By Rob McCow

What’s the story called?

City of The Damned

First published in Doctor Who Weekly 9-16, 1980.Like The Iron Legion, it was also reprinted in Color in the USA in Marvel premiere issues 59 and 60. The Americans couldn’t cope with the word Damned, so it was re-named ‘City of The Cursed’. This story didn’t resurface until The Iron Legion graphic novel in 2004 by Panini Books.

Writer – Mills / Wagner

Art – Dave Gibbons

Editor – Dez Skinn

Still travelling alone, the Doctor teams up with The Zepos, a bunch of emotional outcasts. Each ‘character’ has one emotion that they are keeping safe from the emotionless Moderators. The Zepo rebels, therefore are the ultimate ciphers. They have names that reflect their emotion such as Freddy Feelgood, Silly, Nervous; Very Angry with his brothers, Slightly Angry and Fairly Angry; and Half-Daft who hopes to go completely mad some day. Revering the Doctor as The Great Emoter, they assist him in his attempts to restore emotion to the City of Zombos.

In the City of Zombos, emotion is banned and the people are damned, dammit. The citizens regularly purge any stray feelings in their household Harmoniser machines. Upon arrival, the Doctor is immediately arrested by the City Moderators for dunking. He is rescued by the Zepos, rebels dedicated to emotion who exhibit one emotion each. Back at the Zepos’ hideaway, the Doctor and the Zepos find that the Big Hates, uncontrollable barbarians from the wastes, have filled the food supply for the city with Barabara Blood Bugs that can strip the flesh off a person in seconds.

The Doctor discovers that the Barabara are killed by adrenaline, but the emotionless Damned in Zombos are vulnerable. Returning to Zombos with the Zepos in tow, the Doctor steals a teleporter from a Moderator and visits The Brains Trust, who are in charge of the city. The Brains Trust agrees to give the people back their emotions, but the Moderator General decides this is illogical and kills The Trust. The Doctor knocks him unconscious.

Impersonating the Moderator General, the Doctor gives the order for people to enter the Harmonisers and sets the controls to give them back their emotions. Having saved the day, he is eager to leave, but the people of Zombos need to rediscover how to use their emotions. They find they have a copy of the Doctor’s emotional E-Wave Patterns and everyone on the planet becomes an emotional copy of The Doctor.

This story could easily have turned up in the TV show in 1979. Although the Barabara attack is quite gruesome, they handily reduce everyone to skeletons very quickly in a way that’s similar to the Ogri in Stones of Blood. I can’t see how the scenes where they swarm all over the city and start eating everyone would have worked though.

The primitives and Barabara Blood Bugs bare some similarity to the Horda and the Sevateem from The Face of Evil. The Big Hates are large and muscular however, so given that the BBC’s idea of primitive aliens in the seventies was skinny, scrawny and very cold looking old men, it seems unlikely they would have been well realised. They needed Brian Blessed instead of John Abineri or Leslie Schofield.

All The City of The Damned is lacking is a sub-plot for the companion to get involved in. Apart from that, this could easily have been a TV story.

Visually, there’s not as much going on in this story as in The Iron Legion, but it still looks superb. The contrast between the four different groups of humans is very clear. There’s the clean, shadowless lines of the Damned, who have blank expressions and a ghost-like pallor. The scruffy and scrawny Zepos are a rag-tag collection of folk, covered in cross-shaped sticking plasters and other accoutrements. The Big Hates have a classic comic-book barbarian shape to them, like Conan or Tarzan. The warty Moderators are uniformly ugly, with their helmets sporting a single eye-slit. Good use is made of the Zombos’ logo, which is an eye-like hypnotic swirl set into a diamond shape. It appears on everything from the Moderators helmets and tanks to the Brains Trust’s shirts.

Frequently with these fourth Doctor stories, at least one part will end with a close up on the Doctor’s face while he says something portentous in capitals. This time he bellows in wide-eyed horror that ‘NOW NOTHING CAN SAVE THE CITY OF THE DAMNED!’

Another strong and well-paced story, it’s very involving despite the Doctor being the only character who has a complete personality. Again, it’s a potentially hoary old cliché that’s given a good old polish and made into something exciting, but Doctor Who was always best at recycling old ideas. This time, it’s the idea of an emotionless society that is the heart of the story and in some ways it reminds me of THX-1138, Spielberg’s art movie with its oppressed city of baldies.

Inventiveness is the key to this story’s success. Inventiveness and wit. Inventiveness, wit and good likenesses of Tom Baker. I’ll come in again.

This story is underpinned by its inventiveness and wit. A more modern strip might keep the story entirely in the City of Zombos and explore the emotionless masses, but here events shoot off in wildly unexpected directions. For example, it’s not the villainous Moderator General who is in charge of the city but The Brains Trust, humanoid creatures with giant brains for heads. And The Big Hates are just as much of a threat to the Doctor as the Moderators are.

The actual events of the story are grotesque, with voracious Blood Bugs, ruthless Moderators and the horror of an emotionless existence. In another comic strip it could be bleak and depressing, but the character of the Doctor and the way people react to him injects a lot of humour, giving the story a comic lightness. When threatened with being devoured by Barabara, the Doctor declares "Heavens! This would never have happened if I’d have gone to Benidorm!" and upon producing a tray of coffee and donuts, the Moderator informs the Doctor that "Dunking is not permitted!" before smashing the tray out of his hand.

As with the Iron Legion, it’s a strong, ideas-led comic strip which is only let down by some frenetic story telling. Its shortcomings are easily covered by its vibrancy, energy and enormous sense of fun.

This would never have happened if the Doctor had got to Benidorm!

Sadly, we never get to visit the planet of Fourth Doctors again. If we ever do, I hope we’ll find that they’ve all matured into Tom as he is now! Legions of old warhorses going on pub crawls and discussing tingling bosoms, the noise of Vanessa Feltz’s thighs and ‘It’s a pleasure to have you in me cab, Mr.Pertwee!’ Oh, they’d be adored.

The story was re-named for the American market as City of The Cursed, as mentioned above.

The Doctor is wearing his grey jacket from season 15, plus a big spotty tie and checked waistcoat.

In the Doctor’s pockets there are pills for Spanish Tummy (useful in Benidorm), a ball of string, a rubber duck, a catapult, a smiley face badge, coffee and donuts, a model satellite and jelly-babies.

The Doctor has a speeding ticket from Jundian, the seventh Planet of the Vorlag system. Though he swears he wasn’t doing a Grumma over forty.

The Time Space stabiliser keeps cutting out on the Doctor. Funny, I’d have thought he’d have learnt to fly the TARDIS without stabilisers by now.