By Rob McCow

War of The Words (Doctor Who in War of The Words)
 

Starting a short run of one-issue stories, War of The Words graced Doctor Who Monthly #51, April 1981 (a couple of weeks after the last episode of Logopolis). It was coloured in and presented in the US Marvel Doctor Who comics #10, released in July 1985 with a new Dave Gibbons cover. War of The Words is one of the wonderful stories available in graphic novel ‘Dragon’s Claw’, published in 2004 by Panini Books.
 

Writer – Steve Moore

Artist – Dave Gibbons

Editor – Alan McKenzie
 

K-9 is on companion duty. He says ‘Affirmative, Master!’ twice but seeing as this is his last appearance in the comic strip, it’s not much of a send-off. He assists the Doctor by hacking into a computer to find a map. Later, the Doctor ties a box round his neck and tells him to deliver it to co-ordinates ‘7Z7, B4T’ - K-9 does indeed return before tea. If anyone knows how K-9 untied the box from round his neck and put it down safely, please write in.

The Doctor befriends one of the robot librarians of Biblios, who is amiable and helpful, but also a pedantic jobsworth.

The TARDIS lands in the middle of a war between the Vromyx and the Gargynths over the planet Biblios. The war is ripping the whole space-time continuum apart. The Doctor rematerialises on Biblios to find out what’s going on and discovers that all is quiet on the planet. A robot librarian explains that Biblios holds all the known data of the universe. The Vromyx and the Garynths have been fighting in the space around the planet for decades, meaning that the Doctor is the first person to visit the library in all that time. The robot librarians have no idea why the two races are fighting.

A Vromyx ship crashes into a tower wiping out all the Parliamentary speeches from 20^th Century Earth. The Doctor asks the injured alien why they are at war and it reveals that they are after the data the library must hold on weapons. The robot librarian is bemused as that information is the one thing they don’t record.

The Doctor collects a device from the TARDIS and asks the librarian if he can consult a map of the library. However, this is the one thing that is not allowed, so the Doctor overloads the librarian’s motor circuits, immobilising it. He then sends K-9 off with a package to one of the locations on the map.

The Doctor cuts in on the Vromyx and Garynth Commanders, forcing them to listen. He describes himself as a powerful war-lord, who has beaten their blockade. He tells them that the super-weapon information is in a certain tower, which he then blows up. The two war fleets pull out as they have nothing left to fight for, although in actuality the Doctor has only blown up an empty storage building! The Doctor points out to the robot librarian that ‘Actions speak louder than words, especially actions that make a very large ‘BOOMF!’’
 

With it’s quick turnaround between situation and resolution, this story would have been too short for television. The enormous intergalactic war wouldn’t have turned out too well. The BBC’s take on the vast, planet-sized library with its stick-limbed robots would have been beyond budget and possibly beyond imagination.

Personally I’d still place this story before Season 18, because of the Doctor’s character. He’s still an intergalactic problem solver, taking great delight in his job and his little victories, rather than the morose Time Lord at the end of his life that we saw in his last season.
 

There are some superb close-ups of Tom Baker in this story, the best one being of his cheeky grin as he declares that he’s ‘Trying to stop a war, that’s what!’

The space war is whizzy and very cluttered, giving a sense of the chaos that the TARDIS is landing in. There’s a brilliant montage as the robot librarian explains the history of the war. The layout is excellent here, particularly where the Vromyx and Garynth Commanders are peering at each other across their respective war fleets.

The robots are cute but distinctly robotic, lacking any human face features. The slightly different designs of the robots plugged into the mainframe and the wheeled medical robot keep them visually interesting. When the robot librarian is frozen, it gets stuck with its arm in the air and its leg sticking out, which is a good comic touch.

War of the Words, like Spider God that follows it, is an amiable little story. The Doctor makes one intelligent action and is successful in stopping a war.

It’s slightly dubious that the Doctor keeps a bomb ready for use in the TARDIS. Perhaps it’s from the TARDIS armoury, as seen in the Troughton comic strip era. Fortunately, in this case it is the Doctor’s clever ruse that saves the day rather than the bomb itself.
 

This is the first one-part Doctor Who story ever printed in the magazine, although the back-up strip had run one-part stories before.

Tom is in his Season 18 gear, but this is the last story in the comic strip to feature K-9. There’s no sensible gap between Warrior’s Gate and Logopolis that the comic strip run can fit into, so I’m presuming that they’re still set between The Horns of Nimon and The Leisure Hive in the TV run. Either K-9 is stuck on board the TARDIS, or the Doctor’s dropped him off with Romana somewhere. Brighton pavilion, perhaps, or Benidorm.

The idea of a library being attacked for its information on super-weapons also appears in the Big Finish audio play, The Genocide Machine.