDIS to Gallifrey, the Doctor’s imminent arrival is reported to Overseer Luther in his watchtower. When the TARDIS lands, the Doctor’s party is greeted by Castellan Tenion, and Fey forces her to get the Doctor immediate assistance. The bacillus is purged from his system, but to aid recovery his mind is placed inside the Matrix. Here he meets Rassilon and the Higher Evolutionaries. The Doctor confronts them about the Threshold (see here). Back in the real world a college dropout named Xanti attempts to see the Doctor but is incapacitated by Fey. He believes he is being stalked by some strange cult called the Elysians. Just then the Elysians appear over the Doctor’s body declaring that he must die to safeguard the future.

The Doctor’s prone body is saved by the arrival of Shayde who kills one of the Elysians, but the rest of them seize Xanti and Izzy before dematerialising. Shayde summons the Doctor back to the real world, but the Doctor first asks Rassilon to tell him more of the threat he is facing for ‘the good of their bargain’. Rassilon speaks of a shared vision of Gallifrey grown dark and wicked, suppressing the weak, suspending progress. Returning to the real world, the Doctor examines the body of the dead Elysian and discovers it has the face of Xanti. Overseer Luther arrives and asks for the Doctor’s assistance.  He has been concerned about Xanti for some time, but the Chancellory guard will do nothing to investigate the boy’s sightings of the Elysium. He instructs the Doctor to visit Uriel, the boy’s father, now residing in a mental asylum called the Quantum of Solace. It is a place presided over by Tubal Cain (see Fifth Doctor comic strip The Stockbridge Horror) who warns the Doctor that Uriel exists in a dangerous dreamscape of his own making. While Izzy and Xanti discover that Luther is behind the Elysium, Fey goes inside the dreamscape to assist the Doctor, but finds him bound, Gulliver-style, by tiny men.

Fey rescues the Doctor and is in turn rescued by Uriel, but Tubal Cain disconnects the circuits leaving both Fey and the Doctor’s minds trapped in the dreamscape. Uriel tells them he joined the Elysium in its early days. They were a secret society that rejected the old ways of Gallifrey. They were the oldest civilisation and should have been Gods. Xanti was a clone produced from Uriel’s own bio-data to be a weapon in the seizing of the Capitol, but upon seeing his son, Uriel’s feelings changed and he had himself committed to the asylum in shame. Uriel has a device that will allow the Doctor and Fey to return to the real world. They depart, leaving him to his guilt. Knocking Tubal Cain unconscious, the pair head to the department of records and there look at the plans of Luther’s watchtower: the purpose of each storey is clearly marked... apart from the ninety-fifth floor. While Castellan Tenion goes to confront Luther directly, the Doctor pilots the TARDIS to the ninety-fifth floor of the watchtower and is there greeted by the man. Xanti, who contains material from the Eye of Harmony, has been wired into the systems - the watchtower is the central column of a planet-sized TARDIS that will take Gallifrey back to Year Zero.

Luther plans to rewrite all of Gallifrey’s history to set them up as gods, but Izzy appeals to Xanti to use his powers over the Elysium. He does, turning them all against Luther, but Luther kills the boy as the TARDIS prepares to materialise at Year Zero - the year Rassilon activated the Eye of Harmony and turned them into Lords of Time. In turn, as power is unleashed, he is swept into the vortex. To avert the destruction of all Time Lord history, the Doctor must pilot the TARDIS back to its starting point, but to do so will require a living time brain wired into the system. The Doctor is resigned to his fate and tricks Fey and Izzy into departing in the TARDIS. Shayde appears, but it is the Doctor who must endure the agony of transfer. All is restored to as it was, but the strain of the operation forces the Doctor to regenerate...

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - SHAYDE (Part Three) (Click here for Part One)

Shayde returns to the comic strip properly (having put in a cameo appearance in A Life of Matter and Death) after an absence of almost fifteen years in The Final Chapter, though what exactly his role in events is remains ambiguous at this time. He turns up to save the Doctor from the Elysium then reappears at the end to offer some words to the Doctor that will have to be heavily reinterpreted by the reader in the light of the following adventure.

The Doctor’s regeneration is a sham devised between the Doctor and the Higher Evolutionaries, with Shayde as their willing accomplice. The new Doctor is in fact Shayde disguised using a personal chameleon circuit, augmented by a persona imprint pulled from the Matrix to give the charade a convincing character capable of fooling the Threshold. It was actually he who piloted the watchtower back to its starting point in The Final Chapter while the Doctor hid aboard the TARDIS. The resulting trauma was sufficient to convincingly stage a fake regeneration and deliver to the Threshold exactly what they wanted: a Doctor who was vulnerable.

The plan exposed, Shayde does battle with the Pariah, his predecessor as an agent of the Time Lords, but loses the fight and is almost destroyed. He survives by bonding with Fey Truscott-Sade, becoming, as he later suggests, an agent of both Rassilon and King George VI. In their new, shared form, Shayde and Fey became known as Feyde.

FEYDE’s STORY CONTINUES HERE.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Roger Langridge
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes

ISSUE: 272
COVER DATE: 16 December 1998
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Glorious Dead, published November 2005.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
With so little televisual Doctor Who on which to base the Eighth Doctor’s comic strip reign, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Grace Holloway should turn up in the comic strip at some point, and the way it is done is clever, springboarding its story from dialogue in the TV Movie to great effect. The idea of the Master’s morphant form being a creature from the planet Skaro is also neat and goes some way to making sense of the TV Movie’s nonsense. The ending feels a little easy and lacking in real drama, but of course it’s the final panel, riffing on the TV Movie’s other major character, that leaves the big impression. We have just started on another epic story arc, and this time we know it.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks)
LETTERS: Elitta Fell
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes

ISSUES: 273 - 276
COVER DATES: 13 January 1999 - 7 April 1999
ON TV: The Curse of Fatal Death (Doctor Who spoof)
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Glorious Dead, published November 2005.

Landing in London in November, 2001, the Doctor and Izzy are verbally attacked by a street preacher. They make their escape to a cafe. Meanwhile, a party aboard an advanced helicopter are searching for something strange. They’re not sure what it will look like, but they know they’ll recognise it when they find it. What they do find is the TARDIS, and one of the crew knows it of old and demands an immediate landing. However, Izzy has returned to the TARDIS for her glasses and is soon held at  gunpoint, but a more serious threat, alien in nature, presents itself. The sound of gunfire alerts the Doctor, who has been reading about disappearances in the area, but he is soon held at gunpoint by a man named Duncan. One of the helicopter crew appears, telling Duncan not to hurt him. The crew member is Doctor Grace Holloway.

The helicopter carries the Doctor, Grace and Duncan back to base - MI5. Grace tries to mention what she has been working on, but Duncan silences her. Izzy and a member of the crew named Patrick, meanwhile, find themselves underground. But there is something hungry down there with them. The Doctor meets Leighton  Woodrow, head of MI5, who tells him about the disappearances, and also the disappearance of MI5’s own Professor Donald Stark, a brilliant geneticist, who vanished from his locked lab nine days before. Grace was his assistant. But the Doctor is suspicious - Grace is a surgeon, not a lab assistant. She explains that she found residue of the Master’s substance that he spat at her to control her (see the TV Movie) which she collected. Its complex DNA structure was beyond her background, but she was eventually contacted by Professor Stark and hired by MI5, the aim being to find a way to splice Time Lord and human DNA to make humans capable of regenerating. The Doctor is furious. He examines a sample of the substance and claims it is not Time Lord tissue. Donald Stark has been transformed into a monster, and the Doctor realises that all the disappearances happened on the course of the River Effra, which is now largely underground. Underground, Izzy and Patrick are consumed by the gelatinous creature.

Izzy’s life flashes before her eyes, and it is her memory of the Doctor that saves her, as the creature is intrigued by the alien Doctor. The Doctor, meanwhile, explains to Woodrow, Grace and Duncan that Stark has injected himself with a DNA compound derived from a lifeform native to Skaro known as a Morphant, but Stark doesn’t have the mental powers to control the Morphant or the consciousnesses it absorbs and it will have driven him insane. At the moment he will be trying to increase his mass by absorbing protein. The River Effra only touches the surface in the pond in Brockwell Park, and it is here that the Doctor plans to lure the creature with thirty cow  carcasses. The creature appears, Izzy in its grasp, and offers to spare her in return for the Doctor, but then reneges on the deal, seizing them both. With the Doctor absorbed it will be able to control the TARDIS and plunder the universe for food.

Grace saves the Doctor and Izzy by detonating a canister of carbon dioxide. The creature retreats back into the watercourse, but the Doctor realises it will be heading for the Thames and commandeers the helicopter. Ejecting just in time, he crashes it into the creature,  detonating the supply of carbon dioxide aboard. The creature dies. Duncan, meanwhile, has spotted the street preacher, for the third time in a security area and goes to confront him, but the preacher is not all that he seems... The Doctor gives Grace a tin whistle before returning to the TARDIS, but he has an uncomfortable feeling that he has missed something. Woodrow and an MI5 operative go to examine Duncan’s body. It has been shrunk to the size of a doll...

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so they say, and the Doctor’s good intentions in this story will definitely come back to bite him fairly soon as another part of the latest story arc slots into place. The setting is rich (though sometimes a little sketchily illustrated), the detail impressive, the Gaijin genuinely effective, and the characters well realised, especially Katsura Sato and the Lady Asami, driven mad by visions of her own country’s future. Sato, cursed with immortality, must surely have been the inspiration for Captain Jack Harkness, though Sato’s immortality is even crueller as every moment of his life from this point on dishonours him.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks)
LETTERS: Elitta Fell
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes

ISSUES: 278 - 282
COVER DATES: 2 June 1999 - 22 September 1999
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Glorious Dead, published November 2005.

Seventeenth Century Japan. Samurai Katsura Sato returns from the Shogun in Edo in time to see his aged master killed by demons bearing the crest of the clan Rikushira, the oldest enemies of the Makoto, Sato’s clan. Unable to win the support of the clan elders, Sato sets out alone to take his revenge. The Doctor and Izzy arrive in a small village, but are taken prisoner by Captain Hirotada, who plans to take them to Edo. But en route they are attacked by a fire-breathing dragon.

The dragon scares Izzy’s horse before dissolving into a cloud of insects. The Doctor’s party are taken as guests to the palace of Rikushira, whilst Izzy is saved from her horse by Sato, who tells her he intends to kill Rikushira. But Rikushira, through the alien gifts of his mother, knows of the Doctor’s lineage and poisons Hirotada to get the Doctor alone. He takes him to meet his mother, the Lady Asami, who in turn introduces him to the alien Gaijin.

The Gaijin claim to be students of the abstract seeking understanding of the conceptual. They want to understand honour. In return they have given the Lady Asami a device for fashioning whatever she imagines into reality from a cloud of nano-drones. With it she plans to destroy Edo and the Shogun. Rikushira, meanwhile, has been given a hibernation chamber containing billions of nano-drones programmed to repair cellular damage - immortality for the user. Izzy and Sato gain entry to the palace of Rikushira and, as part of the ruse, Izzy is taken to the Lady Asami. The old woman reaches into her mind to see the fate of her country and eventually uncovers the atomic blasts that devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. She vows never to allow it to happen. She will crush the West... beginning with Izzy and the Doctor.

Sato enters and attacks. In the confusion, the Doctor and Izzy escape, but Asami sends a swarm of nano-drones after them which manifest as a giant robot from Izzy’s mind. Sato kills Rikushira, despite the terrified man offering him the gift of immortality, then saves the Doctor and Izzy from the drones... but he is mortally wounded. The nano-drones manifest as a giant, Godzilla-like monster.

The Doctor realises that the nano-drones are being controlled by Asami’s rage rather than her intellect. He and Izzy get Sato inside and save his life using Rikushira’s hibernation chamber, but they are soon captured by Asami’s drones and she threatens a terrible revenge. The Doctor appeals to the Gaijin, teaching them the true meaning of honour. Finally understanding, they turn on the Lady Asami and destroy her and themselves. Now Sato confronts the Doctor. Having failed his master, he tried to commit seppuku, but cannot die. He is cursed with eternal life, and that is the Doctor’s fault.

SCRIPT: Alan Barnes
ART: Roger Langridge
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Scott Gray

ISSUE: 283 (two covers available)
COVER DATE: 20 October 1999
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Glorious Dead, published November 2005.

The TARDIS materialises in the path of an alien fugitive’s ship just as the alien engages his dimensional transbobulator. Both ships are drawn into a parallel universe. The alien ship crashes into BBC Television Centre, and its occupant, the infamous Beep the Meep uses black star radiation from his star drive to enslave the building’s inhabitants. Captured, the Doctor is brought before the Meep, but Beep refuses to believe he is the same man who defeated him before, and enslaves him with black star radiation. Izzy, meanwhile, finds the one man who can help her. The Meep is about to link his star drive to the BBC’s transmitter, bringing the whole of Britain under his control, when, to his horror, he is confronted by Tom Baker - the image of the Doctor who defeated him so long ago. While the Meep is distracted, Izzy sabotages his star drive, overloading the BBC transmitter and freeing the employees of Television Centre. As the furious Meep is led off to the zoo, Izzy admits she had help defeating the Meep - and gives the Doctor a copy of the Fantastic First Issue of a certain magazine...

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
A bit of a breather from the story arc, and a spot of light-hearted and dizzyingly self-referential fun (Tom Baker’s dialogue being particularly funny) to celebrate twenty years of Doctor Who Magazine, as the Doctor is forced to recognise his own fictional status as both a television series and a continuing comic strip (with the title a knowing wink to one of the comic strip’s homes during the 1970s). As well as referencing a good deal of the BBC’s late 1970s television output, including Are You Being Served?, The Basil Brush Show, Top of the Pops, The Onedin Line, Larry Grayson’s Generation Game, Fawlty Towers, Blue Peter, Blake’s Seven, Grange Hill, The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Animal Magic, The Goodies, Rentaghost (possibly) and Doctor Who (specifically The Horns of Nimon), it also manages to squeeze in a cameo for Hoppit, the bullying security guard from TV Comic strip TV Terrors.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
I’m not a great fan of this strip. After a very strong run, it feels rather lightweight and inconsequential and more of an excuse to get Kroton aboard the TARDIS. It also radically redefines Kroton’s character, turning him into a                wise-cracking, fist-fighting guy in a shiny suit rather than the tragic but noble Cyberman he once was. It is, though, a nice piece of development the way the Doctor comes to trust him over the course of the adventure and finally welcomes him aboard the TARDIS. With this story, the final piece of the story arc is manoeuvred into place ready for the epic finale to  come, I just wish this story had been more elegant in itself.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Adrian Salmon (pencils), Fareed Choudhury (inks)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes

ISSUES: 284 - 286
COVER DATES: 17 November 1999 - 12 January 2000
ON TV: The Daleks (episode 7 only) (repeat), The TV Movie (repeat), Spearhead from Space (repeat), Doctor Who and the Silurians (repeat)
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Glorious Dead, published November 2005.

Qutrusian Space Freighter X-705 is boarded by space pirates led by Grast Horstrogg, who slaughter the crew and disable the engines. Going through the cargo bays, they soon find the Doctor and Izzy, who have landed by accident having meant to land at the Alexandria Library. They also find Kroton the Cyberman who is stowed away, hoping to get to Phodosia, who knocks out a group of pirates and sets off to explore. A power flux from a nearby asteroid field destroys the pirates’ ship, and the Doctor and Izzy escape when the shockwaves hit the freighter, but when they encounter Kroton, the Doctor assumed the worst and attempts to kill him with a power cable.

The Doctor and Izzy are recaptured by Horstrogg and his pirates. Believing the Cybermen are behind the destruction of the pirate ship, the Doctor urges them to repair the engines, but the ship is caught in an energy leash and pulled towards the asteroid belt. As the ship is drawn down to a base on one of the larger asteroids, Kroton revives and befriends the Doctor and Izzy. While the pirates head out to deal with the enemy, the Doctor, Izzy and Kroton discover the TARDIS missing. Something on the planet wants it so that it can escape.

The Doctor, Izzy and Kroton head out into the city and discover the half-crazy Tobal Reist and the Eraser, a sentient multi-function energy manipulator. It explains to them that Tobal invented it and, in testing it, split his homeworld of Trionikus into eighteen billion fragments, with Tobal as the only survivor. The pirates overhear and plan to take the TARDIS for themselves, but Kroton overpowers them. However, Horstrogg kills Tobal and seizes the Eraser, but when he tries to transmat out he finds that the Doctor has stolen the power cell. Horstrogg begins to pursue the Doctor, but Izzy commands the Eraser to destroy itself, which it does. Unfortunately, it was the Eraser creating the atmosphere and gravity on the asteroid. The Doctor and Izzy both entrust their lives to Kroton, who regains them entry to the TARDIS, leaving Horstrogg stranded in space.

The Doctor is living a life of domesticity, married to Grace and working at a university. Until suddenly he isn’t. Now he is a gunslinger in a Western. Then a cartoon cat trying to pilfer some fish from a fishmongers. Then a powerful warlock battling fantastical creatures alongside his apprentice Sayde Le Fey. Then a character in a Peanuts cartoon. Then a private eye on the case of multiple homicides. Then a Cyborg killing-machine wiping out alien invaders. But the Doctor forces himself to concentrate. For a time it seems he is back with Grace, but he realises this is illusion and finally faces a creature called Esterath, who is a gatherer, and who realises the Doctor has learned perspective and awareness, qualities he will need to face his final challenge. He stands on the wheel on which reality turns... the Glory, and the Glory is about to die.

Izzy’s plan worked - most of the Ash Wraiths were destroyed, survivors have retreated to their own realm and the allied forces have recaptured the Southern hemisphere. Morningstar retreats to Dhakan, but Kroton is a stowaway aboard his ship and planning retribution for Izzy’s death. The Doctor, meanwhile, sees that the time/space vortex is but a tiny tributary flowing into the Omniversal Spectrum. The Glory keeps the structure of the omniverse whole, but it requires a living consciousness to direct it. The current director is dying, and the Doctor has been chosen to replace him. Meanwhile, aboard Morningstar’s flagship, Izzy is only miniaturised and not dead. Morningstar removes his helmet to show her his true self. He is Katsura Sato. Esterath delivers the Doctor to the planet Dhakan, a grim world of pollution populated by the enslaved. But when he sees St Paul’s cathedral, he realises that Dhakan is Earth and that the Master is behind it all. The two Time Lords confront each other and the Master declares that he has learned a great deal. The Doctor is the apprentice... and he is finally the Master!

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Alan Barnes

ISSUES: 297 - 299
COVER DATES: 15 November 2000 - 10 January 2001
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Glorious Dead, published November 2005.

At the request of a friend, the Doctor visits Blueberry House, where Doctor Andrelina Hastoff is in charge of rehabilitating robots suffering from ‘severe programming deviancy’. While she discusses her work with the Doctor, one of her cloned assistants ‘accidentally’ locks Izzy in the robot congregation chamber, where Izzy is nearly attacked by the mad robots.

The robots realise that Izzy is human -- just as they believe themselves to be. The depressed Emperor Zero tells Izzy that they are all human beings who have been locked up by robots, and the Doctor, watching, realises that the robots have formed their own society. They aren’t insane, they’re sentient; and just like children, they are developing emotions that they aren’t sure how to deal with. Hastoff, however, insists that their deviancy is the result of an undetected virus, and reveals that she has purchased an Adjuster from Kallulio Prime with which to electronically recondition the “deviant” machines, returning them to “normal”. The Doctor is horrified, and realises that Hastoff had Izzy locked in the congregation chamber in the hope that the robots would harm her, giving Hastoff an excuse to use the Adjuster on them all. When he threatens to shut her down, Hastoff tries to kill him with the Adjuster.

He is saved by Izzy, who has decided that, by this time, the Doctor must be in trouble, and she and Zero break out of the congregation chamber to look for him. They find the Doctor being chased by the Adjuster, and Zero gives his life to destroy its guidance systems so that it careers off a balcony and sinks to the bottom of the bay. Angered by Zero’s death, the robots storm through Blueberry House -- but although they capture Hastoff, they don’t kill her. As the Doctor had hoped, they understand mercy; they are maturing, and one day they will be accepted by humanity as equals.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
I’m a great admirer of Roger Langridge’s artwork on the lighter one-part stories, but I can’t help but feel that here it works more against the story, somehow making it less engaging and more difficult to follow. There is an interesting idea behind the strip, but the whole is played perhaps too lightly to make it work.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks/colours)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Alan Barnes

ISSUES: 300 - 303
COVER DATES: 7 February 2001 - 2 May 2001
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Oblivion, published October 2006.

The TARDIS is swallowed by a giant serpent-shaped bio-mechanical spaceship, a dampening field preventing it from leaving. The Doctor and Izzy explore, observed by the apparently invisible Beholder Panoquai, and discover other crashed ships, but are soon forced to hide as a herd of gigantic rock-like Mobox arrive and destroy one of the ships with Isotetric energy streams fired from their mouths. Having been detected, the Doctor and Izzy run, but their troubles worsen as flying Seeonkaas attack. They are saved by a semi-aquatic alien. Beholder Panoquai’s commentary on events in interrupted by another voice. The intruders must be deleted. The amphibious alien introduces herself as Destrii, but Beholder Panoquai has found them again, and prepares to destroy them.

However, the Doctor has detected Panoquai’s presence and topples him from his floating chair. The Beholder was a nanosecond in the future, making him invisible. Destrii explains that she and her void-glider were swallowed by the serpent a couple of months ago, and she survived by finding her way to a cave that leads to a network of tunnels repaired by spider-like servicer drones. Leaving Izzy and Destrii to bond, the Doctor goes for an exploration in Panoquai’s floating chair and discovers an artificial eco-system inside the serpent-ship. He also discovers, inside a special spherical control deck, that the ship is called Ophidius and sees the leader of the Beholders, a being called Gorolith. But he is detected, and held at gunpoint. Gorolith gives orders to destroy.

Before he dies, the Doctor demands some answers. He identifies the Ophidians as beings capable of trading their bodies for the bodies of other species. The jungle provides an arena to select the strongest species, who have been regressed to creatures of pure instinct, and the Mobox proved the winners. Ophidius now approaches the Mobox homeworld so that the weakening Ophidians can renew their race. The Doctor escapes, leaving behind the servicer drone he found earlier. Izzy and Destrii, meanwhile, force Panoquai to lead them to a transmat and get them aboard the Ophidians’ control deck. The Doctor is discovered, but the servicer drone has been reprogrammed by the Doctor and it wrecks the anti-gravity regulator causing the control deck to crash into the jungle below. The machine that regressed the minds of the creatures in the jungle is damaged and the creatures revert to normal. They are keen to have revenge on their oppressors, but the Doctor stops them. Destrii, meanwhile, has found a device that she recognises and convinces Izzy it will allow her to contact the Doctor telepathically. However, it is really one of the Ophidians’ body-swapping devices, and Izzy and Destrii swap forms.

Destrii, now in Izzy’s body, kills Beholder Panoquai and prepares to do the same to Izzy by setting the device to overload. As she leaves to join the Doctor and the TARDIS, blasting a Mobox on the way, the dying Panoquai releases Izzy from the device. To prevent Gorolith destroying Ophidius, the Doctor disconnects him from the ship’s central nervous system, but Gorolith fights back. It is Destrii, in Izzy’s body, who saves the Doctor, blasting the Gorolith and claiming that Destrii was killed by a Mobox, but the Doctor isn’t fooled and demands Destrii return Izzy to her body. But the mate of the Mobox that Destrii killed earlier finds her and - as Izzy approaches - blasts Destrii, destroying Izzy’s true form.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - DESTRIIANATOS

Destrii is eighteen and obsessed with Earth culture, though specifically television shows like Wonder Woman, Bonanza, Lost in Space and Rawhide, and she later mentions Mrs Peel, so we can assume she knows of The Avengers. She is also familiar with the original series of Star Trek, mentioning a ‘five year mission’, the final frontier and quoting dialogue from the episode Spock’s Brain. Having befriended Izzy, she tricks her into swapping

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
I must confess I never much cared for this strip. It’s not that it does anything particularly wrong, and the character of Destrii is a fantastic addition to the strip, but the main plot and the subplot never quite mesh to produce a memorable story, the Doctor and Izzy never feel in any particular danger, and it feels like the main threat is rather easily disposed of. Much stronger is the subplot which dramatically kick-starts the next story arc that basically runs until the end of the Eighth Doctor’s comic strip adventures. The move to colour is a welcome one, though the colour here is slightly garish and not entirely conducive to generating atmosphere. The servicer drone the Doctor finds he cheekily calls Boris (a nod to Matt Irvine’s name for the mechanical spider from Planet of the Spiders).

bodies with her, intending to kill her - as she does Beholder Panoquai and the Gorolith. She explains that she is being pursued by a ‘few authority figures’ and the switch is the perfect way to put them off her scent. Unfortunately, Destrii’s lack of respect for life is her undoing. She kills a Mobox called K’yruss, and the Mobox’s mate comes looking for revenge, apparently frying Destrii - and with her Izzy’s natural form. However, it turns out that the Mobox can also deconstruct bodies and store them within themselves, and this is what the Mobox actually did to Destrii, releasing her in the jungles of its homeworld over a pit of piranha-like Mykkadons. Destrii was able to escape this fate, with a little help from a Mobox seer called C’sorr who realised the vital part she would play in saving his planet from the wrath of Ophidius. Against her will, Destrii talked to Ophidius and persuaded it not to destroy all of the Mobox. Equally against her will, the Doctor then took her back to her homeworld. Here we learn that Destriianatos is an alien princess and her mother, the Matriax Scalamanthia, is a cruel tyrant queen of the Imperious House of Endoskiia whose lineage can be traced back three millennia. The Matriax always hated Destrii, punishing her severely for any minor transgression, because the people preferred Destrii to her mother, believing she would save them. She gave six-year-old Destrii a pet, let her care for it, then forced her to kill it. Destrii entered the arena for the first time when she was ten. Her only relief was the time she spent with her beloved Uncle Jodafra. Destrii is due to be wed to Duke Borvathorius, first-born son of the House of Dregganon. She made a mortal enemy of the Lady Tetronnia when she gutted her sister, but finishes Tetronnia by stabbing her in the back. Once her mind is back in her own body, thanks to Helioth and Hassana, she murders her own mother, but this is bad news for Oblivion as it releases the Horde. However, when the Horde catch her, they transform her into their queen and for a while it looks like her self-loathing will lead them to destroy the planet. But Izzy appeals to Destrii, who leads them to Jodafra’s chronon capsule where they are converted into fuel. Destrii is restored to her humanoid form and the two blast off for the adventures she has always craved. However, those adventures are as amoral as the Doctor’s are moral.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks/colours)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Alan Barnes

ISSUE: 304
COVER DATE: 30 May 2001
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Oblivion, published October 2006.

Izzy struggles to come to terms with her new appearance, initially blaming the Doctor. However, when he saves her life by submerging her in the TARDIS pool, she realises that he is not to blame.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - ISABELLE ‘IZZY’ SINCLAIR (Part Two)

After being tricked by Destrii into swapping bodies and then seeing her natural form apparently destroyed, Izzy is initially consumed with grief and feelings of self-loathing. She feels suicidal, and also blames the Doctor, but she does come to terms with it, promising to be less trusting of people in future. Arriving in Mexico, 1941, she initially decides to stay inside the TARDIS, but summons her courage and ventures out. It is here she meets world-famous artist Frida Kahlo, who teaches her to take control of her destiny and never forget what lies within, an important step towards her emotional recovery. On Kyrol, though she feels shunned by many of the xenophobic humans, she learns to embrace the abilities of her new body, but it is here that she is captured by agents from Oblivion who mistake her for Destrii. It isn’t until her final story that we learn Izzy’s surname is Sinclair. Her childhood dreams of being an alien princess are finally realised, though probably not in the way she would have imagined as she is attacked by the alien queen Matriax then forced to fight in matrimonial conflict in an arena. It is in this arena that she finally meets Destrii again. She is consumed with rage and almost kills the deceitful body thief. However, Helioth and Hassana, alerted to the mind swap by Fey, stopped the fighting and switched the minds back again, thus finally ending Izzy’s nightmare. However, during the transfer she saw into Destrii’s mind and saw the suffering she had endured at the hands of her mother. She forgave her, and it was Izzy who talked her round when she became possessed by the Horde. Izzy’s ordeal taught her a lot and helped her come to terms with her nature, clinching a lingering kiss with Fey. She realised she had treated her parents badly and wanted to return home to put things right. The Doctor returned her on 19 December 1996, the same night she left.

As the longest serving comic strip companion of all time, Izzy’s development is one of the great triumphs of the Eighth Doctor’s strip adventures. We end up with a more thorough understanding of her than many of the television companions, and it is an extremely rounded and believable portrait of an isolated young woman, afraid of her sexuality and seeking comfort in fantasy. Her adventures with the Doctor teach her to grow, and this is one of the key things that was surely picked up by Russell T. Davies in developing the new television series of Doctor Who. The emotional heart of the new series starts beating in the comic strip.

Izzy (now without the blonde streak) puts in one final cameo in the last instalment of The Flood, fittingly the final Eighth Doctor comic strip, and even narrates part of the tale, but has since turned up in the Big Finish audio adventure The Company of Friends where she is attempting to track down ultra-rare back copies of Aggrotron, the most dangerous comic in history. Here she is played by Jemima Rooper. She makes further cameos in the Tenth Doctor stories Death to the Doctor! and The Stockbridge Child, this latter tale revealing that she has become a traveller and explorer, stays in touch with Max Edison, and has recently discovered something interesting in Kabul.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), Robin Smith (inks/colours)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Alan Barnes and Clayton Hickman

ISSUES: 306, 308 - 310
COVER DATES: 25 July 2001, 19 September 2001 - 14 November 2001
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Oblivion, published October 2006.

Mexico, 1941, November the Second. Artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are driving to a party during Los Meurte Dos Dios (the Day of the Dead) when their car hits Izzy, knocking her unconscious. Diego wants to call a doctor, but Frida knows doctors would only cut her open to find out why she looks the way she does. Instead, she takes her home to nurse her better. When a semi-conscious Izzy mentions a companion, Diego goes to look for him. Izzy is alarmed by a skeleton-shaped festival decoration and runs off. Frida tries to stop her, but receives a visitation from Guillermo, her dead father. Izzy sees this and stops her touching him, but the spectre fights back. Diego, meanwhile, sees lights coming from Costillio Park. There he finds the Doctor studying a cloaked spaceship with an endo-dimensional tracer, but both of them are soon surrounded by the alien inhabitants.

The Doctor identifies the aliens as being composed of pure plasma matrices. When questioned further, he claims both he and Diego are Time Lords, and the aliens, apparently led by Voreseth, decide they warrant further investigation. Izzy is losing the fight, but the spectre destroys Frida’s shrine to her father and she realises this is not him. She shoots the spectre and it explodes. Aboard the ship, the Doctor and Diego meet Susini of the Wasting Wall, the greatest artist to ever grace the nine dimensions. She has long wanted to get her hands on some Time Lords. Now they will be her clay to shape into a work of art.

The Doctor turns on Susini. She belongs to the necrotists, a movement denounced across the civilised universe for its slaughter of innocents. Voreseth says that his race - the Torajenn - became plasma matrices after an unfortunate war. Susini will give them flesh again by allowing them to appear to the locals disguised as dead ancestors. Then they can drink the flesh from the bones of their victims and resume corporeal existence. She goes to meet her public, leaving the Doctor and Diego at the mercy of one of the Torajenn, but he suddenly explodes. Izzy and Frida head to the cemetary to warn the locals of the danger, but Frida is knocked out and Izzy, shunned as a freak, receives a visitation from her own human body. Tired, she reaches out to touch it.

Frida recovers consciousness and shoots at the apparition. She misses, but the sound is enough to make it revert to its natural Torajenn form. Izzy and Frida use the planned firework display to make the Torajenn revert. The locals see them as demons and the Torajenn are forced to flee. The Doctor and Diego escape the ship and confront Susini, who is busy building a tower of human bones using an energy vortex. She sets Voreseth on them, but the Doctor seizes Susini’s ultrasonic projector - a fail-safe weapon in case the Torajenn turned on her - and uses it to destroy them. However, Susini fights back and it is left to Diego to topple her into the energy vortex. It strips the flesh from her bones and she becomes part of her own work of art. Izzy is distraught because the Torajenn stole the one photographic image she had of her original body, but Frida paints a portrait of her human form, telling her never to forget who she really is.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Frida and Diego Kahlo were real people, living in Coyoacán in Mexico. Both Diego and Frida were famous artists and many of the details in the story are genuine. By 1941, Frida and Diego had been divorced once but remarried in 1940. Their second marriage was just as turbulent as the first. In the strip, Frida says that her sister owes her far more than she can ever repay. This is true, as her sister had an affair with Diego. So, that’s the educational stuff done with, what of the actual strip? It’s a reasonable one (though it would be nice to meet a race of aliens that doesn’t glow and float), given much depth and colour by the setting and the supporting cast, and is as much about Izzy coming to terms with her predicament as it is about Susini and her ‘art’.

Diego’s utterance of ‘Mierda’ is rather grown up for the magazine and probably the first instance of swearing in the comic strip.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Lee Sullivan (art), Adrian Salmon (colour)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Alan Barnes and Clayton Hickman

ISSUES: 312 - 317
COVER DATES: 9 January 2002 - 29 May 2002
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Oblivion, published October 2006, with additional material .

The Doctor takes Izzy to the planet Kyrol aboard a huge high-tech submarine called the Argus, so that marine biologist Alison Lavelle, an old friend of the Doctor’s, can examine Izzy and better help her understand her new form. The Argus arrives at the Asamda Ridge for a mineralogical survey, Despite the Doctor’s protestations, Alison wants to monitor Izzy in the ocean rather than a tank aboard the Argus. However, as she feels the rush of the ocean, the Argus is struck by a sonic wave and begins to sink. Oblivious, Izzy swims on, but suddenly finds herself surrounded by Daleks.

The Doctor and Alison manage to survive the Argus plunging down to the ocean bed. Whilst Captain Julius Otago and his second-in-command Theo Rankin try to send a distress call to Kyrol central, the sub is attacked by Daleks. Izzy, meanwhile, is taken prisoner. The Doctor and Alison gain entry to the Argus through a hull rupture as the Daleks seize the bridge. The Doctor and Alison make for the reactor, where they try to prevent a reactor meltdown - but it is the Daleks who prevent this happening. Identifying the Doctor, they hail him as the saviour.

While the crew are held prisoner aboard the Argus, the Daleks attach devices to the hull. Julius and Theo are suspicious of the Doctor because of the Daleks’ odd reaction to him. The Doctor needs answers and goes to the bridge to get them. There he meets a Dalek who calls himself Makkith. Makkith says the Daleks are saving the humans following the mysterious sonic wave. The devices on the hull give the sub structural integrity and allow it to be piloted - through a holographic projection and into the heart of the Asamda Ridge. Here they discover a vast Dalek city called Azhra Korr. Disembarking the Doctor is reunited with Izzy, but also meets Alpha, one of the three Daleks he conditioned with the Human Factor during his second incarnation (Evil of the Daleks). Alpha shows the Doctor the peaceful society they have built, developing their psychokinetic powers. But he cannot allow the humans to leave and expose them to danger. The Argus is destroyed. They will remain here and make a new life.

Despite tensions between the Daleks and the humans, Alpha is keen to preserve his society’s security. He tells the Doctor of the escape from Skaro during the civil war and how he had a vision of Kyrol. They have remained hidden for decades, hated and feared by all. The Doctor wants to trace the source of the sonic wave. He gives Alpha his word that he will not attempt trickery. Meanwhile, Julius and Theo are planning escape, but distrust the Doctor and refuse to let him in on their plans. Izzy also feels rejected by the humans. The Doctor tells her he and Alpha are going to find the source of the sonic wave, but he has another task for her to do. As the Doctor and Alpha head off into the waterways beneath Azhra Korr, Izzy swims out to the wreck of the Argus to retrieve the TARDIS. But she is seized by a gigantic tentacle.

As the Doctor and Alpha explore the waterways, Julius and his elite of men launch an attack to seize the saucer that the Daleks arrived in. But tensions between humans and Daleks reach boiling point and an all out attack begins. The Doctor and Alpha, meanwhile, reach the source of the sonic wave - a huge many-tentacled creature called Kata-Phobus. The creature reveals that it led Alpha and his Daleks to Kyrol and has been protecting them ever since. It shows Alpha the conflict in Azhra Korr, but when the Doctor tries to intercede, it reveals his deception to Alpha by producing Izzy and the TARDIS. Feeling betrayed, Alpha opens fire on the Doctor.

The Doctor dodges Alpha’s blasts and manipulates the Dalek into accidentally firing on Kata-Phobus. This gives the Doctor the chance he needs to rescue Izzy and the TARDIS and escape back to the surface. But Kata-Phobus, with Alpha its prisoner, arrives in Azhra Korr first. It explains how it consumed the last remaining member of its own species before looking elsewhere for sustenance. It feeds on psychokinetic energy and saw the potential of the Daleks as psionic generators. Now it plans to feed and use its new strength to destroy all humans on Kyrol. But Alpha will not allow his people to be used as weapons and self-destructs. The other Daleks follow, destroying Kata-Phobus. But some of the humans fail to understand the Daleks’ act of self-sacrifice, and a disgusted Doctor and Izzy head back to the TARDIS. However, outside the ship, they are confronted by two glowing aliens who think Izzy is Destrii. They knock the Doctor unconscious and carry Izzy away into the vortex... back to Oblivion.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Taking Evil of the Daleks as its inspiration, Children of the Revolution weaves around it a thought-provoking, mysterious and compelling tale, subverting all normal expectations by making the Daleks the heroes and the humans the ones to be pitied. It resolves its mysteries at a perfect pace, saving its best twists for the final instalment, though it’s a shame the Doctor isn’t more directly involved in the conclusion. The artwork and colour are top notch, adding tremendously to the  story. And then, right at the end, more glowy, floaty aliens appear and abduct Izzy! We must surely be off on another story arc here. I can’t wait to find out what happens...

her link with Shayde, she picks off all of Kessler’s soldiers before finally revealing herself to Kessler in her Feyde form and dispatching him. Aboard a train to Zurich, Fey and Shayde argue because he will not allow her to shadow-slide to Berlin and kill Hitler, but the debate is interrupted when Shayde receives an urgent summons - from the Doctor.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
This is another of those interesting little character pieces that start to appear during the Eighth Doctor’s comic strip run. Fey’s dealings with the Nazis are nothing special, fairly standard comic strip fodder, but the real focus here is the relationship between Fey and Shayde and this is handled extremely well. Add to this the surprise ending with the summons by the Doctor and suddenly the story becomes part of a larger story (one that arguably stretches all the way back to The Tides of Time). The artwork is very nicely done and the colours are muted, sometimes almost sepia, and extremely sympathetic to the tale being told.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - FEYDE

We next meet Fey and Shayde, still inhabiting the same mind, in Austria 1941. It seems things are not running quite as smoothly as had been hoped. Shayde’s conscious mind cohabiting with Fey’s was proving too confusing for both of them so Shayde is forced to mainly function on a subconscious level - sleeping, as Fey calls it. There is also a good deal of tension and resentment between Fey’s loyalties to her friends and country and Shayde’s broader perspective on the web of time, with him stopping her from using his powers to end the Second World War. In return she refuses to obey orders from Rassilon and the Higher Evolutionaries. Trapped by the Mobox, she is forced to allow Shayde to take complete control of her, something she is resistant to, though being forced to trust him and both working together to help the Doctor recover Izzy seems to improve their relationship, the respect between them and ultimately their efficiency. The feelings that had been brewing between Fey and Izzy for some time finally found expression as Fey prepared to return to her duties during the Second World War, having spoken to Izzy about her decision to return home.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: John Ross (art), Adrian Salmon (colour)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

ISSUES: 319 - 322
COVER DATES: 24 July 2002 - 16 October 2002
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Oblivion, published October 2006.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), David A. Roach (inks), Adrian Salmon (colour)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

ISSUES: 323 - 328
COVER DATES: 13 November 2002 - 2 April 2003
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ Oblivion, published October 2006.

Izzy, trapped in Destrii’s body, is punished by the Matriax, but saved further torment by the arrival of Destrii’s uncle, Count Jodafra. However, Jodafra’s casual manner to the Matriax infuriates one of the lords, who challenges him to a sword fight. But the Matriax has her own defenders, glowing aliens called Helioth and Hassana who appear hand-in-hand and vaporise the lord. The Matriax tells Izzy that her wedding will commence at dawn. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Feyde and Destrii arrive on Oblivion. The Doctor is puzzled because no planet is recorded at those spatial coordinates during any time period. It is a dead, stale world.

but no longer wish to kill her as she is now outside the Empire. Feyde explains about the mind swap and the aliens determine to fix things. As the Doctor and Jodafra race to the area, Helioth and Hassana halt the duel and place the minds back in their respective bodies, though there is a moment when Izzy and Destrii’s memories mix. The Matriax is furious that Destrii has made a mockery of the ceremony and attacks the girl, but Destrii takes a knife and stabs her mother in the guts. Jodafra is horrified; the thread has been cut. Feyde sees aliens like Helioth and Hassana emerge from the landscape around the dome. There are ten billion of them, and Shayde detects that they are angry.

The beings advance on the domed city, scattering the molecules of anything in their path. Feyde joins the Doctor and Izzy. The Doctor has a plan. He tells Feyde to fire at Helioth and Hassana’s hands to separate them. She does, which leaves them powerless and blind. Heading for Jodafra’s home, the Count explains that Oblivion was once a rich world where the ruling houses made proud war. But weapons were created that ate the flesh from within, mutating minds, destroying memories. The capital city was sealed off in a dome, leaving the population to die. Six months later, a masked ball was held in the palace, with everyone disguised as a beast, but a psychokinetic pulse reshaped their molecular structure so they became the creatures they resembled. The cause was the Horde, the transformed remnants of the population. They were childlike and eager for entertainment, hence the arena, but also held some memory of the Matriax as their ruler. Izzy tries to comfort Destrii, now knowing what she went through, but Destrii rounds on her - at least she had parents who cared. Destrii goes outside to offer herself to the Horde for punishment for killing her mother. But the punishment transforms Destrii into the queen of the Horde.

Izzy attempts to talk Destrii round, while the Doctor follows Jodafra. The Count plans to escape in his chronon capsule. He has adapted the engines to feed on the psionic energy generated by the Horde, but Destrii senses his plan and goes to him. She raises the chronon capsule into the air and the Horde follow, but it is a trick and Destrii is returned to flesh and blood and the Horde become fuel for Jodafra’s ship which takes off for worlds anew. Izzy has learned a lot from her experiences, including people can’t help being who they are and shouldn’t be afraid of who they are. She proves she no longer is by kissing Fey, but she wants now to go home to Stockbridge to try to put things right between her and her parents. The Doctor returns her the same night she left in the TARDIS.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Roger Langridge (pencils, colour), David A. Roach (inks)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

ISSUE: 329
COVER DATE: 30 April 2003
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Flood, published July 2007.

Having a crisis of confidence, the Doctor takes a drink in Bish’s Bar and talks to Bish about his responsibilities. He stops a drone named Zalda from blowing herself up in the name of love, and then decides to take Bish’s advice and take a holiday. When the Doctor leaves, Bish closes the bar and transforms back into the form his wife Caralla loves - he is Frobisher the Penguin.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
As we’ve come to expect by now, when a story arc comes to a close (albeit temporarily) we have a quieter, funnier, more off-the-wall story usually drawn by Roger Langridge. This one, taking its lead from the American TV sitcom Cheers, is quietly effective and rather sweet, mainly due to the final reveal of Frobisher, with neither he nor the Doctor aware that they have just renewed an old acquaintance. It’s really another example of the Eighth Doctor’s comic strip adventures drawing on the rich past that Marvel and Panini have created through the years.

SCRIPT: Gareth Roberts
ART: Mike Collins (pencils), David A. Roach (inks), Dylan Teague (colour)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman and Scott Gray

ISSUES: 330 - 332
COVER DATES: 28 May 2003 - 23 June 2003
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Flood, published July 2007.

Drawn off course by a para-static vortex beam, the TARDIS materialises in a football stadium in 1977. Investigating, the Doctor questions young fan Billy Wilkins, who tells him that Delchester United has performed poorly since the Shakespeare brothers, Milo and Frank, bought out the team. The Doctor is attacked by two alien Morgs who believe that the Doctor is an agent of the Galactic Police, but he escapes, waits for nightfall and then returns to the stadium. There, he meets Ray ‘Butch’ Stobbs, a disgruntled player who hasn’t been allowed to participate in the new special training programmes - because he’s too stupid for the alien hypnotic conditioning to work on him.The hypnotised players are being used as slaves to tend to a vast alien being called the Nukaryote beneath the stadium; the team’s performance has suffered because they’ve been too tired to play. But the creature is hungry and it seizes the Doctor.

The Doctor escapes by feeding it crisps, but is spotted on the closed circuit television. The Shakespeare brothers send a new Morg creature to kill the Doctor. Billy Wilkins breaks into the stadium to help the Doctor because there’s nothing good on TV, and helps Stobbs to distract the Morg killer-unit by kicking footballs at it while the Doctor confronts the Shakespeare brothers, who are revealed to be components of a single biological entity, the Prime Morg, which absorbed all life on its homeworld and is now expanding to consume the universe. A seed of the Morg’s being, a Nukaryote, was planted on Earth centuries ago and has been absorbing life energy from the planet ever since; the Prime Morg has now returned to absorb it into itself with the vortex beam. Fearing the Doctor is from the Galactic Police and will send in agents, they activate the Nukaryote, launching the football stadium into space.

In orbit the Nukaryote melds with the Prime Morg. The Prime Morg tries to absorb the Doctor’s knowledge, but he resists its probing and learns that the entire organism is still dependent upon the original Morg cell. The Doctor, Stobbs and Billy get hold of one of the Morg’s seed pods, and with a series of soccer moves they kick it into the original cell, splattering it and delivering a fatal blow to the Morg. The Morg’s human slaves are freed from its control, and the Doctor takes them all back to Earth in the TARDIS as the Morg explodes. The team’s play promptly improves, and though the Doctor later returns to offer Billy a ride in the TARDIS, Billy is too caught up watching the game to notice.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
This isn’t so much light-hearted as tongue in cheek, deliberately harking back to the style of 1970s football team comic strips both in its tone and in its artistic presentation. The latter of these is probably the more successful of the two elements, with the 1970s evoked through the use of colour (the duo-tune panels in blue and, later, red strongly evoke the annuals) and details, such as Texan bars, Space Raiders, Spangles, Cheeky comic (placing this story after 22 October 1977 when this title launched), Judge Dread and punks. There are also a couple of in-jokes; a bookshop named W. Gray Booksellers (Warwick Gray aka Scott Gray), and a stand in the stadium advertising Hickman powertools, but I don’t want to think about this one too hard. The story itself is okay but nothing startling, just a little thin and inconsequential, as though the setting came first and then a reason for the setting came last.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The Doctor gets his holiday, but it feels like the editorial staff might be taking one too, as this is the third light-weight and fairly undramatic story in a row. The idea of the Doctor feeding anyone, even an Osirian, to crocodiles just doesn’t sit right with me, but there’s little else to the story to commend it. And I’ve said it before, but I love Adrian Salmon’s illustrative work and I also love his work as a colourist, but for a comic strip it never quite comes together for me, feeling far too heavily stylised to bring the (slight) story to life. This may be the only Doctor Who story in any medium where the Doctor goes topless throughout...

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Adrian Salmon (art and colour)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

ISSUE: 333
COVER DATE: 20 August 2003
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Flood, published July 2007.

Enjoying his holiday, the Doctor and boatman Ediphis are sailing down the Nile when they notice a bubbling in the water. Hippopotamus god Thoueris emerges. Thoueris demands tribute of the pair but Ediphic tells her he has none. Thoueris forces him to return up the Nile. Soon a large group of Egyptians are worshiping Thoueris. To demonstrate her power Thoueris throws an Egyptian into the Nile and uses her ring to summon crocodiles which eat him. The Egyptians hurriedly bow to Thoueris. The Doctor and Ediphis are hiding in a bush on a cliff above Thoueris. Ediphis is worried that going against Thoueris is sacrilegious, but the Doctor recognises her as an Osirian and begins hurling insults. Thoueris promptly throws her knife at him. It misses so she begins to climb the cliff. The Doctor and Ediphis pour oil on her hands and light it forcing her back into the water below, but the Doctor seizes the crystal from her ring before she falls. He uses the ring to summon the crocodiles who kill Thoueris. The Doctor then continues his holiday on the Nile.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Anthony Williams (pencils), David A. Roach (inks), Adrian Salmon (colour)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

ISSUES: 334 - 336
COVER DATES: 17 September 2003 - 12 November 2003
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Flood, published July 2007.

The Doctor is exploring in Covent Garden, London, 1840, when he is approached by a strange blonde girl who tells him that the essence is ready. Intrigued by her trance-like state, the Doctor tries to talk to her, but is disturbed by the sudden appearance of Spring-Heeled Jack, who detects the Doctor’s alien nature. The arrival of the police forces the strange fire-breathing creature to retreat. The appearance of Jack has shaken the blonde girl - Essex-born Penny Chapman - from her trance. She says Jack seems familiar to her. However, once the Doctor has seen her home, Jack appears to him, and blasts him with his fiery breath.

Jack digs into the Doctor’s mind to discover his alien nature, but the Doctor fights back and sees into Jack’s mind - a thousand skies on fire, lit by war, his race dying, and Jack a symbol of hatred. But Penny sees the mental battle and comes to the Doctor’s aid with a shotgun, forcing Jack to flee. The Doctor, with Penny, returns to the TARDIS to locate the source of any electronic impulses. He finds one at the Blackthorne Gasworks, the place where Penny works. However, once back in the gasworks, Penny slips back into her trance and leads the Doctor to a chamber containing the essence, a proto-morphic lifeform capable of controlling Penny. She says the Pyrodines are coming. Across London, gas lamps shatter to release the fiery Pyrodines.

As the Pyrodines attack London, Penny reveals herself to be Morjanus, shielding her mind behind the disguise of Penny Chapman to avoid detection from Jack, who is trying to stop her mission to create an experimental weapon - the Pyrodines - to help her people win the war against Jack’s kind. She attempts to kill the Doctor, but he uses two shotgun shells and a crowbar to shatter the essence’s casing, which destroys the Pyrodines. As she is about to take her revenge, Jack captures her in his psychic fire, but he only destroys Morjanus’ mind, leaving Penny Chapman intact. The Doctor offers Jack a lift home, but the creature says he will stay to protect London. The Doctor tells Penny to return to the country and live a quiet life.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
This story is a clever little tale, pretty well confounding our every expectation. We expect Jack to be the bad guy and Penny Chapman to be the new companion, but it doesn’t turn out that way at all. Actually, Penny would have made a rather good addition, being feisty, inquisitive, and a crackshot with a shotgun. We do get some more floaty glowing aliens, which is slightly tiresome, and the completely unnecessary addition of a police inspector from Scotland Yard, who adds nothing to the story and is therefore only really padding, but we could be generous and say that this is just more of our expectations being confounded. It is also unclear why Jack is interested in the Doctor rather than his actual target. The idea of aliens emerging from gas lamps would be picked up by the new series of Doctor Who with the Gelth in The Unquiet Dead. The art is frequently very atmospheric, and occasionally a little flat and bland, but Anthony Williams’ Eighth Doctor is rather generic throughout and looks even less like Paul McGann than some of the previous interpretations.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
As gloriously insane as the TV Comic strips it parodies, this story is a glorious celebration of the origins of the comic strip, somehow fitting for the Eighth Doctor for whom this sort of exploration and development has become almost a running theme. The artwork perfectly evokes the somewhat static and  simplistic style of Neville Main, to whom the strip is respectfully dedicated, and even the colour is spot on. A real gem of a strip, and very funny too, though with a nice touch of balancing sadness right at the end.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Give or take The Curious Case of Spring-Heeled Jack, it feels like we’ve been on a diet of low fat Doctor Who comic strips ever since Izzy departed eight months previous, but that definitely ends with this strip. This is the real deal, and what we have come to expect of the Eighth Doctor’s comic strip adventures. Of course, with the announcement on the cover of Issue 342 of a new Doctor, we also know that his tenure is coming to an end, but it is clear that they intend to try and end his reign in style. This is a strong story, though I can’t help but think that it would have been stronger still had it not featured real historical figures, for here they add nothing to the narrative. It is good to see Jodafra and Destrii again, though the former is nowhere near as amusing as before, though just as vicious.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), David A. Roach (inks), Adrian Salmon (colour)
LETTERS: Roger Langridge
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

ISSUES: 338 - 342
COVER DATES: 7 January 2004 - 28 April 2004
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of the Panini ‘graphic novel’’ The Flood, published July 2007.

The Black Hills, Dakota, 1875, and the Doctor’s arrival is foreseen by Running Bear of the Lakota Sioux, who greets him as he steps from the TARDIS and takes him to his village. There he meets Tatanka Yotanka, better known as Sitting Bull, who tells the Doctor that the land they occupy was promised to them by Washington, but now soldiers have discovered gold and miners are swarming across the area disturbing ancient powers that should not be disturbed. Sitting Bull receives a report that the mining town of Lincoln has been found empty, and the Doctor rides there with a small party to investigate. Everyone is vanished apart from the priest, who is dead, internal organs ripped out. General George Armstrong Custer of the United States’ Seventh Cavalry arrives, believing the native Americans have done this, but the emergence of huge, hairy creatures suggests otherwise.

Cavalry and natives attempt to fight back, but there are too many of the creatures and they are forced to retreat, heading for higher ground on Saunders Plateau. There Custer plans defense, but tensions are high between the two groups, especially when Running Bear identifies the creatures as Windigo. When one of the cavalry men scratched by a Windigo transforms into one of the creatures, the Doctor realises the miners of Lincoln weren’t killed by Windigo, they are the Windigo. As the Windigo attack, the Doctor and the men drive them back with fire and bright light, but the Windigo are suddenly all killed by rays from a landing spaceship. Aboard are Jodafra and Destrii...

Jodafra offers the Doctor and Custer supper aboard his ship, and while Destrii distracts the Doctor, offers Custer the power to rule the world. The Doctor realises something is afoot, but Jodafra returns him to Sitting Bull’s village, having made it clear that this is now a contest between the two of them. Sitting Bull takes the Doctor into the spirit streams to speak with the Wakan Tanka. It tells them that they do battle with an old poison fed by a new one, and that the Doctor’s purity may be his strength, but may also lead to his enemy’s victory. However, before they can return from the spirit stream, they are seized by a psychic projection of the one true Windigo.

The Doctor forces his world-bound body to cry out, alerting the tribe to their danger, and Running Bear throws water over their bodies, drawing them out of the psychic projection. Jodafra and Destrii, meanwhile, are teaching Custer’s men to use advanced weapons, though Custer is uneasy with the terms of Jodafra’s contract. The Doctor realises that alcohol is the catalyst for the change into Windigo, and also the reason the Windigo wants the Lakota Sioux destroyed as they do not drink. Jodafra captures the TARDIS, but the Doctor can trace it to the mine workings. However, the Doctor has not anticipated Jodafra capturing all the Sioux children with the help of General Custer.

Seeing the Sioux children caged as bate in the mining cavern, and all his men transform into Windigo, General Custer realises that Jodafra has been lying to him and flees into the night. Jodafra urges the Windigo to dive into the pool in the centre of the cavern, combining to form the flesh of the one true Windigo, a gigantic time manipulator capable of freezing temporal fields with the sound of its cry. It has offered Jodafra mastery of the time/space vortex in return for giving it form. Destrii enters and sees the caged children, which shocks her. Jodafra explains that the Windigo needs to feed its new body on human flesh free of toxins, but Destrii, spurred on by the Doctor, will not allow it and blasts Jodafra’s equipment. The temporal fields revert to normal and the Lakota Sioux destroy the Windigo with burning arrows before rescuing their young. Jodafra turns on Destrii, furious that she sided with the Doctor, and leaves her for dead. The Doctor carries her into the TARDIS.

alerts Doctor Partho to the disturbance and he and the Doctor race to Destrii’s room, but Weaver goes to Bob’s systems core and destroys it. The artificial gravity fails as a result, but there are bigger problems as Zeronites enter the base

The intruders plan to destroy all Kulkans and avenge their forefathers. The Doctor and Destrii go to the systems core to restore the gravity enhancers, and there find Nurse Weaver. Destrii fights her and knocks her out. They discover she is disguising her true alien body with a holographic envelope, having murdered the real Weaver three weeks before. Destrii takes the envelope while the Doctor begins to repair Bob’s systems. Bob tells them that the Kulkans genetically engineered the Zeronites as servitors only able to function in zero-gravity environments. Bob also says that he cannot repair the gravity enhancers as they can no longer lock onto the mass of the nearest star. Destrii goes out in her new human disguise to buy the Doctor some time. As the Zeronites plan to detonate a bomb, Destrii takes their leader, Centurion Tollios, hostage, but he is not afraid to die for his cause.

The Doctor interrupts, and saves Destrii by getting her and Tollios to have a proper fight. If he wins then he can carry on as before. If Destrii wins then they can still blow up the station but must allow everyone to leave first. Tollios accepts. The Doctor and Bob use the mass of the TARDIS’ internal dimensions to re-stabilise the gravity enhancers and, just as Destrii seems about to die at Tollios’ hands, he plunges to his doom as the gravity kicks in. The Doctor, convinced that Destrii isn’t such a bad person after all, offers her a scenic ride home in the TARDIS and Destrii accepts.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
This story of vengeful space monkeys never really captured my imagination. It is too much about fisticuffs and shooting and too little about the real stuff of Doctor Who, which is even a point the Doctor makes at the end, levelled as a criticism against Destrii.

As the Cybermen launch a full-scale invasion of London, the Doctor and Emily Rice work on a device to boost the sonic screwdriver’s scrambling signal, but when he tries to use it, he realises they have found a way to deflect the signal. Destrii sees the inhabitants of Camden, including Tony and Linda, rounded up for conversion before she is taken with the Cyberleader to the MI5 building. Here the Cyberleader demonstrates the neuro-stream, a device that breaks down people’s emotional control. But the Cybermen can free humanity from the tyranny of fear, and hatred and joy. Driven almost insane by the neuro-stream, the humans gladly accept the Cybermen’s gift of conversion.

The Doctor and Destrii are taken aboard the Cyber-control ship along with the TARDIS. The Doctor fleetingly detects another presence aboard, but cannot identify it. He is then presented before the Cybercontroller. The Doctor guesses that the Cybermen will launch the neuro-stream as a bio-chemical agent through rain across the world, reducing man to cowering creatures who will welcome conversion. The Cybercontroller will save humanity. They see Linda, Tony, Woodrow, Emily and North being converted and the Doctor offers a deal. If they stop this, he will offer the Cybermen his own death.

Cyberconversion has always failed on non-human life forms because of tissue rejection, but he can offer them his own cellular resequencing template allowing them to convert any species in the universe. All they have to do is monitor him while he regenerates. He suggests radiation as a means of triggering a regeneration, but the control ship is powered by something much more powerful - a fragment of the space/time vortex, the presence the Doctor earlier detected. Exposure to the time winds will force the Doctor to regenerate. Wiring the Doctor into the system, the Cybermen tell him that Destrii will be the first test subject and that the invasion of Earth will continue. Destrii springs into action while the Doctor frees himself and tries to blow up the cyber-control ship, but the Cybercontroller stops him. However, rather than surrender his secret, the Doctor throws himself into the heart of the space/time vortex.

Destrii is subdued and the order is given to eliminate her, when the Doctor, empowered by the time vortex energy, emerges from the ship’s power source. He channels the vortex to destroy the Cybermen, freeing the Earth, but the vortex threatens to consume him. However, when the ship begins to break up around Destrii, he forces his way back to save her. They escape in the TARDIS just before the ship explodes. The TARDIS lands somewhere on Earth and the Doctor and Destrii head out to explore.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
I’m guessing that this comic strip is Russell T. Davies’ favourite one ever, given how many elements he’s paid homage to in the television series. Firstly we have Emily Rice, a scientific advisor who is the Doctor’s biggest fan, just like Malcolm in Planet of the Dead. Then we have the idea that exposure to the space/time vortex will cause the Doctor to regenerate, as in The Parting of the Ways. Then we have possession by the vortex and channelling its powers to destroy an invading force ala the same episode. Then we have the vague idea of the Doctor tapping into the collective consciousness of the world (albeit in reverse) and him glowing and floating which is echoed in The Last of the Time Lords. Destrii’s development throughout this strip is fantastic to see, and the Cybermen’s plan probably the most persuasive ever seen in any medium. This is an explosive and visually stunning conclusion to the Eight Doctor’s era, and the final pages are really sweet too.

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