ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Mike Collins becomes the first artist to draw the DWM debut strip for three consecutive Doctors, and he’s a fine choice, having a confident, naturalistic style capable of capturing excellent likenesses. He’s ably abetted by Ofredi’s excellent colour work. However, after the freewheeling adventure of The Crimson Hand, in story terms this all feels a little constrained and safe.
 

see them. She leads the Doctor to a sealed ward holding ‘plague victims’. Every patient is mutated into one of a multitude of different shapes, some resembling  insects, others plants or animals. There is no pattern to the disease. His diagnosis is cut short - a monstrous creature bursts into the compound. Cornering it, the Doctor notes the tag on its ankle: the monster was once human. Before they can speak to the creature, a party of convicts led by Conrad Finch enter, intent on murder. Finch accuses the Doctor of being behind the infection. But Amy is transforming into a giant insect...

Cargill persuades Finch not to kill the Doctor so he can help the colony. The Doctor uses Cargill's lab to investigate the security tag from the captured creature. It belonged to a man called Buchan Foster. Cargill says this makes sense. Foster made several trips into the jungle to explore and claimed he had discovered a dark secret. He disappeared on a survey a month ago, just when the transformations started. The Doctor says the transformations are not viral but are the amalgamations of two distinct life forms becoming an entirely new species. As he and Cargill step into the jungle, he says the whole eco-system has become a pick and mix of life forms. Cargill asks if that means the life in the jungle is taking humanoid shape. Even as she speaks, they are pursued by a plant with human eyes and sharp teeth. They are saved by a blast from a robot spider (or “snoop”) which halts the monster. They run back to the compound. The Doctor orders the convicts to stay in the centre of the compound while he modifies the snoops to set up an energy ring around them. He tells Cargill to look after Amy while he investigates Foster's secret. Finch accompanies him. They fly a snoop over the energy barrier and across the jungle to a cave behind a waterfall. Back in the sick bay, Amy and Cargill are attacked when a monster breaks through the energy barrier and crashes through the sick bay wall. The Doctor finds an underground chamber with an ancient machine at its centre. Before he can investigate, he too begins to transform into an insect.

The monster pushes Cargill aside and carries Amy away. She is now fully transformed into a giant butterfly and takes flight as the other monsters leave. The Doctor, meanwhile, tells Finch the machine is a gene splicer left by an alien race to accelerate the process of life. Foster reactivated the machine, causing the new transformations. The Doctor resets it and the effect is immediate. In the compound, Foster becomes human again. Finch assaults the Doctor and pulls a home-made gun. He was innocent of his crime, framed by a boss who embezzled money. The machine is his ticket to freedom once he tells the Empire. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to neutralise the gun, but it is the arrival of butterfly-Amy riding a Snoop that overpowers Finch. The Doctor redirects the machine's power on itself to prevent further use. The Doctor and Amy fly out on the snoop with Finch tied beneath as the cavern collapses. Amy transforms back into a human - albeit a naked one. They return to the compound, where all of the humans have returned to normal. The Doctor deactivates the snoops and tells Cargill it is up to the convicts to make a success of the colony. She says the empire will send their traction factories and concrete over the planet but the Doctor advises her to send a message saying the virus has wiped out the colony (the message that started the story) so it can develop at a more leisurely pace.

crashing on a nearby planet, but as the ship does down the crew begins to sing and dance. Sometime later the TARDIS materialises by the wreckage. The Doctor and Amy examine it and realise there were no survivors. Amy and he sing a duet about the wonders of exploring a new world. The Doctor points to a ship coming into land and says that it might have something to do with their strange behaviour. The ship lands and heavily armed lizard-aliens, the Shasarak of Baloch, emerge. Amy runs but the Doctor is captured. One of the crew tells their leader that the cargo is missing from the crashed ship. Amy finds a human village and befriends a young man named Rajiv who says he rescued a goddess from the wreckage a few days earlier, a blue woman, part of whose face and shoulder have been damaged to reveal circuitry. She says she is a Muse, precisely what the Shasarak are looking for. While they sing about not resting until their mission is done, the Doctor makes his escape. The Muse tells Amy she is an amusement created for the Maharani of Baloch, used to induce courtiers to perform musical numbers against their will. When the Shasarak realised her powers could be used for evil they attacked the palace to abduct her. The maharani's servants smuggled her away in a ship. The Doctor arrives. Examining the Muse, he says the damage to her systems means that people keep breaking into song at inopportune moments. He says she should be able to self repair given a suitable energy source. The Shasarak arrive at the village. The peasants break into song, leading the lizard-men to assume the Muse is nearby. They break into Rajiv's house but find only the Doctor. Meanwhile, Amy and Rajiv have taken the Muse to the Shasarak ship. Rajiv knocks out the sentry and the Muse uses the power supply in the ship to re-calibrate. Just as the Shasarak prepare to kill the Doctor for deceiving them they break into song. The Muse has returned. The Shasarak dance and sing for three hours, time enough for the Doctor to contact the Maharani and arrange for the Muse to be picked up and the Shasarak to be placed into custody.

section and detect the Doctor. The Doctor and Tranter escape the section as it begins to sink into the planet's molten core. They are attacked by native creatures but saved by others who have undergone a process which tames them and they are led to a hidden base. Amy is interrogated aboard a Dalek ship about the Abomination. She believed the Doctor died in the descent, but is corrected by the Daleks. She knows nothing of the Abomination and is sent back to her cell with Jay. Jay calls Dalek 3. It responds before the Daleks destroy Station 7 completely. A Dalek enters Amy and Jay's cell and the girls attack it. Its weapon turns on Jay, and a Dalek gun is fired - but it is Dalek 3 destroying the guard. Dalek 3 instructs Amy and Jay to follow it to the hangar, where there is a scoutship. They escape the ship, but only because the Daleks allow it to happen. The scoutship crashes on the planet below but the passengers are unharmed. The Dalek detects the survivors' tracks and follows them. They are also being watched, like the Doctor who is now at the base and aware of it. The Daleks arrive on the planet to continue their search. A signal from "their agent" is then detected and they follow it. The base is powered by heat from the magma so no power can be detected. It turns out to be owned by Professor Weston. He has a Dalek mutant in a container and the processed natives are his work. He spies Amy and Jay with the Dalek and thinks them to be collaborators but is quickly corrected. They plan to attack the Dalek as soon as the trio arrives. Weston thinks he may have a use for the casing. The Doctor asks about the mutant which Weston claims he has successfully tamed. He claims it is ‘the only good Dalek’ but Tranter thinks it ‘an abomination’. The Dalek force on the planet is discovered. Weston sends his processed creatures to stop them and Tranter's

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The Axons are perhaps not the first monster you would think of for a rematch with the Doctor, but they work extremely well in comic book form, being visually impressive in all their forms and with a very clear purpose. Although the Doctor doesn’t quite seem in character yet, talking more like the Tenth Doctor, this is an exciting action adventure with stunning artwork and colour. It is also the start of an epic story arc which will not reach a conclusion until The Child of Time more than a year later.
 

SCRIPT: Jonathan Morris
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), David A. Roach (inks), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Scott Gray

ISSUES: 425 - 428
COVER DATES: 15 September - 15 December 2010
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: Most Haunted - Rough Waters
IN DOCTOR WHO US: Final Sacrifice
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of ‘Doctor Who Child of Time’ graphic novel, published December 2012, Panini.

Present day Tokyo. Mr Okada walks into the office of Mr Kin, head of the Shining Dawn Corporation, and asks Kin whether he has accepted his company's proposal to launch a product called Goruda into Europe. Kin, however, is aware that Okada is a spy working for UNIT, and, transforming into a creature, pushes Okada from the window, killing him. Two days later, the Doctor and Amy are at a UNIT briefing. The Doctor asks Major Hiraki about the Shining Dawn Corporation, and Goruda. Hiraki suggests the Doctor see for himself. Later, Amy and the Doctor turn up at a family's house and witness Kaito, a small child, watching Goruda on the TV. Goruda says ‘Drink the brain tonic, one, two, three, and let’s learn  together!’ Kaito's mother says his exam results have shot since he started drinking the tonic and watching Goruda. The Doctor and Amy visit more houses. Back at base, Hiraki explains to the Doctor that the tonic increases the number of links between neurons. However, the Doctor gave some information to Kaito which every subsequent child then knew, implying that the drink makes the children telepathic. Hiraki says the lab results suggest the tonic is just H20. The Doctor drinks it, and confirms it as water. He takes it back to the TARDIS for further testing. Whilst walking to the station, the Doctor notices that Sergeant Machi, a UNIT man from the base, is following them. Suddenly, Machi fires lasers at them, and they run into the tube. The Doctor ends up fighting Machi on top of the moving train, but when a passenger pulls the emergency stop, Machi is thrown to the tracks and reduced to alien goo. Meanwhile, an alien voice tells Mr Kin that they must bring their plans forward and begin conversion. The Doctor wants Amy safe, so suggests she go to Major Hiraki's place whilst he tests the tonic. Hiraki and Amy go to Hiraki's home, and see her daughter, Takara, watching Goruda. The Doctor discovers that the tonic contains a chameleon molecule disguising its true nature. Suddenly, Goruda says,’Drink the brain tonic, one, two, three, and place your hands against the screen!’ Every child who drank it goes into a trance and places their hands against the TV screen. The Doctor realises the chameleon molecule can absorb energy and use it to change living tissue. Kaito, Takara and all the others suddenly become wide eyed. with golden skin, chanting ‘We are golden! We are golden!’. The Doctor remembers that the tonic increases the number of links between neurons. The links between neurons are called Axons. The Axons storm the street.

The Axons start killing everyone in their path. The Doctor runs from the TARDIS to a barricade made by UNIT and tells Captain Yoshida to stop firing because they will only kill the child not the Axon. Yoshida agrees, and goes with the Doctor's idea of keeping the public safe. Amy and Major Hiraki return, and they drive to UNIT HQ, whilst the Doctor explains that the Axons are 'space parasites' that consume planets by preying on the gullible and greedy. At UNIT HQ, they discover that   50 - 70,000 children are affected, and at least a thousand of them are heading towards UNIT HQ. The Doctor creates a hat that can tune in to the Axos psychic wavelength, and jam it, thus saving the children. However, before he can plug it in the power goes out. The Axons have infiltrated the base, and absorbed the electricity. The Doctor, Amy, Hiraki, and the surviving UNIT soldiers head to the roof, where a helicopter waits. However, the helicopter shoots at them then flies away. The Doctor asks Yoshida for a grappling hook, and aims it at the nearest skyscraper. Amy and the UNIT soldiers go down first. The Axons make it to the roof, just as the Doctor slides down the wire. In the skyscraper, the Doctor prepares to plug in the hat, but suddenly Amy and Hiraki turn into tentacled Axons. The Axons tear through the UNIT soldiers to get to the Doctor, but the Doctor uses the hat to cut the link between Axos and the Axon replicants. Mr Kin appears on a TV screen - he is holding the real Amy and Hiraki hostage. The Doctor uses his hat to break the psychic link between the children, freeing them all. However. Mr Kin says the children will die without the psychic link, and he will kill Amy and Hiraki unless the Doctor reactivates the psychic link.

When Yoshida mentions that the Axons\children have woken up, the Doctor hatches a plan. He calls Tokyo city hall, and tells them to barricade themselves in whilst he uses the hat to stun the Axons for one minute. Meanwhile, Amy and Hiraki are locked in a cell with the real Sergeant Machi, but are released by Chiyoko, a young girl who had previously been seen with Axos. Arriving at the mayor's office, the Doctor requests the blueprints for the Shining Dawn Corporation building, believing that Axos' spacecraft is buried beneath it. While the Doctor is occupied, Axos contacts the mayor, claiming that they only require enough power to recharge their ship so they can leave. The mayor believes him, and has the power of a local nuclear plant channelled to the Shining Dawn building. At the same time, the Doctor discovers that the blueprints for the building are blank. When the energy is transferred, the entire tower starts shifting and changing, with Amy and the others still inside. The Doctor realises that the building isn’t built over the Axos ship, but is the Axos ship.

As Axos begins to rampage through Tokyo, Chiyoko leads Amy and Hiraki to safety, but is unable to prevent Machi from being killed. Amy and Hiraki are then rescued via helicopter by Yoshida and the Doctor. They head for the power plant. Once there, the Doctor uses his telepathic hat to convince the children to resist Axos. Their combined mental energies form a giant Goruda that attacks Axos. Using this diversion, the Doctor attempts to reverse the power plant's feed to Axos. Unable to do so, he contacts every home in Tokyo, telling them to turn on every electrical device they have. This causes the power plant's energies to be drawn away from Axos, weakening and killing it. As Kin dies he confronts Chiyoko - she promised him a world to feed. She tells him that it was all necessary for a ‘new life’ to begin. With Axos' hold over the children gone, Tokyo returns to normal, and Hiraki decides to take some time off to be with her daughter.

brainwaves, they are confronted by the Vorpon, Guardians of the Boundary Nexus. In spite of the Vorpon's warnings, Amy and the Doctor race past the guardians and down another level of the Boundary Nexus, the bridge between universes. The Doctor negotiates the release of the scientists and a return to the research base in return for the Vorpon being left alone to guard the Boundary Nexus. Because the Vorpon are Nexus forms, if the boundary had been breached, the result would have been catastrophic for both humans and Vorpons. Safe again, the scientists agree to halt their investigation into the Grey Hole.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Some quite big words and some unusually complex ideas are contained in this strip which sort of reminds me of the Doctor’s journey into the world of antimatter in Planet of Evil. Unusually, the TARDIS materialises in this strip not with its now standard Vworp! Vworp! sound effect, but with the words ‘Grind!’ and ‘’Wheeze!’
 

wants a book to read on the train and rushes into Phoenix Books, which is much larger on the inside. She shouts up to a man on some ladders, causing him to tumble to the floor. He tells her that it both is and isn't a bookshop and that children are forbidden. Amelia opens a large tome which causes the door to slam and the shop to shake. The man demands to know which book she looked into but Amelia pretends to have lost it. The man tells Rory that they aren't in London anymore; the shop travels into the pages of any book that has been written so they could be anywhere. He rushes out to investigate and the three find themselves in a dark forest. The whole world is dead as though something terrible has happened. As they step into a deserted town and see a statue, the man, who calls himself ‘Professor’, realises they are in the one place that he never wanted to visit - the Desolation of the White Queen. He tells them to run back to the shop. Every time they turn round the statue seems to be closer but they never actually see it move. They reach the shop just in time and the Professor takes another book to find a place where the statue will never find them. As the shop spins through a vortex the statue holds onto a lamppost outside and then flies away, laughing. The Professor tells Amelia they have landed in a golden world of fields and shining seas but when they step out they are in snow. The Professor says that he must have brought the White Queen with them and she has arrived first. They are surrounded by anthropomorphic animals, all heavily armed. A wolfman tells them that the White Queen materialised many years earlier and made it winter but never Christmas. She transformed all who opposed her into trees. The Professor offers to fight her but the creatures have been sent to take the travellers prisoner. The Queen is waiting for them in the Tower of Darkness. When the Professor and his companions are brought before the Queen, Amelia calls her evil and cruel. The Queen flings a bolt of green energy at her but the Professor leaps in the way and is killed. As the Queen turns to kill Rory, Amelia produces the book she first opened in the shop and opens it. The Queen is sucked back into her own story. Amelia wonders if a book can bring people back too. She picks up a quill and writes that the Professor was not dead. Instantly, he is revived. The creatures offer their thanks and the travellers return to the shop through a green and pleasant landscape. The Professor takes them home but he tells Amelia that if she keeps on making up stories about him he will carry on having adventures. When the children leave the shop they find Amelia's aunt waiting and she tells them they have barely been gone two minutes. Amelia is carrying a book: The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop.

It transpires that this narrative is being read from a manuscript by C.S. Lewis to his friend J.R.R. Tolkien at a meeting of the Inklings club in The Eagle and Child pub. Tolkien criticises the story for being derivative and allegorical but Lewis turns to the two newest members of the club for their opinions. They are the Doctor and Amy - who loved it - but the Doctor suggests that the story might work better with a wardrobe. Outside on the pavement, snow falls onto the TARDIS.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
This is a truly magical tale, filled with echoes and imaginative touches, not just of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (which I think it uses more meaningfully than The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe) but of Doctor Who itself. For instance, the bookshop is TARDIS blue, the desk inside resembles the secondary control room console, there’s a Dalek on a shelf. The books in the shop have titles like The Imps, The Master of Luxor, Red Fort, Scratchman, Space Whale and Shada  The Queen behaves like a Weeping Angel, the anthropomorphic animals resemble various Doctor Who monsters including Nimon and Fish People, and the Tower of Darkness is the Dark Tower from The Five Doctors. But this is much more than just a string of continuity references, this is a celebration of the longevity of Doctor Who and how it will continue to exist so long as their are people with imagination to feed it.
 

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Usually, as you may have noticed,  I’m not terribly impressed with Dan McDaid’s artwork but here, coupled with a detailed Victorian setting (or Napoleonic setting, as this is France), his style really comes alive and definitely works in the strip’s favour, imbuing it with much of its atmosphere. His art is perhaps at its weakest during action sequences, but it still conveys what is happening with great skill. The story itself is solid enough, though it probably feels weaker for appearing after two very strong strips, but it has a motivated villain whose scheme makes perfect sense, a reasonable means of achieving his ambition, and the slowly building story arc which only emerges in the final frame. And that is an excellent way to do it, because it means the story is perfectly enjoyable in its own right, but it has an extra bonus for anyone who has read the strip previously or who cares to read it subsequently.
 

SCRIPT: Jonathan Morris
ART: Dan McDaid (art), Geraint Ford (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Scott Gray

ISSUES: 430 - 431
COVER DATE: 9 February - 9 March 2011
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: The Salt Solution - Chasing Rainbows
IN DOCTOR WHO US: Spam Filtered - Ripper’s Curse
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of ‘Doctor Who Child of Time’ graphic novel, published December 2012, Panini.

Paris 1858. A young woman, Cosette, finds the house of Monsieur Valdemar and asks him to help her achieve her ambition to be an opera singer. He tells her to look into his eyes which begin to glow. Months later, the Doctor and Amy pay a visit to the opera to watch a performance of Orphée. They are astonished by Cosette’s performance but the Doctor recognises by her reduced blink rate that she is in a hypnotic trance. He takes Amy to the stage door but Valdemar rushes Cosette through the waiting fans and into a carriage. A young man called Louis calls after Cosette but to no avail. The Doctor guesses that Louis is Cosette's boyfriend and Amy invites him to a café. There, he explains that he and Cosette were engaged until she went to Valdemar. He hadn't expected much to come of Cosette's ambitions because she was such a poor singer. However, she spent more and more time with Valdemar until one night she never came home. The Doctor, Louis and Amy go to Valdemar's house and gain entry via a skylight. In one of the rooms they discover a series of chambers wreathed in a green gas. Each contains a young woman, the girls from the opera, wearing gas masks. The Doctor examines the machinery and recognises a DNA sampler, but they are forced to hide as Valdemar enters and removes the masks from the girls. He gives each a target and tells them to collect genetic samples before singing their victims to death.  The girls fly out from his house to perform their evil deeds. Valdemar tells the three intruders to reveal themselves. The Doctor asks how the girls managed to levitate but Valdemar insists that it is beyond the Doctor's comprehension. He releases Cosette from her chamber and tells her to sing to theml. Cosette emits an ear-shattering scream.

Salzburg 2098. Eldritch Valdemar is found guilty, as leader of the Eugenic Cult, of murder, treason, mental domination and genetic manipulation. He points at four men in the courtroom, accusing them of treachery. The robotic judge says that the four have bought their freedom with their testimony and Valdemar is sentenced to death. Before the sentence is carried out he swears to have his revenge and then Valdemar is hit with a blast of energy. In Paris, 240 years earlier, the Doctor, Amy and Louis are chained to a wall. Valdemar instructs Cosette to take a sample from each, which she does by kissing them deeply. Louis sees a paper bearing the names of Valdemar's victims: the same four surnames repeated over again. The Doctor guesses that the targets are the victims' descendants who he wants to prevent existing. He has to make sure that none of the victims of his plan are his own ancestors too, hence the DNA samples. Valdemar says that he got here when his death by molecular dispersion resulted in him being instead transported through time. The Doctor sees that someone is behind all this but it isn't clear who. When Valdemar leaves, Amy uses a bent hairpin to free them all. They approach Valdemar just as he discovers that neither the Doctor nor Amy are his ancestors. He orders Cosette to kill them, but Louis surmises, as he is being spared, that he is Valdemar's grandfather. He snatches a flask of poison and threatens to drink it unless Cosette is returned to him. Valdemar refuses and is swept up into the air by his 'daughters of the night'. Louis grabs Cosette and drags her down. The Doctor asks her to take him in pursuit of Valdemar. Valdemar leads them to the roof of Notre Dame for a showdown. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to ring the cathedral bells which loosens Valdemar’s hold on the girls. They turn on him and he plunges from the roof. Satisfying himself that Cosette can no longer sing and is back to normal, the Doctor and Amy return to the TARDIS accompanied by Louis and Cosette. They enter the alleyway together and as Louis thanks them Cosette examines the TARDIS. The Doctor and Amy step inside and the TARDIS dematerialises. It is then that Louis realises Cosette is not with him. He does not see that he is being watched from the shadows by a little girl in a sailor suit - Chiyoko.

the garden are. Sister Frost orders Amy to stop chatting and get on with her duties. She tells Amy that another resident died in the night but when Amy enters the room the body has surprisingly already gone. Amy picks up a photo of the dead woman, Margaret, as a child. When she turns around the young Margaret is behind her. The Doctor, meanwhile, talks to Miss Bruce who is in charge of the nursing home. He says she has been arranging for the undertakers to bury empty coffins and that he knows this is true because he was there when they were dug up by archaeologists eight hundred years in the future. He accuses her of only admitting people with no friends or relatives, though he doesn’t think she is behind the disappearances. He asks her how long the home has been allowing children to play in the gardens, but Miss Bruce calls him insane - there are no children, even though a group are visible through the window behind her. Amy tries to talk to the young Margaret but Sister Frost drags her away. That evening, as the sun sets, the Doctor takes Arthur out to the TARDIS. Arthur tells him his friend Bert saw the faceless boy the night before he died. He expects to die soon. He says the children only appeared recently. They notice that the children's clothes and games are rather old-fashioned. When the Doctor approaches, the children say they cannot tell anyone where they came from or the grownups will put a stop to their games. Margaret tells Arthur he will be joining them soon. Amy rushes up to tell the Doctor that there is a girl in the home invisible to the staff. He replies that a perception filter is at work and it is probably shielding an alien hiding place. Amy remembers a laundry closet invisible to Sister Frost. They head straight there. Arthur is suffering chest pains but he hasn't had so much fun in years. The laundry closet is revealed as a huge, high-tech alien nest. Nurse Frost is within, as are a number of faceless children. Frost's head opens up to reveal a robot which accuses them of being a threat to the surrogates. As weapons fire, Arthur dies of a heart attack but a boy with no face steps forward and surrounds his body with energy. The corpse vanishes and the boy grows a face. He turns to the robot and demands it to stop, adding that the Doctor and Amy are his friends. The robot immediately designates them as non-hostile and ceases fire. Amy turns to the new Arthur who is confused as to why he is suddenly so short. The Doctor demands an explanation from the robot. It says it is a Vorlax regeneration drone that provides replacement bodies for dead infantry, placing their consciousness inside at the moment of death. Enemy fire caused a teleport malfunction, and it arrived on Earth where it activated its camouflage. The Doctor repairs the teleport device and sets it on a countdown for departure to an uninhabited garden world. Amy says that it was actually doing a good thing, giving people a second chance for life. She asks what will happen to the kids and why the other residents don't deserve the same chance. They take the children to the residents' sitting room and ask them if they would like to be made young on a planet millions of miles away. He tells them they have to make up their minds immediately. The next day’s news reports that all of the residents of Hawkshaw Nursing Home have have emigrated to New Zealand after winning the lottery. Amy, the Doctor and 'Nurse Frost’ watch the children play in a garden paradise.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Spooky in a proper Sapphire and Steel sort of way (to which this strip must surely owe its period children and faceless figures), but also extremely poignant as Arthur faces up to the inevitability of death. Except of course in this case death is far from inevitable - everyone lives! - and the last page is surely one of the most joyous that the comic strip has ever managed to produce. The artwork is also of the highest calibre. This story is a proper little gem that should be cherished.
 

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
There is much to commend in this strip, including some wonderfully nightmarish imagery from Adrian Salmon, but overall it does very little for me. The Jim Morrison hippy is fairly irritating throughout and his inability to give a straight answer not only annoys Amy but it annoys me too.
 

leave. The Doctor starts to run, telling her that they have to get away because they are in a trap. Before he finishes his sentence he is turned into a life-size sand sculpture that then disintegrates. A floating hippy appears before Amy and tells her they are all trapped and that only she can save everybody now that the Doctor has gone. The young man vanishes with a warning: 'Beware of the dark.' Everything has changed - it is cold and wet and the people on the promenade are dummies. Suddenly, Amy is confronted by five dark figures in business suits and bowler hats. Amy runs away them onto the pier. She is watched by five figures in a candle-lit room. One of them is the hippy, another is the Doctor. They want to help her but they can only watch, knowing that if the dark consumes her she will cease to exist. Amy is trapped on the pier-end with the shadow men closing in.

Amy thinks of ice cream and one appears in her hand. She feels happy and the sensation causes the sun to come out. The shadows are dispersed by the sunlight. Back in the room, the men realise she is stronger than any of them. The hippy floats before Amy again and tells her that he used to be a musician who visited Psychspace for his inspiration until it became harder for him to leave and he became stuck here with the others: a painter, a poet, a mathematician and, now, the Doctor. Amy follows the musician into the room where she finds the Doctor comatose. The musician tells her that when they lose hope the darkness grows more powerful and begins to consume Psychspace. Their only salvation is if Amy helps them smash the glass and returns them to reality. They ask her to sit down and dream. Amy finds herself reverting to her childhood, watching Blue Peter on television. The Doctor is a presenter and he tells her to use her stubborn nature to transcend the metaphysical reality. Amy wakes in the darkened room and tells the Doctor she can see something. He regains consciousness and asks what she sees. A large purple squid hangs above them. The Doctor recognises it as a psychic squid that has lured creative minds into its home dimension to feed on their psychic energy so that it can break into the real world and feed off human imagination. The squid wraps a tentacle around the Doctor and sends a shock of energy through him. The shadow men come down the stairs and overpower the dreamers but they turn on the squid and use their combined power to cause it to explode. As the darkness closes in on them, the Doctor urges Amy to imagine the TARDIS which she builds in her mind from jigsaw pieces. They run into the console room and shut the door. The Doctor tells Amy that the dreamers created the darkness from their own guilt and despair but finally sacrificed themselves to save the world. Their reality included fear and guilt and in the end they had to accept that.

SCRIPT: Jonathan Morris
ART: Dan McDaid (art), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Scott Gray

ISSUES: 435 - 437
COVER DATE: 29 June - 24 August 2011
ON TV: A Good Man Goes to War
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: Dinosaurs in New York! - The Upper Deck
IN DOCTOR WHO US: When Worlds Collide/A Fairytale Life/San Diego Convention Special
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of ‘Doctor Who Child of Time’ graphic novel, published December 2012, Panini.

The Doctor and Amy arrive on a space station. They are attacked by a security robot, which is destroyed by a group of nuns with guns. They scan the Doctor and Amy for purity using a bio-scanner and announce they are 'untainted'. Mother Ivana threatens the Doctor, but he proves he is of no danger to them. They explain they are there to investigate exotic particles of alien origin. Another nun, Sister Bridget, says they are also there to find out what happened to an earlier expedition. They find the source of the exotic particles - a leaking Time Engine. They find the previous expedition's skeletons and the Doctor grows stubble. He explains that time is speeding up because of the leak, which has caused Konami to age into an old woman. The Doctor sees a lizard and follows it into a pathway which within minutes grows into a jungle. The lizard dies of old age. The Doctor tells them to come with him to the TARDIS so they can get Konami to safety, but as they approach they

notice it has hideously mutated.

The TARDIS is caught in an accelerated time field. Amy sees the faces of Cosette and Margaret while the Doctor sees a Shasarak. Axos and plants from Supernature are also visible. The ship continues to mutate, creating a creature separate from the TARDIS, which seizes and absorbs Konami. As the nuns pursue the creature, the Doctor and Amy enter the TARDIS. The Doctor realises the TARDIS was infected by the gene splicer from the colony (see Supernature) and has absorbed lifeforms ever since. The nuns corner the creature, but it dematerialises. Ivana wires the Time Engine with explosives. The Doctor lures the creature to the station’s teleport where he can separate it into its constituent parts, but Ivana wants answers. The Doctor surmises that the nuns are fighting a war against Galatean androids and came here in search of a weapon. He also realises that Sister Bridget is an enemy agent and manages to trap her outside the bridge. Ivana says the war has raged for a thousand years. Bridget reactivates the station security robots and they begin sterilisation procedures. The only escape is the teleport, but that is tied up separating the creature. With the robots cutting through the bulkhead, Amy suddenly ages into an old woman.

Ivana threatens to kill Amy and the Doctor unless they allow her to destroy the creature - and the innocent beings it is made up from. Her threat is interrupted by the Galatean android and the security robots breaking onto the bridge, but Ivana holds the trump card - she has rigged the time engine with explosives. The robots blast her, but Ivana detonates the explosives. The Doctor and Amy shelter in the eye of the storm - beneath the exploding time engine, but when the destruction abates they are captured by robots and taken back to the bridge where the teleport opens to reveal the super-evolved amalgamation of several creatures and the TARDIS - Chiyoko (who was introduced here). She destroys the robots, but refuses to save Amy from old age before she dematerialises. The Doctor uses Bridget’s bio-scanner to restore Amy and himself to their correct age. They then teleport to the TARDIS before the station explodes. The Doctor sets the controls to follow Chiyoko through the vortex.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
It’s a strong story that finally starts to develop the story arc - and reveals that the arc began in the first Eleventh Doctor strip, not in The Golden Ones. I do feel though that this could have been visually more powerful presented in a more naturalistic style.
 

STORY & ART: Matthew Dow Smith
COLOURING: Charlie Kirchoff

PUBLISHED: September 2011
PUBLISHER: Best Ever Publishing Ltd

Any is taken as queen of a tribe of primitives while the Doctor and Rory are imprisoned. Amy rescues them and they all escape.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
With a plot that makes even the most average Doctor Who Adventures strip look complex and challenging, artwork that could charitably be called rudimentary and colour work that looks like everything’s been cut out of pieces of coloured felt (mainly baby-poo brown) this is nobody’s finest hour. Even the cover of the card is badly composited.
 

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The art is almost as bad as in the previous card, but the story is definitely a major step up. Even the open-endedness of the strip works in its favour, leaving the reader to provide their own conclusion.
 

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Epic, complex and frequently more ingenious and satisfyingly timey-whimey than the television series of this period, The Child of Time satisfyingly brings together threads from almost every story from Supernature onwards (indeed, only The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop and Forever Dreaming lie outside the arc). That it also has room for some sparkling characterisation (particularly Turing, though the gun-toting Brontes also establish themselves in very little time) and some excellent twists and turns (the destruction of the Earth is a very fine and surprising cliffhanger) is a mark of the quality of the writing. This is an incredibly good comic  strip.
 

SCRIPT: Jonathan Morris
ART: Martin Geraghty (art), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Scott Gray

ISSUES: 438 - 441
COVER DATE: 21 September - 14 December 2011
ON TV: Let’s Kill Hitler - The Wedding of River Song
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: The Moon of Lost Hope - The Atomon Invasion
IN DOCTOR WHO US: When Worlds Collide - Silent Knight
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of ‘Doctor Who Child of Time’ graphic novel, published December 2012, Panini.

while they explore. A ship attacks, firing energy beams. They try to escape to the TARDIS but a near miss buries the ship under rubble. Galatean robots close in on them but are disabled by an E-M burst from a party of human soldiers. Captain Kaido orders the incineration of the robots while she questions the Doctor. Satisfied that he and Amy are organic she takes them to the crypt beneath St Paul’s. Travelling with them is Sergeant Sokkuri, who was rescued by Kaido after her ship was shot down by Galateans. They enter a chapel containing a massive statue of Chiyoko. Amy and the Doctor pretend they are Chiyoko worshippers, too, while realising that she must have beaten them to Earth by several centuries. On a screen, the Galatean Prelature offers the humans mercy in the name of Chiyoko. Commander Hachiman is furious that they name Chiyoko. The Galateans make an offer to the last humans: keep the planet as a reservation while the robots take the stars. Hachiman refuses, saying humans would rather die than surrender. Hachiman is told that the Ultimate Weapon is ready. Kaido knows what to do. The Doctor and Amy want to stop her, but she tells him that he is too late. She has already started the countdown and the computer only responds to her brain pattern. The Doctor sees that a network of fusion bombs has been panted beneath the planet's surface: they are going to destroy the Earth. Kaido pulls a gun but before she can shoot she is killed by Sokkuri. The Doctor scans Sokkuri and finds that she has a Galatean brain. Sokkuri tries to absorb the dying Kaido's brain patterns but an emergency E-M burst from the control room kills her. The countdown has reached 49 when Chiyoko materialises. She says that it has been fun playing a game of Galactic War just to see who would win but now that the Galateans have proven their superiority they can continue while the humans must go away. She says goodbye to the Doctor and Amy before dematerialising. The planet explodes.

The Doctor and Amy are lying on an English village green. Both are puzzled by their locational shift. Asking a passerby for directions, the Doctor recognises him as scientist Alan Turing. Turing assumes that he knows the Doctor from Oxford and invites him and Amy home. He tells them that they are in Wilmslow in 1954. Turing and the Doctor discuss Turing's work on Fibonacci numbers. When the scientist goes to fetch some papers, the Doctor whispers that something is wrong: Turing should have killed himself the previous month, but Turing overhears. He tells the Doctor that he had considered suicide but was saved by a Japanese girl called Chiyoko. Turing admits that he has been in Wilmslow in 1954 ever since he can remember. Investigating the surrounding countryside on the Doctor’s instructions, Amy follows a dodo. It steps through a hole in space and she follows... to the Library of Alexandria where John Keats and Buddy Holly are writing a musical for Jayne Mansfield. Galatean robots arrive and blast the celebrity trio, revealing them to be robots. Amy escapes only to find herself at gunpoint again. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to open a hole in the fabric of space and he and Turing step through to a hall containing huge spheres, which the Doctor identifies as an abandoned museum. Each sphere is a dimensional projection of a point in Earth's history. They find Amy with the heavily armed Bronte sisters. Amy reveals that the sisters, and Turing, are robots. The Brontes reveal they are being stalked by Galateans. The Museum of Lost Opportunities was built as a memorial to the human race in the middle of an asteroid belt around a dying sun. It was designed by Chiyoko and is all that remains of Earth. Now that the Galateans have wiped all life from the galaxy they have sought out the museum. Emily Bronte is destroyed by a Galatean but Charlotte and Anne fight it off. Charlotte says that their decaying program allows them self knowledge. They know they are robots but believe they have as much soul as living creatures. They take the Doctor to a time scoop which they used to bring him here - he is the only one with enough knowledge of changing history to safely remove the Galateans from time. The Doctor points out that this will end the Bronte robots' existence but they are aware of that. A group of Galateans burst in and destroy Anne Bronte. As Charlotte fights back, the others take cover. Amy suggests bringing the TARDIS to them with the time scoop but the Doctor says they will be killed before they reach the controls.

Back on Earth in the near future a falling star brings an infection that spreads rapidly, soon becoming a pandemic. Robots travel the land, identifying new victims and sterilising derelict towns. The Doctor, Amy and Turing are sent back by Charlotte, arriving amidst the devastation. Turing identifies this as the time of the Galateans’ creation. They are found by a robot which detects that they are not contaminated and takes them to an underground facility. The trio are taken to Keltor Jacobs. He tells them the Doomsday Plague has all but wiped out the human race and research stations across the empire are going out one by one. His assistant, Chloe, says that they have spent five years looking for an alternative solution and have settled on the creation of Galateans: robots containing the uploaded minds of the human race. Turing tries to tell them that the Galateans are not the solution but the destruction of humanity. The duplicates will come to believe they are the originals and will wipe out the humans believing them to be impostors. Chiyoko materialises and reconfigures time. Like phantoms, the trio have to watch as Chloe activates the Galateans just three hours before a cure for the plague is found. Jacobs tries to recall the Galateans but they have already started killing. Jacobs tries to abort the Galateans with an EM pulse but Chiyoko kills him. The Doctor says that she is diverting history to ensure her own creation. He tells her that the Galateans will wipe out all other life in the galaxy and begs her to put things back the way they were, but she says such an action would mean giving up her own life. She has as much right to exist as anyone else. She puts the Doctor, Amy and Turing back in London on the day that Earth was destroyed - they have been brought here to die. Amy screams as a ship hovers towards them, blasting at them with laser canons.

It turns out that the ship is actually shooting at the earlier versions of the Doctor and Amy as they scramble across the rubble. The Doctor realises they can escape the same way as last time. He, Amy and Turing follow the same route into the ruins of St Paul's. They then find their way into the bomb control room and hide. The Doctor knocks out his and Amy's earlier versions so that when the time scoop picks them up he can greet the Bronte sisters and readjust the time scoop to bring Turing along, too. He then puts their past selves into the Wilmslow time bubble to meet the earlier Turing. Chiyoko materialises and threatens to wipe them from history. The Doctor scoops up Cosette, Margaret and Konami from before they were absorbed into the TARDIS. He then wipes the co-ordinates so Chiyoko won't know when they came from. Her own existence is under threat if she takes any drastic action. Chiyoko is overcome by pain and regret as she feels empathy for the first time. The Doctor asks her to unwrite her own existence. She admits she is scared and, sobbing, sends her component lives back to the places they were last in before absorption. The universe grows dark; it is being erased as it ceases to exist. The Doctor time scoops the TARDIS to them and sets the controls for Keltor Jacobs' laboratory just after the Galateans are awoken. He tells them that the cure for the Doomsday Plague is about to be announced. Turing calls the Galateans as they awake on Moonbase and tells them that he is the last of the Galatean race. He sends them his memory files so that they can see a future that must never exist, thus averting the war. He hopes organic and artificial humans can live together in harmony. Amy calls the Doctor - Chiyoko is dying. The Doctor takes her to Moonbase where she is remade as a Galatean. The Doctor takes Amy to an observation platform to look down on the planet Earth below. He tells her that there are a billion possible futures and that it is time for them to go and find out which of them is about to happen.

SCRIPT: Steven Moffat
ART: Peacock (Contributors Stuart Crouch, Anthony Dry, Gavin Rymill, Daniel Reed, Bill Donohoe, Lee Binding)

RELEASE DATE: November 2011

Early events in The Impossible Astronaut are summarised in a one page comic strip printed inside the DVD case.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
There’s a slight problem with this strip, which is that the Doctor does nothing whatsoever to recover the abducted  humans. This means, with him taking the Prin to Illuminata, the whole village will be deserted. The Galactic Glitter is a nice little nod to The Five Doctors.
 

SCRIPT: Kieran Grant
ART: John Ross (art), Alan Craddock (colour)
EDITOR: Moray Laing

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are drawn to a house in a village where the villagers have all been abducted by the Sceadu. All that is, except one man who lives alone and all year celebrates Christmas with a house and garden full of lights. The Sceadu are made of anti-photons and can exist only in the dark. While the house remains lighted, the man is safe. Suddenly the wires are pulled, the lights go out and a Sceadu bursts through the windows at Rory and the Doctor. Grabbing Amy, the man takes her to the basement, where he has a back-up generator. He reveals himself as the last of the Prin, in hiding from the Sceadu. He fled to Earth when his people were hunted down. Escaping from the Sceadu using a Galactic Glitter firework from the Doctor's pocket, Rory and the Doctor join Amy in the cellar. They escape through a tunnel but not before the Doctor has rigged the basement generator to explode just as the Sceadu burst in. With the Sceadu threat ended, the Doctor offers a free trip to the planet Illuminata, which he thinks the Prin will like.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Amy gets to mention the Atraxi, Vampires in Venice, the Silurian city, the Pandorica and her honeymoon in this lightweight but surprisingly fun little strip.
 

does this by talking about their adventures. The Doctor, meanwhile, returns to the spacecraft with the Professor, looking for something to reverse the effect. They find another crystal like one in the machine, but the Professor dismisses it as a spare. The Doctor applies the sonic screwdriver to the crystal to return Rory to his normal size. He recognises it as having been developed by a small warrior race from Dehliop Four, the Dehliops. They used it to make themselves bigger against their enemy. Because of the side-effects of the technology, the machines were banned. The Doctor takes away the last remaining one to be destroyed.

SCRIPT: Neil Gaiman
ART: Mark Buckingham (art), Charlie Kirchoff (colour)
LETTERING: Todd Klein
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are pursued by aliens intent on sacrificing them to the rain gods. The Doctor clearly does not have a plan to get them out of this predicament, until the Time Lord message cube materialises before him, scaring the aliens away and giving the Doctor and his friends clear passage back to the TARDIS.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
The original opening of the television episode The Doctor’s Wife, as scripted by Gaiman but dropped when the production fell behind  schedule. This is an intriguing glimpse into what might have been.
 

The Doctor and Plato run up to the Acropolis. The Doctor demands that it stops killing people. Getting no response, he tells Plato that the image is powering down. It promptly fades away. Rory finds Amy unharmed and they go to the tavern where they are reunited with the Doctor. The Doctor lists the possibilities for what is happening: aliens who arrived centuries earlier were mistaken for gods; aliens who have just arrived are posing as gods. Socrates tries to interject but the Doctor brushes him aside. Amy drags the Doctor outside to find out why he is being so rude but the Doctor tells her that Socrates wrote nothing in his lifetime, everything that is known of him was written by Plato, and Plato is the real genius. Amy says that she knows what it is to be let down by a hero. She adds that she grew up and got over it. The Doctor returns to the tavern and asks if anybody has seen anything unusual. Rory tells him about the statue. Amy produces the talisman that Calidora gave her. The sonic screwdriver shows that it is able to absorb lightning. He tells Plato to take Amy and Rory to Calidora's house while he and Socrates search Athens for more of the metal. However, when Rory and Plato reach Calidora's house, the woman drunk hemlock and killed herself. In the city, a tree takes on the shape of a Cyclops and attacks the soldiers who took the statue of Athena. Harpies erupt from the ground, Cerberus made of water leaps from a well and a wall becomes a griffon. All of them shout that they are made ‘for the glory of Zeus’. The Doctor follows a signal to the forge where the statue was melted. As the Doctor and Plato look on in horror, the Hydra bursts from the pool of molten gold telling all mortals that they will die for the glory of Zeus.

The Doctor asks Socrates to throw him a poker and uses it to strike the talisman that Calidora gave Amy. Not only does the Hydra disintegrate but so do all of the other monsters in Athens. The Doctor shorted out the psychokinetic energy by using the poker which was made of the same metal as the talisman. Elsewhere, in Calidora's chamber, Plato reads a letter that Calidora left. It tells how, as a girl, she saw a fireball drop from the sky. When she found where it landed she saw that it was a golden egg. The egg commanded her to bury it in the most sacred of places, which she did. However, she kept some of the molten metal and poured it into the statue of Athena that her father was making and then used more to make the talisman. Amy tells this to the Doctor and he and Socrates run to the temple of Athena. The Doctor finds that the egg is hidden in a dimensional fold above the temple. It has grown to a huge size. Socrates tells the Doctor that it was fed on belief and if they believe then they can enter. They touch the surface of the egg and are pulled inside. They arrive in Olympus. The ancient gods bow before Zeus. He is angry that they have let their worshippers grow less ardent. The only god who has not failed him is Ares. The Doctor steps forward to intervene but Zeus chains him to a pillar with a sweep of his hand. In Athens, the armour of countless soldiers is swept into the air to join together as a giant Ares. As soldiers race to combat the giant, it cuts them down with his huge sword while simultaneously declaring war.

Hanging upside down in his chains, the Doctor tries to tell the gods that they are merely psychic constructs created by a woman now dead. Her death has led to them running out of control. Socrates whispers to the Doctor that telling somebody they are not real may take some believing. The Doctor says that Socrates might be the very man to convince them. The soldiers fall back from Ares assault. Plato tells them to assemble in the main market square: the Doctor and Socrates were expecting this and have a plan. Amy rides up to Ares on a white horse and challenges him before leading him back to the square. Meanwhile, Socrates leads Zeus through the argument that: Zeus is all powerful; he therefore has absolute knowledge; his knowledge includes events in the future; he saw that men would one day disrespect the gods; this day was therefore predestined; Zeus must obey destiny; his power cannot be absolute. As Ares arrives in the square, he is challenged by 'Roranicus'. Ares blade shatters when he strikes Rory, and Rory uses the sword to cut off the god's leg and hand. The people of Athens wade in and smash Ares. When Zeus sees the defeat of his son, Socrates asks whether a god can fall to a man. If he can't (as Zeus insists) then neither Ares nor Zeus are true gods. Zeus disintegrates, the gods vanish and Olympus begins to collapse. Athena, goddess of wisdom, remains briefly. She asks the Doctor a question: "What is buried in man?" The Doctor follows Socrates through the portal back to Athens. He holds a piece of metal that literally builds gods. He says he does not know who fashioned it but he would love to find out. He turns to Socrates and thanks him for saving mankind. Socrates says that he has been reinvigorated to seek out truth. He points out that the Doctor is both brave and clever but not wise. The Doctor remarks that two out of three isn't bad before taking Amy and Rory back to the TARDIS which dematerialises much to Plato’s astonishment and Socrates’ amusement.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Scott Gray returns to writing duties on the Doctor Who Magazine strip, having last written the Ninth Doctor strip Mr Nobody way back in 2005. He immediately demonstrates all the qualities that made his Eighth Doctor run of strips some of the most exciting, entertaining and captivating in the long history of the strip. Of course, we’re off on another story arc as the Doctor is posed a question potentially more interesting than ‘Doctor who?’ and sets himself the task of finding out who created the metal that creates gods. The characterisation is, as always for a Gray strip, very strong, and there is a sense of scale and place that Mike Collins communicates beautifully in his dynamic layouts and large panels. A lovely piece of work.
 

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Dan McDaid (art), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Peter Ware

ISSUES: 448 - 450
COVER DATE: 27 June 2012 - September 2012 (No day given)
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: The Sky is Falling! - TV Hell!
IN DOCTOR WHO US: Assimilation^2/The Hypothetical Gentleman
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of ‘Doctor Who The Chains of Olympus’ graphic novel, published October 2013, Panini.

Horatio Lynk is engaged in swapping a priceless gemstone called the Star of Solitude with a fake from a vault of precious stolen artefacts in the city of Cornucopia when the TARDIS suddenly arrives. As security moves in to arrest the Doctor, Rory and Amy, Horatio saves Amy from the cruel guards, escaping with her out through a window. The Doctor and Rory meet the owner of the vault - Granny Solasta - who, believing them to be polices, orders their death as law enforcement is illegal in Cornucopia. Miss Ghost, a newly appointed aid to Granny, shows her boss security footage of the TARDIS materialising and suddenly Granny sees more potential in keeping them alive. Amy and Horatio, meanwhile, are attacked by the Hijackers Guild and plunge to their doom.

Amy manages to get them down reasonably safely. Threatening Rory’s life, Granny - who is the head of Thiefcorp - forces the Doctor to show her inside the TARDIS. Horatio, meanwhile, explains to Amy that Cornucopia used to be a space port, but with a century-old rad-storm blowing in the ionosphere, traffic dried up stranding everyone here. At around the same time a vast ship appeared in the sky above the city known as the Ziggurat of Corucopia, a vessel that nobody has ever been able to board. Granny Solasta takes the Doctor and Rory to meet some guests, Professor K’rokk of the Assassins Alliance, Deacon Kell of the Blackmailers Collusion, Lady Panibri of the Hijackers Guild and Brother Traybe of the Kidnappers Federation. She tells them that the Doctor is going to transport them inside the Ziggurat using his TARDIS to save Rory’s life. He does so, finding the Ziggurat filled with treasure. However, it exerts a strange influence and the Doctor is suddenly overcome with avarice.

Rory snaps the Doctor out of it. The air is saturated with residual emotional energy. Horatio, meanwhile, reveals that the Star of Solitude is actually part of the Ziggurat, a teleport key, and he and Amy use it to beam aboard. Granny orders him killed, but Horatio evades her men to locate a neural network command cockpit just waiting for the Star of Solitude to power it up. The Doctor stops him activating the ziggurat, but they are found by Granny and her gang. As only one of them can claim the pilot’s seat, they begin fighting amongst themselves, but it is Granny who ultimately triumphs. However, the Doctor has switched the real Star of Solitude with the fake. He shatters the real Star which launches a self-destruct program. Granny refuses to leave, but the others flee in the TARDIS. The Doctor uses the TARDIS to tow the ziggurat into the upper atmosphere where the explosion clears the rad-storm without harming the city. With Cornucopia now able to be a space port again, the Doctor confronts Miss Ghost, demanding to know who she really is. She vanishes, but not before leaving him with a question: ‘What is buried in man?’

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
We have a further flash of strip continuity here as K’rokk is a Mobox, previously shown in Eighth Doctor comic strips Ophidius and Uroboros. The artwork does slightly hamper my enjoyment of this strip, but it’s solidly plotted with excellent characterisation and, of course, will play an increasingly important role in the comic strip adventures of the Eleventh Doctor.
 

SCRIPT: Justin Richards
ART: Mike Collins (art), Kris Carter with Owen Jollands (colour)
LETTERING: Ian Sharman
EDITOR: Clayton Hickman

North Eastern France, 2017, and an archaeological dig investigating a Bronze Age mound discover instead a buried Dalek ship. One man is killed and another seriously wounded. The Doctor arrives and is immediately mistaken by Professor Angela Todd for a medical doctor. However, brief inspection of the man’s wounds soon leads the Doctor to take a party down into the dig. There, inside the Dalek ship, he discovers human duplicates and realises that the Daleks have tapped the dig’s generator to recharge their systems while they wait for rescue. However, the Daleks are not as dormant as the he expected and it is only by luck that he and his party manage to escape the ship. Back on the surface, the Doctor urges Todd to rebury all the Dalek artefacts that they’ve found and fill in the tunnel, but she reveals that Pierre was convinced all the finds were part of a single artefact that he was trying to reconstruct. They find Pierre dead, and a crudely constructed Dalek very much alive. It heads for the generator and restores the ship’s systems before the Doctor and one of the archaeologists in a JCB manage to destroy it, but it is too late - the buried Daleks have been re-powered and begin to emerge from the ground now intent on disconnecting the power before the ship overloads. The Doctor adds the TARDIS’s power to the mix and the Dalek ship is torn apart in a gigantic explosion. The Doctor takes Todd back to 1917, and on the way he tells her a story...

war is a proto-Dalek. The Daleks aboard their ship detect the Doctor’s presence and the demonstration Dalek tries to kill him. He and Edward race back to Hellcombe Hall, but more Daleks await. Edward is incapacitated and taken by the Daleks to their ship behind one of the Hall’s doors. The Doctor and Mary follow (the doors are really transmat corridors) and there discover that the ship was part of a fleet testing new time-drive systems. Caught in a vortex storm, two of the saucers collided. One crashed in Siberia and was destroyed. The other was badly damaged and crashed close to Hellcombe Hall. Lord Hellcombe, meanwhile, having realised that the Daleks lied to him (he believed there was only one stranded creature), is being held with Edward when the Doctor and Mary rescue them. The Doctor breaks the news that Ralph is a duplicate used to manipulate Lord Hellcombe to do their bidding, but realises that the Daleks engineered the entire war to serve their ends - the rapid advances in technology that war brings so they could repair their ship more quickly. The Doctor, Mary, Edward and Lord Hellcombe escape the Dalek ship back to the Hellcombe estate, but the Daleks follow. The Doctor’s party discover the bodies of exterminated gardeners and Lady Hellcombe too, but with the Daleks incinerating the estate behind them they flee back to the house and through a transmat corridor to what they at first believe to be Hellcombe’s proto-Dalek factory in France. However, they soon realise it is a German installation run by German industrialist Erik Graul, also producing proto-Dalek war machines. Making it to Graul’s office, Hellcombe and the Doctor attempt to make him realise that he is being used by the Daleks, but he instead makes a fuss and the intruders are forced to flee aboard a U-boat. They head for the Kent coast where Hellcombe Hall is located and attack the submerged Dalek saucer, forcing it to surface. Making it back into the hall, they use the transmat corridors to reach Hellcombe’s factory in Northern France, but this only forces the Daleks to begin the final phase of their plan - as the Doctor’s party make it into the fully automated factory, the production line begins to spew out Daleks. The Daleks capture the Doctor and reveal that the Dalek saucers were correlating data on human behaviour and military practice throughout history when they crashed. The only experiment left to observe is how humans fair against Daleks, but that is both British and German produced Daleks against any human. British and German forces unite to attack the Daleks, but the Doctor realises the Daleks plan to destroy all life on the battlefield to hide their interference in history, and the ship from Hellcombe Hall, lifted by barrage balloon - and with Mary and one of the gardeners’ sons aboard - moves in to assist. Lord Hellcombe moves against the Daleks, but is shot by the duplicate of his son before the Daleks can destroy him. Fatally wounded, he takes a biplane and crashes it into Graul’s factory, destroying German proto-Dalek production. The Doctor, meanwhile, realises that the proto-Daleks use simple pattern recognition to identify the enemy switches the pattern from human to Dalek. The proto-Daleks rebel, destroying the real Daleks, and Edward and the military forces on the battlefield rally to wipe them out. The Doctor attempts to rescue Mary and the gardener’s son Joe from the saucer, but ends up hanging from a rope beneath it. Ralph in a biplane moves in to attack. However, the Doctor reminds him of his humanity and Ralph instead turns his firepower on the saucer, destroying it as the Doctor cuts the ropes to the barrage balloon, using it as a parachute to get them to safety. Sending Mary and Joe to safety, the Doctor joins Edward in the trenches just as blanket bombing begins. The Doctor and Edward escape back to Hellcombe Hall, shutting down the transmat corridor behind them.

Hellcombe Hall, 1917, and Professor Angela Todd meets Edward and Mary and Joe and the Doctor urges her to remember the sacrifices made during wartime.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Probably the thing this graphic novel will always be best remembered for is being cancelled in its original Tenth Doctor form because it shared similarities with the forthcoming Victory of the Daleks. However, assuming the basics have remained more or less unchanged, I would suggest that The Dalek Project is actually just about the stronger of the two. Like The Only Good Dalek, it contains nods to previous Dalek stories, most notably Power and Evil and (presumably - and cheekily - retroactively) Victory, but here it is less of a check list of continuity references and more of an actual story. Occasionally it descends into random action for the sake of spectacle, helped early on by the transmat corridors, but good characterisation generally holds it all together. Having said that, quite how a fatally wounded Lord Hellcombe in a factory overrun by Daleks and pursued by his duplicate son manages to make it to a biplane and fly all the way to Belgium on a kamikaze run is really anyone’s guess. The quality of the artwork is generally quite good, sometimes slightly variable, picking up markedly from page 118 onwards (the line work is more fluid and the colour work which for those last few pages is very pleasing indeed). It’s the better of the BBC’s two graphic novels to this point, but (though it outshines its TV equivalent) it is still a somewhat qualified success.
 

SCRIPT/ART: Alexander Matthews
EDITORS: Albert Barnes, Dave Torrie, Morris Heggie, Craig Graham, Craig Ferguson

COVER DATE: 29 September 2012

Nuke Noodle returns to 2012 where he fails to notice a Dalek invasion. He then meets the Doctor who he duffs up.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Not big on laughs unless you find smelly bottoms and thumping people particularly amusing.
 

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Martin Geraghty (pencils), David A. Roach (inks), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Peter Ware

ISSUES: 451 - 454
COVER DATE: October 2012 - Winter 2012/2013 (DWMs dating system has gone seriously screwy)
ON TV: Asylum of the Daleks - The Angels Take Manhattan
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: Pondnium - On the Cards
IN DOCTOR WHO US: Assimilation^2/The Hypothetical Gentleman - The Doctor and the Nurse
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of ‘Doctor Who Hunters of the Burning Stone’ graphic novel, published September 2013, Panini.

Prague, Czechoslovakia, November 1989, and leaving his wife and daughter, Patrick Lake sells secrets to a man named Yuri Azarov, a man with an inhuman bandaged sidekick named Joseph. The Doctor, Amy and Rory, meanwhile, save political activist and art student Rhoda Hoffman from security forces who want to arrest her for posting posters about a rally. Taking her home, the Doctor senses something unreal in the air. Rhoda lives with her rabbi grandfather Saul. When someone knocks on the synagogue door, he orders them all to hide. It is Azarov demanding a 400-year-old book called The Sorrows of Prague by Gerhard Frankel. Saul lies and claims not to have it, and though he leaves, Azarov knows he is lying. The Doctor is interested in the book as its lock cannot be undone with the sonic screwdriver, so Saul takes them to show them Frankel’s grave, but Azarov has followed them. Holding the group at gunpoint, he sets Joseph to retrieve the book. The Doctor flees with it, but Joseph soon has him cornered.

Rhoda fights back against Azarov, loosening his control over Joseph and allowing the Doctor to escape. He is rescued by Patrick Lake who is keen to get something on Azarov and who takes the Doctor to the British Embassy. Amy and Saul are free, but can only watch as Rhoda and Rory are taken by Azarov to the Russian embassy. The Doctor convinces embassy operative Hugo Wilding of his connections to British intelligence and lerns that Azarov has been running a KGB network in Prague for twenty years. Lake sold him minor information to expose him. The Doctor and Amy enter the Russian Embassy disguised as the ambassador of Syldavia plus guest, monitored by earpiece by Lake and Wilding. The Doctor confronts Azarov and tries to force his hand by involving the Russian ambassador, but in the cellar where Rhoda and Rory are being held, Azarov reveals a glowing 2-dimensional being which swallows the ambassador whole. In the confusion, the Doctor, Amy, Rory and Rhoda escape, but soon find themselves trapped between the 2-dimensional creature and Joseph.

The Doctor distracts Azarov, loosening his control of Joseph. The party runs from the embassy and is taken away by Lake and Wilding, but the Doctor is captured in the confusion. Chained, he learns that Azarov has also kidnapped Lake’s wife and daughter Heather and Annabel. The 2-dimensional being is a Mavora, an entity which feeds on raw emotion. It led Azarov to the crypt they are now in where he discovered Joseph - not a servo robot as the Doctor suspects but the Golem of Prague. While Amy, Rory and Rhoda slip out of the British embassy, Azarov contacts Lake - his family in return for the book. Wilding protests, but Lake knocks him out and heads out with the book. He is followed by Amy, Rory, Saul and Rhoda. Lake gives Azarov the book and the Mavora shatters the lock releasing all the other imprisoned Mavora.

Because the Golem is a creature dedicated to truth, the Doctor angers it by telling it outrageous lies. In its anger it shatters the chains holding him prisoner and the Doctor is then able to communicate with it, learning that it is in fact Gerhard Frankel. Azarov leads the Mavora Collective off to Wenceslas Square to feast on protesting humans, but not before he has escalated the situation between protesters and the authorities. Lake is saved from execution by Rory, Amy, Rhoda and Saul. Also contained in The Sorrows of Prague is a psychic message left by the Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel which instructs Saul how to deal with the Mavora. In the 16th Century, the Mavora spread lies throughout Prague to ignite fear and hatred. A sphere of living metal fell from the sky, and Rabbi Loew used some to fashion a prison for the Mavora. The rest, fused with Frankel’s living mind, became the Golem which rounded up and imprisoned the Mavora and then stood guard over them. Frankel asks the Doctor what is buried in a man. The Mavora queen emerges from the floor of the crypt. Frankel fights back but is destroyed. At the demonstration, Saul and Rhoda unite the protestors and the Mavora are starved of the fear they crave. Heather Lake is compelled to touch the sphere of psychic metal, which instantly kills her and converts her into a new Golem with strength enough to destroy the Mavora queen. The last of the Mavora turn on Azarov and consume him. Lake, Amy and Rory reach the crypt, but Heather is dead and the Golem gone.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Rhoda says something very rude in Czech. Syldavia, the kingdom of the black pelican, is a fictional Balkan state from Tintin. Rather oddly, the Doctor appears to learn the Mavora’s name somewhere between the end of the second instalment and the start of the third. This is a very strong story with solid characterisation that actually packs some emotional clout, cleverly tying together recent history with myth whilst also developing the story arc.
 

SCRIPT: Jason Loborik
ART: John Ross (art), James Offredi (colour)
EDITOR: Jason Loborik

Danny and Abby creep downstairs early on Christmas morning and begin unwrapping their presents. However, the Doctor appears warning them not to unwrap a particular present. As he analyses it with his sonic, a zentrabot robot tears free of the wrapping paper. The Doctor and the children run, but the robots are everywhere and Abby is captured and teleported away. The Doctor and Danny follow in the TARDIS, locating the Zentra mothership but also intercepting a demand for Earth to surrender within one hour or all the captured children will die. Once aboard, the Doctor programs a Zentrabot to reprogram the next Zentrabot it meets, but is then captured and taken before Captain Karvox. He gives the signal for the Zentrabots to turn on the guards then rescues all the children. Danny and Abby are reunited with their parents.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Rudimentary stuff with robots and nasty aliens.
 

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Marginally better than its companion piece, but it’s still fairly basic.
 

SCRIPT: Jason Loborik
ART: John Ross (art), James Offredi (colour)
EDITOR: Jason Loborik

The Doctor, Danny and Abby (see above) are travelling through the vortex when they suddenly see a psychic projection of a sad woman. The Doctor traces the source of the projection to Philastra, Planet of the Deathly Cold, a world they find deserted and in ruins, After encountering some ghostly psychic projections, they locate the woman, Shemura, from the projection, in some kind of stasis chamber. She tells them that her world was invaded and her subjects put her in the chamber to protect her from their enemies. The Doctor releases her, but it immediately becomes clear that her story was a lie - she is a tyrant imprisoned by her subjects. Now she takes the TARDIS key, intent on conquering other worlds. The Doctor, Abby and Danny are thrown into a pit where they meet Alaban. They escape and meet Shemura outside the TARDIS. The Doctor convices her that only he can pilot the TARDIS, but when he is in control, he boosts the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits allowing the ghostly projections of Shemura’s dead subjects to hound her. Alaban then seals her back in the stasis chamber. The Doctor realises it’s time to get Danny and Abby home.

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Mike Collins (pencils), David A. Roach (inks), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Peter Ware

ISSUE: 455
COVER DATE: January 2013
ON TV: The Snowmen
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: Decky the Halls - All Change!
IN DOCTOR WHO US: Assimilation^2/The Doctor and the Nurse
REPRINTS: Reprinted as part of ‘Doctor Who Hunters of the Burning Stone’ graphic novel, published September 2013, Panini.

In Leadworth Primary School, the nativity play is about to begin and young Amelia Pond is being teased by the main star Veronica, the mayor's spoiled daughter. Veronica breaks the Raggedy Doctor doll Amelia made. Whilst in the library Veronica is visited in the mirror by a man who appears similar to a reversed Santa Claus claiming to be her uncle ‘Krampus’. He gives her a doll. Aided by his goblins Otto, Sigfried and Ludwig, Krampus captures Amy, Rory and Mels. He is really a member of the Pantheon of Discord trying to prevent the future Amy and Rory from getting married, joining the Doctor and conceiving their child. However, prompted by Amy, Veronica realises that the doll he has given her is nothing more than a lump of coal. She throws it into the mirror and Krampus and his goblins are sucked back into their own dimension. Amelia and Rory forget about the events but Mels remembers. Since Veronica is knocked out Amelia becomes the new Mary, with Rory as her Joseph. Rory's father comments that they make a lovely couple, to which Mels enthusiastically agrees.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Technically a Doctorless strip, but it fits into the chronology better in this section. Incidentally, it’s the first time the main strip in DWM has been Doctor-free since 2002’s Me and My Shadow. This is not Amy’s first encounter with something calling itself Krampus, as she and the Doctor encountered a race of that name in Doctor Who Adventures’ 2010 Christmas story Red Christmas. A fun story given a nice emotional twist by the final page which acts as a fitting farewell to the
Ponds. Paying tribute to departing companions has become something of a tradition in Doctor Who Magazine, and they do it well.

Ian and Barbara fail to recognise the Doctor. The Doctor realises they are trapped in a psychic prison with no memory of their adventures together. He breaks their conditioning by drawing the TARDIS on the blackboard. Taking them back to Clutha's ship, he soon realises that Ian and Barbara still don't know who he is, as they know nothing of regeneration. Before he can explain, however, Clutha's crew start to cut through the door, and the trio are forced to flee through a service tunnel to the engine room where the TARDIS is parked. Once aboard, however, it becomes clear that Ian in particular doesn’t believe the Doctor is who he says he is. The Doctor uses Clutha’s navigational compensators to discover the ship’s destination. It is Cornucopia. Back on Pala's ship, Cheshire discovers that the Hunters are seeking the living metal. She detonates a fusion charge before escaping. The Hunters, outraged, destroy the ship. The TARDIS lands in a market on Cornucopia and the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to advertise their presence to the right party. The effect is almost immediate as the Hunters land in the western plaza. Upon discovering that the Ziggurat has been destroyed, they decide to obliterate Cornucopia.

The Hunters begin their attack. The Doctor, Ian and Barbara temporarily thwart the attack, the Doctor finally winning his former companions’ trust in the process, but then Cheshire appears and demands that the Doctor tells her what he knows about the Hunters. Barbara is taken as a hostage by Cheshire and they both accidentally fall through Cheshire's teleport gate. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver which summons a group of creatures coated in psychic metal. They are the Prometheans who arranged Ian and Barbara's kidnap and who made the Ziggurat and other items out of the metal. The Doctor is just about to get some answers when he and Ian are rescued by Horatio Lynk (see here). They persuade him to help them find Barbara and start by breaking into Miss Ghost's home. There the Doctor finds Annabel Lake's doll. On the ship, Cheshire reveals herself to be Annabel Lake. She tells Barbara that she first met the Doctor in Prague, 1989, the night her mother died (see here). The Doctor is confronted at gunpoint by Patrick Lake. The Doctor, Patrick, Horatio and Ian are all knocked back by a sudden explosion. The Prometheans and the Hunters emerge from the wreckage and knock Patrick's gun away. The Prometheans refer to the Hunters as their children, and the Hunters reveal themselves to be Za, Hur and Horg from the Tribe of Gum. They decree that they will take back their world.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Picking up story threads going all the way back to The Chains of Olympus, and referencing events as far back as Eight Doctor swansong The Flood, as well as reacquainting us with Ian (who last appeared in a UK comic in 1994’s Religious Experience) and Barbara (who I believe here incredibly makes her UK comic debut. humorous strips aside), Hunters of the Burning Stone definitely aims for the epic and achieves it too, managing to celebrate Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary in a way that would have been impossible on the screen, but - by celebrating the birth of the series and the importance of its iconography - arguably does a better job of telling us why the series has endured for so long. A Quark puts in an appearance in the first installment, the Menoptra in the second, a Weeping Angel, Omega, a Sycorax, an original Cyberman, the Master, a Zygon, Mr Sin, a Sontaran, Mavic Chen and Scaroth feature in Part Four, whilst Part Five gives us a Sea Devil, Sharax Jek. the Kandyman, a Cheetah Person, Daleks, a Roboman, a Zarbi, Koquillion, the Animus, a Mechanoid, a Voord and Tlotoxl, Jamie, Sarah, Ace, Tegan, Amy and Rory, an Ogron, an Ice Warrior, an 80s Cyberman, a Sycorax (again), the TV Movie Master, Sutekh, Sara Kingdom and the events of The Daleks, The Edge of Destruction, Marco Polo, The Daleks’ Master Plan, Genesis of the Daleks, The Caves of Androzani, The Romans, The Web of Fear , The Parting of the Ways and The Curse of Fenric. Phew! As celebrations go, this is pretty comprehensive! Of course, returning us to Cornucopia also sets up the final strips of the Eleventh Doctor’s DWM run...
 

SCRIPT: Unknown
ART: Lee Sullivan
LETTERING: Unknown

PUBLISHED: March 2013

Invited to a reunion, the Doctor and Amy find themselves face to face with Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels and rogue Ood. Almost caught in the crossfire, they run back to the TARDIS and depart.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Putting me most in mind of the old adverts for the TARDIS Tuner and Genesis of the Daleks LP (and I suspect the former of these was in Lee Sullivan’s mind too), this is a fun piece of illustration with minimal plot that serves to demonstrate that Doctor Who has been presented in comic strip form since 1964.
 

Amy Johnson flies through the Iraqi desert. A sandstorm causes her to lose control of her plane, and she is forced down onto the sand. Two hours later, as the storm fades, she is confronted by Clara, who is overjoyed to meet her. The Doctor appears and offers to help her get her plane up and running so she can set off once more for Baghdad, where she needs to be by nightfall if she hopes to continue her journey from England to Australia. Meanwhile, Clara notices a mysterious buzzing noise... The TARDIS materialises in Baghdad and Clara remembers how Johnson will die - drowned in the Thames Estuary during World War II. She asks the Doctor if they can warn her, but the Doctor says no. Johnson, meanwhile, lands her plane at the Harrington Aerodrome, and meets the staff  - retired Royal Air Force commander Arnold Bradshaw and mechanics Ted and Kenny. Despite the Doctor’s concerns about Clara changing history, Clara meets with Johnson at the Crown Hotel that evening, and the two head up to the roof terrace for dinner. Back at the aerodrome, Ted and Kenny are swiftly killed by something emitting the same buzzing noise Clara heard in the desert, Bradshaw enters and discovers an alien insect called Koragatta. It tells him it seeks "a warrior prepared to face a terrible threat." Bradshaw is initially sceptical something so small could be so powerful, but Koragatta proves his power by recreating Bradshaw's missing arm out of sand. Clara and Johnson watch in horror as a sandstorm forms copies of them both which menacingly advance.

Clara and Amy escape the sand creatures in a car and race to find the Doctor at the home of Omar, a fez-maker, but a sand creature in the Doctor’s form beats them to it. It demands to know the location of the traitor. Omar’s wife dissolves the creature with a pot of water and the Doctor captures the insect that animated it under his fez. It identifies itself as Vessalak of the Howling Swarm who is searching for the traitor Koragatta. Reunited with Clara and Amy, the Doctor and Omar direct them to the Harrington Aerodrome to examine Amy’s plane, but they are confronted by Bradshaw who reveals that  Koragatta, feeding on the oil fields, has grown to huge size.

As the Doctor’s party flees, the Doctor releases Vessalak to subdue Koragatta and he is joined by the sand creature copies of Clara and Amy. However, Koragatta is now too strong for them and kills them. Koragatta senses the Doctor and probes his mind. Seeing he has extensive knowledge of hyper-dimensional travel, it takes him prisoner with Omar as a hostage to ensure his cooperation. Bradshaw on its back, it departs through a hyper-dimensional portal. It tells the Doctor how it came to question the swarm’s Prime Mother and sought freedom from obedience, but Bradshaw sees it as a deserter and attacks it, allowing the Doctor and Omar to escape but sealing his and Koragatta’s fate. The Doctor and Omar are rescued by Amy and Clara in Amy’s planeand returned to the aerodrome. Here they are confronted by the Prime Mother and her swarm . She saw Korogatta was aided by a human and decides to destroy Earth, but the Doctor tricks her into thinking ants are the dominant lifeform and are a noble species. The swarm departs. Clara reveals to the Doctor that Amy’s body was never recovered after her death and they travel forward in time to rescue her from a watery grave. They take her to live a new life on a new world.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS - CLARA OSWALD
Clara made her comic strip debut in the Doctor Who Adventures strip The Mystery of the Mould, four months before her Doctor Who Magazine debut in A Wing and a Prayer. Her US debut was in Sky Jacks!. In A Wing and a Prayer, Amy Johnson was clearly one of Clara’s heroes and she had read all the books about her, and we learnt that she is also a huge fan of Oscar Wilde in Dead Man’s Hand. This story also made it clear she watched the TV show Deadwood. In Welcome to Tickle Town, she briefly referenced the events of Nightmare in Silver and met Hopalong Harry, a TV cartoon character who she used to watch every day after school. Tickle Town was. of course, a theme park, and she also visited the Trubon House of Horrors and Mirrors in Doctor Who Adventures’ Faceache. In DWA, Clara was often defined by her desire to go on picnics, as in such stories as Dragon Attack and  Planet Void, and it was for some bizarre reason a frequent and recurring theme, though she broke from it to go Christmas shopping for her father in The Holly and the Ivy and to travel for some indoor eating in Reprogramme. Oddly, Nova makes it clear that she uses fake tan, “a girl’s best friend”, though she apprehends the racist villain Cronker in The Curse of the Gibwyn and works out the solution of the coral brain in Coral Maze, as well as saving the Doctor’s life in Invaders of the Vortex. Her experience as a nanny comes in useful in Ball-Pit Beast, and her time exploring the Doctor’s timeline is mentioned in Time Trick where she recognises the Doctor’s first incarnation (though oddly not Susan who she would also have met).

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Adrian Salmon (art and colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Peter Ware

ISSUES: 465 - 466
COVER DATES: November 2013 - December 2013
ON TV: The Day of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: Time Trick - By the Book
IN DOCTOR WHO US: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who
REPRINTS: None

Carstairs and Winthrop attempt to tunnel out of Tickle Town, but are caught by the jolly, winged Doodle Bugs. The TARDIS lands in Tickle Town, a giant amusement part created by cartoon creator Tobias Tickle. Whilst the Doctor is overcome with enthusiasm, Clara meets cartoon frog Hopalong Harry who warns her to leave. The TARDIS, meanwhile, is taken by Doodle Bugs intending to destroy it and, when the Doctor gives chase, he is apprehended by Constable Claws, a solid light hologram. The Doctor escapes in a hover buggy and is soon introduced to Meera Kholi and her daughter Rupinda who have been trapped in Tickle Town ever since opening day twenty years before when an energy wall went up around the town. Clara is captured by Claws and taken to a ride called The World Outside, a sort of propaganda brainwashing machine which threatens to drive Clara insane.

Clara is rescued by Hopalong Harry while the Doctor, Meera and Rupinda use one of the tannoy posts, really a disguised transmat pylon, to transmat out of Tickle Town to the station that keeps it functioning. There they are reunited with Clara and Harry and come face to face with Tobias Tickle, preserved with machinery and eager to protect his legacy and the people in Tickle Town from the horrors of the world outside. Constable Claws realises he has been as trapped as everyone else and kills Tobias and then he and Harry fight to mutual destruction, destroying the machinery in the process. The Doctor shuts Tickle Town’s energy wall down for good and, realising that the whole town has been transported below ground, returns it to the surface. Everyone is finally free.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
This is a beautifully crafted little strip with some fine artwork and very subtle use of colour that tells us just what sort of person the Doctor  is by showing us the opposite. It also has cameos for the Brigadier, Harry Sullivan, Jamie McCrimmon and Ace, which is rather sweet. The detail that everyone dresses the same as the Doctor thus making him look ordinary is never drawn attention to, but adds another layer to this rich, captivating  tale.
 

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: David A. Roach (art), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Peter Ware

ISSUE: 467
COVER DATE: November 2013
ON TV: The Day of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: Time Trick - Dragon Attack
IN DOCTOR WHO US: Dead Man’s Hand
REPRINTS: None

John Smith lives a humdrum life watched by the surveillance iBalls and working at the Department of Commonality, fearful of breaking the law or being noticed, always annoyed by a clock on the building that is five minutes slow. Tuesday morning he is summoned to Mr Waites’ office to discuss his future. Despite John’s protests, Waites promotes him to Assistant Mediator, which is a position dealing with members of the public. John hates it. A woman who looks like Clara shows up. She was working as a nanny, but the family she was working for had to let her go when their situation changed following an indiscreet comment about the government. There is nothing John can do and, on Thursday, he demands his old job back. Waites is reluctant until John betrays a work colleague. He finally snaps when the man is arrested and he climbs out onto a ledge and attempts to set the clock to the correct time. However, the clock hand breaks off and John plunges to his  doom. This breaks the mental hellscape the Doctor has been placed in revealing the mental parasite who feeds off of other people’s horrors. Clara also wakes and helps the Doctor disconnect the other victims. When the Doctor forces the parasite to feed on its own horrors it is destroyed.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
There is rather a lot of exposition crammed into just six pages, especially when the first of these is a splash page. What is going on is initially confusing too, as it looks like a boy has remained the same age for fifty years. Still, Clara and the Doctor are characterised well and Clara is even recognisable in the artwork, which is something.
 

SCRIPT: Moray Laing
ART: John Ross
EDITOR: Moray Laing

In space above Earth, the TARDIS deflects a strange light which hurtles down to the planet and hides inside a toy dog in a small boy’s bedroom. The Doctor and Clara give chase, entering the house by claiming to be from the electricity board and, with the boy’s father Justin, confronting the strange light in Tom’s bedroom. The light reacts, transporting the Doctor, Clara and Justin to a strange unreal world menaced by a giant dog that shoots lasers from its eyes. The light is a wanted criminal that has transported them inside Tom’s dream. The Doctor’s party manage to wake Tom up and trap the light inside the light on the top of the TARDIS. They will drop it off to the Shadow Proclamation to stand trial.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Like a cheese-induced nightmare.
 

SCRIPT: Scott Gray
ART: Mike Collins (pencil art), David A. Roach (inks), James Offredi (colour)
LETTERING: Roger Langridge
EDITORS: Tom Spilsbury & Peter Ware

ISSUES: 468 - 469
COVER DATES: January 2014 - February 2014
IN DOCTOR WHO ADVENTURES: By the Book - Ball-Pit Beast
REPRINTS: None

At the Temple of Infinite Profit on the Seventh Moon of Koth, the Doctor and Amy have hired a matter translation portal from a religious order called the Mandalax Tide. The portal will take them inside an abstract world, something that would be dangerous for the TARDIS to attempt, but something they need to do as the Doctor has received a message via psychic paper which says “Have you heard the piper play?” They pass through to find the Obsidian Mainframe where anything can be bought or sold. They hire a taxi from Londi Kalo who, on the Doctor’s instructions, drives them to a bad part of the mainframe. Meanwhile, Norbo Lakka, overseer of the nucleus of the Obsidian Mainframe, receives a visit from Madame Donaria Strul who claims she is planning to invest in the mainframe. The psychic paper leads the Doctor to Auction House #9999, a place with a bad reputation. Using the message on the paper as a password, they are led down to a secret auction room where host Mr. Minus opens the bidding on the Kindred of Fel, fabled telepaths of the Dushanka Forests. Appalled, the Doctor outbids everyone else, knowing that it was the Kindred who summoned him. Unable to pay for his goods and with his bluff revealed, the Doctor is attacked by Mr. Minus and removed from reality.

Clara tries to intervene but ends up as a lot in the auction. The Doctor survives by data regeneration and materialises by Londi Kalo’s taxi, but he realises the danger Clara is in and returns to the auction room via TARDIS which he then puts up for auction. The bidding threatens to overload the mainframe and Norbo Lakka is forced to close down all operating and security systems under Strul’s watchful gaze. She releases an army of robotic nano-spyders. Minus attacks the Doctor, but Clara releases the Kindred who share all their pain with everyone present. Minus is revealed to be an unscrupulous Kindred. As systems start to come back online, the Doctor races to stop the TARDIS being auctioned, but he is too late and  the ship slams its door and dematerialises. Strul meets up with Londi Kalo who are revealed to be Danny Fisher and Annabel (see here) supervised by Patrick Lake. Thanks to the nano-spyders they can now monitor every transaction inside the Obsidian Mainframe. But the Doctor and Clara are stranded.

ALTERED VISTAS SAYS:
Beautifully illustrated, compact and yet complex, and effectively acting as a teaser for The Blood of Azrael, this strip begins to pull together all the elements that will make up the Eleventh Doctor’s final regular comic strip adventure. It has epic written all over it.