By Rob McCow

Culture Shock!
 

The Collector

Readers of Doctor Who Magazine #139 had a bit of a Culture Shock! in August 1988. It’s heading to be reprinted into the Primal Ocean by Panini in 2009.
 

The World Shapers

Script – Grant Morrison

Art – Bryan Hitch

Lettering – Zed

Editor – Richard! Starkings!
 

Fellow Travellers

The Syntelligence of the Culture is a conglomeration of psychic cells that live inside a small cuddly dinosaur. It refers to its microscopic world as 'The Homebody' and calls The Doctor 'The Overbody'. In political terms, if there was a Primal Ocean Party you can be sure that the Syntelligence would vote for it, provided lots of other improbable conditions were met.
 

The Deal

Some aliens that look like giant eyeballs with squid-like tentacles are under attack from invaders from ‘Outer Space’, war-like creatures that resemble sinister horned beetles.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS arrives on a coast of a planet that has two suns. The Doctor is fed up with bumming around time and space and is considering going home for good.

Is it just me or does the TARDIS look like it's shrugging its shoulders?

The eyeball creatures of the Culture are losing their battle. Their enemies are parasitic, growing their young inside the bodies of the eyeball creatures. The last refuge is the Soft Engine, where the Syntelligence tells them that the invaders have damaged the Homebody beyond repair – they will never reach the Primal Ocean.

The Doctor receives a telepathic cry for help, but wonders whether he should get involved. He quickly decides that he should and rushes to the beach. He finds a two-foot high brontosaurus-like creature that collapses in front of him. He touches the creature’s head and finds himself in communion with the Syntelligence of The Culture.

The Doctor realises that The Culture is actually a cell culture acting as a mass mind and that it is under attack from a virus. The Doctor rushes back to the TARDIS.

Presenting the Doctor's new companion, the pelvic splanchnic ganglion of The Culture!

The Syntillegence assumes the Doctor has abandoned them and is horrified. The invaders have reached the grotto that contains the Syntelligence and are destroying the Homebody. Just in time, the Doctor returns with an injection of Maxenshudicea that defeats the virus. He carries the dinosaur Homebody to the water, where the Culture dissolves the Homebody and enters the paradise of the Primal Ocean.

His sense of purpose renewed, the Doctor takes the TARDIS off to new times and places.
 

TV Action

The Doctor was previously pitted against a psychic virus in the TV story, The Invisible Enemy. This virus was the Nucleus of The Swarm and it infected human minds. The Doctor was only able to defeat it by injecting himself into his own brain. Perhaps if he’d had some Maxenshudicea back then, his life would have been a little less weird.

Don't worry - the Doctor would never cell you out

The third Doctor encountered dinosaurs in Invasion of The Dinosaurs, but there were no mini-brontos.
 

4-Dimensional Vistas

Culture Shock! is drawn in a fantastically weird and dramatic style. The battle between the Syntelligence and the Virus is totally bizarre, but it does create a good depiction of the cell culture being overwhelmed by the chaotic invaders. The Homebody is rather cute, looking like the kind of cuddly toy dinosaur that you might win at a funfair.

The only problem is that the art is a little too indistinct at times. The Homebody's world is scruffy and This strip would have really benefited from being in full colour to help contrast the images of the Culture’s world and the Doctor’s.

Bryan Hitch has had a long and distinguished career in comics. And yet even he is still largely defeated by Sylvester McCoy’s malleable features. There’s one frame where he gets it spot on, when the Syntelligence sees a psychic image of The Doctor. In the rest of the story the Doctor is expressive and consistently drawn, but as ever it's not quite Sylvester McCoy.

The Doctor encounters a very different alien intelligence

End of The Line

When Doctor Who is on television, one thing that the comic strip should strive to be is different. It should offer you adventures and excitement that you wouldn’t get by tuning on at 7:25 on a Wednesday (or some time after 6pm on a Saturday as it is now). In this respect, Culture Shock! works very well. It retains the flavour of the show while taking it in a different direction.

One of the major problems with the comic strip at this point is consistency. The Doctor in this story is very different from how he was portrayed in Claws of The Klathi! He’s more like the melancholy intergalactic wanderer of the fourth Doctor’s comic strip. In isolation it doesn't harm the story, but it's poor continuity for an ongoing comic strip.

In common with a lot of one-parters, it feels a bit slight. The resolution is paticularly weak, with the Doctor whipping out a syringe from the TARDIS to solve the problem. It’s still an interesting departure for the comic strip though and I particularly like the upbeat ending. The Doctor tells the TARDIS - ‘We’ve got people to see, places to go, things to do!’ and there’s a renewed sense of excitement for the future.
 

Follow That TARDIS!

This was Bryan Hitch’s only contribution to the Doctor Who Comic strip and it was also the last story from Grant Morrison. Bryan Hitch provided concept art for the 2005 re-launch of Doctor Who on TV and has also had a long and successful career in comics. Grant Morrison would go on to 2000AD, DC Comics, Vertigo and numerous other publications.

Peter Pinto of The Paperbook Back Shop in Lancaster thinks that the Doctor has become too invincible. ‘This is also the weakness of Culture Shock!, the comic strip in DWM 139. To pun pretty feebly, the problem is that it (the strip and the homebody) has no guts. The Doctor (i.e. we humans) is in no way threatened or alarmed, the homebody isn’t identifiable with, and the incident, while coherent, is unmemorable.’

I anticipate that this page will be the top Google hit for Maxenshudicea.