Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

Normally, it seems to me, that the DWM strip transforms pretty slowly. When Steve Moore first took over for Mills & Wagner, he wrote one last Mills & Wagneresque epic, and of course Dave Gibbons stayed on art. When Steve Parkhouse took over from Moore, his early stories were done-in-one-or-twos with little stings at the end, like the majority of Moore's, only more downbeat, even though soon enough he was writing big Time Lord epics, and he also had the benefit of Gibbons continuing. When the artists began changing during the fifth Doctor era, the writing stayed the same, and when Parkhouse left, the artist stayed the same, and so on. Parkhouse and Ridgway is very different from Mills & Wagner and Gibbons, but there was no sharp demarcation between them.

But the strips collected in The Good Soldier mark, I would argue, one of the more abrupt transitions in DWM history. Most of the McCoy-era strips so far have felt "kiddie" or disposable, or both, even if you discount the ones originally published in or intended for The Incredible Hulk Presents. Suddenly at the beginning of this volume, the strips feel denser, making more use of the way the comics medium had evolved as of the early 1990s. They feel more like the tv show, too; not the tv show as it had been some time ago (I feel like some of the McCoy strips-- Claws of the Klathi! for example-- were trying to emulate Tom Baker stories), but as it was in its last two years on screen. This is especially true in the characterization of the Doctor. Plus the strips suddenly become interested in creating a continuity; there are lots of references to both recent strip adventures (something the strip did a lot in the Parkhouse/McKenzie era, but which had largely vanished since) and recent tv adventures (something the strip has never really bothered to do before).

This era is the one and only time that the DWM strip was the main source for ongoing Doctor Who adventures. The tv show was seemingly over, the Virgin New Adventures had not yet debuted. If you wanted new Doctor Who, this was it! Never again would the comics be at the forefront like this. (Of course, it has acted like it was the only form of Doctor Who going before, and would do so again, but for a brief moment, that was actually true.)

Scream of the Silent
I actually have no idea how many prose stories DWM has run over the years. It could be hundreds; it could be none up until now. (The Tardis wiki lacks a handy category for them.) If there have been some, none have ever been collected in the DWM graphic novels. That said, I have never really cared for the prose Transformers UK stories I have read; something about them just doesn't work for me. It's like they're not really prose stories at all, but transcriptions of comic strips, not really making use of the medium they're supposedly designed for. They are sparse on interiority and on visuals, just lots of dialogue. Scream of the Silent is no exception; I very easily lost track of what was going on here and why it mattered. I am not entirely sure it all hangs together, but maybe it does and the story just doesn't interest me enough to figure it out. There is a nice Lee Sullivan picture of the seventh Doctor looking in a mirror and seeing the first; it doesn't much have anything to do with anything, though, and I assume the moment was put into the story because it was originally published in an anniversary special issue.

Teenage Kicks!
This, on the other hand, is a prose story by a prose writer, and it feels like it. This short story was published in the first-ever DWM issue with no comic strip, no even a rerun or backup. It features Ace, who rejoined the Doctor (after her sojourn in the Cretaceous) in a story published in the previous issue (which for some reason is not collected until the next graphic novel). This is kind of a weird story; the Doctor takes Ace to confront some gang members she used to run with, and also there are aliens. It felt to me like Cornell was trying to do more than the space allotted really allowed for... but Freeman, say, was probably trying to do much less! Cornell, of course, has a great handle on the character of Ace, and a great prose style, and I really enjoyed reading this, and I'm glad DWM has made Cornell's first Doctor Who prose fiction more readily available.

Fellow Travellers
As I mentioned above, suddenly the tone and style of the DWM strip is all different. It's atmospheric, with interesting and unusual cuts; there's narration boxes with internal narration from Ace. As confirmed by the backmatter, it's a clear indication of influence from Alan Moore; for the first time, we're obviously reading comics written and illustrated by someone who has read Watchmen. I occasionally found some of the transitions here tough to follow (Cartmel was a first-time comic scripter), but I really enjoyed this. Clever twists, good engagement with cultural issues, strong characterization for Ace, spooky atmosphere, nice pop culture references. This feels like it came out of the same Doctor Who universe as Ghost-Light and Survival (which is, in my book at least, a good thing)-- but playing to the strengths of the comics form, not tv.

Darkness, Falling / Distractions
These are two three-page stories setting up the "epic" Mark of Mandragora which followed. The first is a brief horror vignette about a UNIT soldier dying, with a one-page Brigadier cameo; the second is about the Doctor and Ace in the TARDIS, realizing that the Mandragora Helix is behind it all, and that it's infected the TARDIS. These are okay; as I'll get to in a moment, I found Mark a bit disappointing, and I think I would have liked these more if they were leading up to something more epic and satisfying than they actually were. Together, they total six pages, less than the normal length of a single issue's worth of comics, which feels a bit cheap, though I guess that matters less in a collected edition than it would have at the time. Lee Sullivan, though, does an excellent job with things like the futuristic cityscape, the secondary console room, and the time vortex-- plus he really nails likenesses. Surely one of DWM's best art finds.

The Mark of Mandragora
I wanted to like this, and for the first three parts I did. Like the tv show did before it was cancelled, it feels very "now"; I like the attempts at near-future slang ("child") and fashion, and I like our new UNIT commander, Muriel Frost. There's some great stuff here in terms of ideas and art, especially the scene where the TARDIS merges with Earth, and so the Doctor and Ace running down a corridor suddenly find themselves crashing into Frost in a London nightclub. I also really liked the bit where the Doctor and Ace whiteout, thinking they've lost. It's got good stakes to it, and a good sense of threat. It all comes crashing down in the resolution, though, as the Doctor wins without even doing anything! This would almost work, because the Doctor has to sacrifice the TARDIS... except of course the TARDIS is back right away, so the Doctor wins with no cost and no cleverness.

Party Animals
The Doctor (with Ace) finally makes it to Maruthea for Bojaxx's birthday party. Everyone who's everyone is there, so mostly what follows is a series of cameos. Some are from the DWM universe: Beep the Meep, Abslom Daak and the Star Tigers, Ivan Asimoff, the Freefall Warriors, Death's Head, and the little penguins John Ridgway liked to draw are among the ones I noticed. Many are from outside it: Sapphire and Steel, Worf, Emma Peel, and Bart Simpson! I was going to put Captain Britain in the second group, but I guess he technically goes in the first. (I don't think he ever met the Doctor, but I am sure they have mutual acquaintances.)

The big appearance is from a future Doctor, based on the Doctor performed by Nick Briggs in the Audio/Visual fan audios, which Gary Russell worked on himself. They bicker a little bit, and then leave. Like, why? I appreciate that in this era, DWM was pulling its history together again, but I have no idea what the point of this was, and art aside, I didn't find much to like about it.

The Chameleon Factor
I found this one pretty inexplicable, to be honest. Ace and the Doctor climb a tree in the TARDIS; a new console room comes into existence; the Doctor gets his ring back. Okay, but why is this a story as opposed to part of a story?

Seaside Rendezvous
The Doctor and Ace encounter an Ogri (from The Stones of Blood) on the beach. It's all rather pointless. Because I jump around in the book on account of reading the strips in publication order, I actually missed the first page, showing the ship in the nineteenth century, until I got confused by what Paul Cornell was talking about in the backmatter. It's funny, I haven't got on with any of Cornell's DWM strips so far, but he's gone on to have one of the most successful comics careers of anyone working on the mag in this era, and I absolutely love most of his work for Marvel.

The Good Soldier
The Mondasian Cybermen make an initial foray of Earth in the 1950s, scooping up a bit of desert outside Los Vegas with a diner, some soldiers, and the Doctor and Ace on it! I didn't totally get the Mondasian plan here (why did they scoop up the Earth?) and found the resolution, like the one to The Mark of Mandragora a little easy (though nowhere near as bad). But the rest was great. Awesome visuals of the type Doctor Who could largely only do in comics, great characterization, some thematic complexity, and yet another strong artistic turn from Mike Collins. Again, it shows some influence from comics outside the strip with some collage panels when Ace's mind accesses the Cyber computer network and some good use of narration boxes. (I am pretty sure DWM will never have a consistent artist again like it did in the early days, but alternating between Collins and Sullivan pretty much is, and it's much better than the hodgepodge approach of the last couple volumes. It really does give a unified feel to the proceedings when the writers are always changing.)

A Glitch in Time
This is a throwback to that kind of DWM done-in-one I often don't like, the ominous sci-fi story. But actually this one had a pretty fun concept and some good art. Instead of saving the twist for the end, it has twists throughout, which in my mind is much more interesting, and I wish more writers of short sf realized that.

Stray Observations:

• The Tardis wiki claims that Fellow Travellers is when the strip began intertwining its continuity with the NAs... but this surely is not true given the NAs didn't begin publication for another eight months!
• Fellow Travellers is the debut of Smithwood Manor, the so-called "house on Allen Road" used as a base and a refuge by the seventh Doctor and companions in many NAs.
• "Glib" is the pseudonym of Gary Gilbert, who had a prolific run as a letterer on Marvel UK's Transformers title. According to the paratext in The Transformers Classics UK, "Glib" was a nickname his wife gave him based on his name, but there was a joke that it stood for "Greatest Letterer In Britain," which caused fellow Transformers letterer Gordon Robson to one-up him by adopting the pseudonym "GLOP" for "Greatest Letterer On the Planet."
• Given the reference to Battlefield in Mark of Mandragora (which takes place a couple years later, in 1999), it bothered me that there was no explanation for why Alistair is back on active duty and why Bambera is not present.
• Darkness, Falling draws together a lot of the recent continuity of the strip, and weaves it into the tv show. The Doctor says, "Something's been troubling me for weeks.... Recently, I haven't been able to take take [sic] the TARDIS away from Earth. Whilst there, we've met creatures and forces that never should have appeared on its surface—at any time! Those Kalik butchers I told you about, Morgaine, even the Hitchers..." The explicit references here are to Train-Flight, Battlefield, and Fellow Travellers. So this would seem to indicate that all of Season 26 (where the TARDIS is Earthbound) takes place recently, and that the Doctor's solo travels in recent strips also take place in such a range. (Train-Flight and Doctor Conkeror! were the first inklings we had the Doctor knew something was up, and there's also hint of in in Teenage Kicks!) And maybe the Doctor is listing those enemies chronologically? On the other hand, most of the pre-Train-Flight strips or the IHP strips can't go within this gap because the Doctor isn't stuck on Earth in those.
• In Party Animals, the Doctor finally makes it to Maruthea, where he's been trying to go since Echoes of the Mogor!, way back in DWM #143. It took him thirty issues to get there! That said, it hasn't been brought up since Nemesis of the Daleks (#152, twenty issues prior), so maybe he gave up for a bit after that.
• With both those things in mind, I might suggest the following sequence (though I'm sure there are some wrinkles here I've failed to account for):
  • DWM #130-56 / IHP #1-12 / DW25AS: The Doctor travels with Frobisher, Olla, and then by himself, trying to reach Maruthea. (Probably during Mel's tv tenure, if we care about this; there's no evidence that Mel exists in DWMland!)
  • Season 25: The Doctor meets and travels with Ace.
  • The Doctor drops Ace off in the Cretaceous.
  • DWM #159-62: The Doctor travels by himself again, and begins to have inklings that the Mandragora Helix is affecting his life. The TARDIS stops being able to land anywhere other than Earth. He then picks Ace up again.
  • Season 26: The Doctor continues to travel with Ace, only making Earth landings.
  • DWM #163-73: The Doctor encounters more effects of the Helix, confronts and defeats it, and then finally reaches Maruthea.
• The exact sequence doesn't really matter; what I like here is how the strip is not only weaving its own events together again, but it also has the audacity to claim that things that happened on screen are part of its continuity, too. Similarly, The Mark of Mandragora cites both the events of Invaders from Gantac! and Battlefield as being so big that the public has become aware of unearthly threats. Plus there's a small cameo from Magog, the villain of DWM's very first story, The Iron Legion! Since Parkhouse left, the strip hasn't really used its own history much, so it's nice to see that back in play again.
• The Mark of Mandragora establishes that Foreign Hazard Duty began as a UNIT off-shoot; once UNIT went public, it needed a top-secret branch to take care of stuff.
• This volume contains the only DWM work of Mark Farmer, who would go on to the kind of career where I couldn't point to a specific title and tell you he did something amazing, but where I do know that whenever I see his name, I am going to see solid, dependable work. Future work that sticks out to me includes Batman: Year Two, the Alan Davis Killraven revival, Paul Cornell's Wisdom, and Justice League Detroit.
• In the backmatter, Gary Russell says that Bonjaxx is a Dæmon who originally appeared in a backup strip from DWM #49. I haven't read this because it hasn't been collected; the Tardis wiki claims that story features Azal from The Dæmons, however.
• Russell also says, "writing comic strips is darned difficult. So many people think, 'Oh, I can knock one of those out,' but they can't. I'm a prime example of that." Despite his self-professed lack of ability, he would go on to write several more DWM strips and an IDW miniseries!
• The Doctor says he and Ace need a holiday at the end of The Chameleon Factor, which links nicely into Cornell's own Seaside Rendezvous, where they are on holiday. Surely this is intentional? I guess it could also lead into The Good Soldier, though.
• Seaside Rendezvous is the only DWM work of Gary Frank who, like Mark Farmer, would go on to a career as a solid artist in American comics. He illustrated the first-ever Birds of Prey story, for example, and he even teamed up again with Paul Cornell during his Action Comics run. The story's inker, Stephen Baskerville, would do no more Doctor Who work, but did ink a million Transformers strips for Marvel UK, and also went on to do some for IDW.
• In the backmatter, Mike Collins says the convertible that the Doctor and Ace drive in The Good Soldier is the TARDIS. Am I just dense, because I totally failed to notice this if so! I thought it was just a car with some Doctor enhancements; when does the strip establish it to be the TARDIS? Rereading the first page, I can kind of see it, but I assumed that Ace's comment in a narration box ("I'm not sure I like the TARDIS looking this way") was something she said earlier, in the recently reconfigured TARDIS.

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