By Rob McCow

Kane’s Story / Abel’s Story / The Warrior’s Story / Frobisher’s Story

The Collector

This collection of four ‘individual’ stories appeared in DWM #104-107, from September to December 1985. It was coloured in and reprinted in 1994 in issues #19-22 of Doctor Who Classic Comics. Four become one in Panini Books’ release of Doctor Who: ‘Voyager’, published October 2008.

The World Shapers

Script – Max Stockbridge

Art – John Ridgeway

Lettering Annie Halfacree

Starkings – Logo

Editor – Cefn Ridout

Fellow Travellers

This story introduces Peri to the comic strip, and this time she’s real! She’s a feisty, job-quitting, Skeletoid-kicking Champion of Earth and New York. And she looks great in shorts. In this story she’s depicted wearing her pink outfit from Attack of The Cybermen. She looks quite bored when everyone’s sitting around waiting in The Valley of The Gods. It seems that Peri has left the Doctor’s company at some point during their adventures, requiring him to pick her up again here. This leads to further mind-bending continuity problems in linking the comic strip stories to the TV stories, which I’ll come back to later.

Regular and much-loved companion Frobisher provides a few witticisms in the first three parts. It is revealed that Frobisher is from Xenon, wherever that may be. In Frobisher’s Story he not only gets his name in the title, but carries the narrative in the first person. He turns into a Pantachian Rock Skipper capable of climbing sheer walls. He also grows an enormous pair of fists, all the better for bashing Skeletoids with.

The Deal

The TARDIS is unwell after it’s trauma in Funhouse. It lands at an angle on a cosmopolitan planet, with many different species of alien. The local police-bot tells them to move along, but the Doctor fobs him off, saying they’ll call a repair truck and get a bite to eat. They go to a burger bar where they meet a shabby-looking bearded man with a hat.

There is a news report on the burger bar’s TV, telling them about the Skeletoid force heading towards the Sol system. The shabby man explains about the Skeletoids. They were invented as the ultimate battle suit, but the human part became redundant as the suits got more sophisticated. Eventually they got out of control and spread across the galaxy, beating up humans, Daleks and Cybermen alike.

The Draconian Empire is on the verge of falling to the Skeletoids. The Federation President of the Sol System has called a summit on Ankara, inviting representatives from all the key races, including Davros and the Cyber-Emperor. The shabby man seems upset at not being invited. He reveals that he studied at Kaltarr Tech for ten years and developed psychic powers. He can control matter with his mind and demonstrates by putting mustard on the Doctor’s burger. USING ONLY HIS MIND!

The Doctor is impressed at the tramp’s hands-free cooking and offers to give him a lift to Sol. The tramp’s name is Professor Borg, although he goes by the name of Kane now. Kane helps the Doctor repair his TARDIS by telling him he can replace his faulty spatial stabilizer with the temporal stabilizer – after all, they won’t need to travel through time for this trip. Frobisher helps Kane find a new outfit.

In New York, Earth, 1985, Peri is quitting her job. She is on her way home when a gang of thugs ask her for money. As she is hurrying down the street, the TARDIS arrives. When the Doctor gets out, the thugs start to harangue him. Peri bashes the thugs out of the way with her handbag. The Doctor invites Peri along for the trip and she accepts.

When the TARDIS escaped from the Funhouse, a fragment of the space-time vortex was expelled that landed on the laboratory of Abel Gantz.

A news report details the worsening situation in the war against the Neo-Skeletoids. It also mentions the disappearance of the brilliant young scientist, Gantz on the planet Triskaa.

Gantz survived the explosion, but is trapped twenty feet below ground. He is horrified when his Wotch* tells him that the search for his body has been called off.

The news report continues, telling how Gantz graduated from university and went into studying alchemy.

Beneath the lab, Gantz watches in amazement as his hand turns into solid rock, with his fingers becoming a formation of statues, that he recognises as from The Valley Of The Gods. Exercising his will, he turns his arm into a spike and starts digging out of the rubble.

Meanwhile, the news comes in from the battle at Altair IV, which has been a victory for the Skeletoids. They are now executing their prisoners.

Looking for answers, Gantz heads to The Valley Of The Gods.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS makes a course correction unbeknownst to the Doctor (but knownst to us). Its new destination is Xaos, home of the Valley Of The Gods!

A spaceship arrives on Xaos, piloted by a young Draconian Warrior. He is heading for a rendezvous with five companions he has never seen, the champions of Sol, Gallfirey, Triskaa, Kaltarr and Xenon. He awaits their arrival in the Valley Of The Gods.

The President of the Federation of Worlds is having a hard time getting people to stay in his conference. The Draconians are pulling out and Davros is still ignoring him.

Davros never called me back, the bitch

On Xaos, the Draconian is meditating with his swords, daggers and shuriken laid out around him when the TARDIS arrives. Frobisher berates the Doctor for his piloting skills. The Draconian introduces himself and welcomes them to the Valley Of The Gods. Behind them are five enormous statues carved in the images of the Gods.

The President buys a little more time for the talks and uses it to catch an hours sleep before meeting his military planners.

Frobisher recognises the Draconian as a younger version of Kaon***, but the Doctor shuts him up before he can say anything. Abel Gantz arrives and the team is complete. The Doctor tells them that they have all been drafted in to save the galaxy.

The TARDIS arrives on Vespin, homeworld of the Skeletoids. The six champions head to the Skeletoid stronghold where they encounter two Skeletoid guards. Kaon pretends to be a dumb creature, crawling along the ground before dispatching the Skeletoids with his sword. Frobisher turns into a Pantachian Rock Skipper to climb up to a window. He lowers a rope so the others can climb up too. Inside, they put paid to more Skeletoid guards. They make their way to the central control room, where they find that the Skeletoids are being controlled by three GIGANTIC BRAINS IN GLASS CASES!!!!!

A door slams shut behind them and the Skeletoids attack. While the others hold them off, the Doctor attempts to sabotage the brains’ life support. When he finds that this is impossible, Abel Gantz takes over. He turns his arms to solid rock and punches through the closed door, telling the others to run. As they escape, Abel sends himself critical, exploding with the force of a nuclear bomb and obliterating the Skeletoids’ headquarters.

At the Galactic Alliance Summit talks, the President declares the Skeletoid menace ended. Abel Gantz’s last request was that no mention be made of his contribution to destroying the Skeletoids.

*Wotch is a registered trademark of the Intravenus Corp.**

** The Intravenus Corp, headed by the froglike Mister Dogbolter, caused problems for the Doctor in ‘The Moderator’ and ‘The Shape-Shifter’.

*** From War-Game.

This story has more TV continuity than the entire Steve Parkhouse era!

The Daleks and Cybermen are shown being biffed up by the Skeletoids and Davros himself is a major player in the intergalactic conference. Although it seems bizarre that Davros would ever attend such a meeting, the story more or less acknowledges that it’s because the situation is so desperate. Worse, any attempt to incorporate this story into Davros’ story arc are utterly doomed. At no point in his history has Davros been a leader and spokesperson for the entire Dalek race. He only comes close in Revelation of The Daleks and at the end of that the Daleks cart him off to pay for his crimes.

Also putting in an appearance are the Draconians, who remain as generically noble as they were on TV.

Peri is instantly recognisable as her obstreperous TV self. She’s prone to sulking, but capable of standing up for herself in a shouty way and essentially good-natured. In order to fit her into continuity, the Doctor must have left her in New York at some point before The Shape-Shifter. Although in that story, he’s still looking for The Moderator who killed his previous companion, Gus. Gus was the companion he had when he was the Fifth Doctor.

So, the only way it could work is if the Fifth Doctor dropped all his companions off at some point and had all his comic strip adventures. Then he recollected Turlough (at least) and met Peri. He regenerated in the TV story, The Caves of Androzani. As the Sixth Doctor, he left Peri in New York and started looking for the Moderator, meeting Frobisher on the way. Then he picks up Peri again.

And you thought Melanie Bush’s continuity was complex. You know nothing.

4-Dimensional Vistas

This is the first John Ridgeway story that is a little below par. Some of the images are very sketchy and the backgrounds are often lacking in detail. Although when there’s something interesting to draw, he clearly invests a lot more effort. The Skeletoids look fantastic as dead faced spacemen. It really brings out the idea of the suit being alive and just carrying the human body inside it. There are some brilliant space war sequences and it’s great to see the Skeletoids bashing Cybermen and Daleks alike. The statues in The Valley of The Gods also look suitably impressive and enormous.

Skeletoids! They don't return my letters

End of The Line

The Stories Saga has some good points. It was a neat idea to have three self contained stories that lead into a fourth, with characters from all over the Universe coming together to fight a near invincible foe. It even has some Steve Parkhouse style mysticism as unseen forces draw the travellers to The Valley of The Gods. Abel Gantz’s powers are very intriguing. They’re similar to Frobisher’s but more elemental and dangerous.

Sadly, the story is inconsistent and confusing. The arrival of Peri is completely perplexing for starters. The TARDIS happens to arrive as she’s being accosted by a gang of New York thugs, but Peri ends up saving the Doctor by beating the thugs with her handbag. Excuse me? Violent muggers running in terror from a little girl with a handbag? It’s also irritating that there’s no attempt at all to tie it in with the TV show.

The unusual format of the story ends up working against it. Part 3 (Warrior’s Story) is very dull. All that happens is the TARDIS lands on Xaos where they see some statues and meet a Draconian. It ties the previous two stories together, but as a ‘Story’ in itself it’s entirely free from action.

The great battle that the heroes have been gathered for is shocking. The all-powerful Skeletoids turn out to be about as much use as a burnt out android. And the terrifying power behind the Skeletoids turns out to be GIANT BRAINS! How will the Doctor defeat the GIANT BRAINS? By using a man who can turn into a GIANT NUKE! It fails to work on so many levels. Although kudos for getting a man who can turn into a nuke 20 years before ‘Heroes’. Overall, it comes across as meandering filler material, giving people at the time good justification to wonder why Doctor Who Magazine was running a comic strip at all.

3 GIANT BRAINS and still no good caption for this picture

Follow That TARDIS!

Jealous brothers Cain and Abel first appeared in the Bible, where Cain murdered Abel for receiving God’s favour. Kane and Abel’s adventures continue in a Jeffrey Archer novel published in 1979.

Part 4 (Frobisher’s Story) was first printed completely out of order in Doctor Who Magazine. This resulted in the Doctor and his friends still being in hand-to-hand combat with Skeletoids after their entire mountain base had been nuked.

In Kane’s Story, a woman on the subway wears a ‘Make Mine Marvel’ T-Shirt. Marvel Comics were the publishers of DWM at the time and this was their advertising slogan.

‘Max Stockbridge’ is a pen-name for Alan McKenzie, ex-editor of Doctor Who Monthly.

Amongst the Galactic Delegates are some creatures similar to ones from the TV show, including a fish-tank that resembles and Arcturan and a four-armed creature with a head similar to the guards from Underworld.

This story boasts the first comic strip appearances of Davros and the eighties-style Cybermen.

The Draconian Warrior in this story appears to be Kaon from War-Game, which may explain how he recognises the Doctor in that story.

Richard Thomas of Adlington in Cheshire wrote in to Doctor Who Magazine to say: ‘Whilst the artwork and story of the Doctor Who Comic Strip has come on leaps and bounds over the last few months, I am not very happy with an eight page strip that only features the Doctor and Peri in two of the last panels. Come on guys, we buy the mag for Doctor Who, not stuff like this. I think you scrap your own comic strips and do adaptations of some classic old Who stories instead.’ Sound advice that was ignored with aplomb.