By Rob McCow

Funhouse
 

The Collector

The two-part story Funhouse appeared in DWM #102-103, in the baking summer months of July and August in 1985. Golden Wonder crisps gave it away as #2 in their range of Doctor Who comic books, giving it a distinctly salt and vinegar flavouring. It was also edited down and coloured in. Panini Books plan to release it in Doctor Who: ‘Voyager’ on 11 October 2007.
 

The World Shapers

Script – Alan McKenzie

Art – John Ridgeway

Editor – Ian Rimmer
 

Fellow Travellers

Despite being a penguin, Frobisher enjoys sitting on a lounge under a UV-lamp, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. He’s a sun-loving penguin. Frobisher is suitably dextrous with his flippers to use a set of keys. At the end of the story he regresses to his barbarian form from War Game and his bald headed bespectacled self from The Shape Shifter. This bald, blank face with the large looney-toons eyes appears to be the natural form for Whifferdills.

Traditional penguins huddle together for warmth. Frobisher is sophisticated

Also appearing in this story is Ms. Perpugilliam Brown. When she appears, she is wearing a skimpy outfit and is chained to a wall. Disappointingly though, she doesn’t comment on how all the corridors look the same to her.
 

The Deal

A sentient old gothic mansion stands on a desolate asteroid in space. It senses the power and life of the TARDIS nearby and draws it off-course.

The Doctor and Frobisher arrive in the house, but see different landscapes through the windows. Frobisher sees an island paradise, while the Doctor sees desolation. They hear a noise upstairs and investigate. They find a study with a half drunk brandy, still-warm violin and a smoking cigar, but no-one in sight.

The Doctor is worried, so they head back to the TARDIS. Before they can get away, they hear a scream and find Peri chained up to a wall. When they free her, however, she turns into a winged demon and disappears. Again, the Doctor and Frobisher try to leave. This time they find a man reading a paper in the study – but the whole room has shifted 90 degrees to the vertical.

The Doctor would never have found the keys on the table without her

The Doctor senses that the TARDIS is under attack as they find themselves in a featureless room with only one door, which is locked. The Doctor barges the door open to find an enormous pit filled with winged demons. The featureless room becomes a corridor again and they reach the TARDIS, but they are too late. The TARDIS is covered in web-like tendrils that rise from the floor. The house has used the TARDIS to dematerialise into the space-time vortex!

Watch out for the slime in this game!

On board the TARDIS, the Doctor realises that whatever creature has possessed his ship is obviously intelligent, but has only tried to scare them rather than communicate. In desperation he grabs an axe and starts to hack at the tendrils, but a force drags the axe from his hand. The TARDIS is rocked from side to side and the scanner screen opens to show an enormous eye in the centre of the tendrils.

The Doctor opens the base of the TARDIS console and tells Frobisher to get a ball of string. He wraps the string around a circuit that prevents the TARDIS occupants from ageing and heads to the Zero Room, trailing the string. His plan is to regress the creature outside so that it forgets about the TARDIS, allowing them to escape. He pulls the string and runs to the console room, changing back through his previous incarnations as he goes. Frobisher quickly changes to his younger self as well. The Doctor reconnects the circuit, trapping the house in the space-time vortex.

Alone in the vortex the house ponders it’s existence outside of time, waiting for another source of life.

The TARDIS is kidnapped by a house
 

TV Action

Peri was the Doctor’s companion on TV from 1984-86. Unfortunately, I can’t honestly say that Peri is actually in this story, as she only appears as one of the Funhouse’s illusions. In much the same way, Zoë Herriot briefly appeared as an illusion in ‘The Tides Of Time’.

The Zero Room was introduced in the TV story Castrovalva, broadcast in 1982.

As a TV show, Funhouse would have been eminently filmable. Despite there only being two characters in it and one of those being a talking penguin. However, the basic idea of a haunted house stealing the TARDIS would have been an ideally creepy premise for a story.
 

4-Dimensional Vistas

The Funhouse itself is a fabulous gothic mansion. It looks even better when it’s cast into John Ridgeway’s distinctive time vortex.

There’s a few clever techniques employed to tell this story. Throughout the first part, there’s a repeated panel of the TARDIS being ensnared by the tendrils. It appears in the bottom corner of each page as the tendrils creep further and further. There are some unusual angles or some views from directly above that increase the sense of disorientation. There’s a superb shadowy cliffhanger at the end of part one where Frobisher and the Doctor find the TARDIS ensnared.

Frobisher looks very much at home on his sun-lounger, it’s probably his most well-known pose. The demons that appear are well designed, being just different enough from the cliché to be impressive. Peri is spot on too, she’s instantly recognisable and a good thing too, it just wouldn’t have worked if the reader was wondering who the heck it was. The portrayal of the previous Doctors is a bit variable though. Davison is quite good, Tom and Jon are great, but Troughton is a bit unconvincing and the Hartnell isn’t great either.

Frobisher and the Doctor experience the force of the time vortex

The only other problem is that the second half is set entirely on board the TARDIS, which is hardly the most lavish or artistically inspiring of environments. On the other hand, he draws an absolutely gorgeous control console. It’s sensual and succulent, a thing of beauty. Phwoar.
 

End of The Line

Funhouse! It’s a whole lot of fun and there’s prizes to be won. Fortunately, Pat Sharp had yet to be invented in 1985.

Funhouse comes across as a great little story, but it’s all an illusion. The set-up is creepy but ultimately pointless, because the house is only trying to scare them. The illusions in part one are random and don’t offer any conclusive clues to the Funhouse’s real nature.

The Doctor’s solution to the problem doesn’t make much sense. Frobisher says ‘I wondered why we didn’t age as this bucket of bolts took us forward in time’. Yes, there’s a circuit that prevents that. So when the TARDIS goes forward in time, does it just wait for 1,000s of years? It’s just bewildering.

OK, now I’ve put all that aside, I can say what I really feel about Funhouse. It gives John Ridgeway a superb opportunity to do some wonderful artwork. You can tell he’s revelling in the images because there’s an extra level of detail and depth to them. What it succeeds in doing is creating an atmosphere that’s quite different from the other comic strips. Although Voyager’s flights of fancy are more majestic, here they are outright creepy. The image of the octopoid alien with the single huge eye is especially horrific and a great pay-off to the build up of tension. It clearly had an enormous effect on a young Gareth Roberts…

There’s even some great humour, especially when the Doctor loses his rag and decides to attack the creature with an axe. I love the image of him with the axe slung over his shoulder saying ‘Just needs to be shown whose TARDIS this is…’ As Frobisher says, ‘For a smart guy, you can be awfully dumb sometimes!’
 

Follow That TARDIS!

All the old ‘Doctors Who’ are in this one, in a very similar way to the 4^th Doctor comic strip, Timeslip.

The Doctor’s plan: ‘It’s simple. Everything outside this room will regress in time at the same speed as the TARDIS – including the house. It should "forget" what it’s doing because it will have moved back to before it encountered us.’ It’s not a bad plan really. I was probably too harsh on it.

In the TARDIS cupboard, the Doctor finds a cricket bat, a yo-yo, a ball of string, a toy ray-gun, a jar of jelly babies, a recorder and a cute little piggy bank.

Peri is wearing a tiny little waistcoat and a bikini bottom, with a flowing transparent belly-dancer dress and boots.

F. Dentieth of Great Sutton in South Wirral literally frothed at the pen on reading Funhouse. ‘Now for my views on your comic strip’ he said in issue 105 of DWM, as though he were Des Lynam. ‘Recent stories, such as Once Upon A Timelord and Voyager were uninteresting, but then along came War-Game. It was very well written, then wallop! Out of the blue comes Funhouse. Words cannot express the brilliance of this story. As soon as I had read the first page, I was totally hooked. The story combined horror-SF and the thriller element rather like the old Quatermass film. One complaint though. Yup, you guessed it!’ (Well done us!) ‘Peri. What on earth was she doing there!’ Indeed.

The events of this story have repercussions that are felt over the following comic strip, Kane’s /Abel’s / The Warrior’s / Frobisher’s Story. I’ll be working out how to title that one properly in a future review.