Doctor Who: vol.11 Cold Day in Hell


By various (Panini Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-410-2

The British love comic strips and they love celebrity and they love “Characters.”

The history of our graphic narrative has a peculiarly disproportionate amount of radio comedians, Variety stars and film and television actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Flanagan & Allen, Shirley Eaton (“The Modern Miss”), Arthur Askey, Winifred Atwell, Max Bygraves, Jimmy Edwards, Charlie Drake and their ilk as well as actual shows and properties such as Whacko!, ITMA, Our Gang, (there was a British version of the Hal Roach film sensation by Dudley Watkins in Dandy as well as the American comicbook series by Walt Kelly), Old Mother Riley, Supercar, Pinky and Perky and literally hundreds more.

Anthology comics such as Radio Fun, Film Fun, TV Fun, Look-In, TV Tornado, TV Comic and Countdown among others all translated our viewing and listening favourites into pictorial joy every week, and it was a pretty poor star or show that couldn’t parley their day job into a licensed comic property.

Doctor Who launched on television with the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ on November 23rd 1963, and in 1964 his decades-long association with TV Comic began in #674 with the premier instalment of ‘The Klepton Parasites’. On 11th October 1979 (although adhering to the US off-sale cover-dating system so it says17th ) Marvel’s UK subsidiary  launched Doctor Who Weekly, which became a monthly magazine in September 1980 (#44) and has been with us under various names ever since. All of which only goes to prove that the Time Lord is a comic hero with an impressive pedigree.

Marvel/Panini is in the ongoing process of collecting every strip from its archive in a uniform series of over-sized graphic albums, each concentrating on a particular incarnation of the deathless wanderer. This particular one gathers stories from issues #130-150, (originally published in the early 1990s) a time when regular artist John Ridgway gave way to a succession of rotating creators as part of the company’s urgent drive to cut costs – although there’s no appreciable drop in quality that I can see. These yarns all feature the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy – my second favourite after Patrick Troughton – but I’m sure I’ll be advised why that’s so very wrong by somebody in due course…)

This all black and white collection kicks off with the eponymous ‘Cold Day in Hell!’ by writer Simon Furman, Ridgway and inker Tim Perkins, a four part thriller featuring an attack by Martian Ice Warriors on a tropical resort planet, which leads directly into the moody, single story ‘Redemption!’ by Furman, Kev Hopgood and Perkins.

At that time and in this book Marvel sanctioned some controversial crossovers with other Marvel UK characters. The first of these was Death’s Head, a robotic bounty hunter from the Transformers comic in Furman and Geoff Senior’s ‘The Crossroads of Time’ (Doctor Who Monthly #135), but it was back to sounder stuff with the freak-filled three-part Victorian Great Exhibition epic ‘Claws of the Klath!’ by Mike Collins, Hopgood and David Hine.

Fresh-faced young scribe Grant Morrison wrote the charmingly different ‘Culture Shock!’ for equally neophytic (no, it means new or fresh) ascending star Bryan Hitch to draw, before John Higgins illustrated Furman’s ‘Keepsake’, a classy space opera about an indigent salvage man. John Freeman and Lee Sullivan started their long association with the magazine in the two-part ‘Planet of the Dead’ (DWM #141-142), which featured an ambitious, spooky team-up of all seven regenerations of the Time Lord on a world filled with the Companions who had died in their service…

‘Echoes of the Mogor!’ (DWM #143-144) by Dan Abnett and Ridgway was an eerie chiller set on a mining planet where Earth workers are mysteriously dying, whilst ‘Time and Tide’ by Richard Alan and John Carnell, illustrated by Dougie Braithewaite & Dave Elliott (DWM #143-144), marooned the Doctor on a drowning world amidst aliens who don’t seem to care if they live or die…

Carnell wrote the other crossover I mentioned earlier, a far less well-regarded romp with the imbecilic detectives the Sleeze Brothers. ‘Follow that Tardis!‘ was illustrated by Andy Lanning, Higgins, Braithwaite and Elliot, and the volume’s strip content concludes with Alan grant’s three-part ‘Invaders from Gantac!’, wherein a colony of alien torturers invade 1992 London by mistake in a tale as much comedy as thriller, drawn by Martin Griffiths and Cam Smith.

Supplemented with lots of text features, pin-ups, creator-biographies and commentaries, this is a great book for casual readers, a fine shelf addition for dedicated fans of the show and a perfect opportunity to cross-promote our particular art-form to anyone minded to give comics one more go…

All Doctor Who material © BBCtv.  Doctor Who, the Tardis and all logos are trade marks of the British broadcasting corporation and are used under licence. Death’s Head and The Sleeze Brothers © Marvel. Published 2009. All rights reserved.