By Rob McCow

Keepsake

The Collector

Holy Spit! This Keepsake was included in Doctor Who Magazine #140, published in September 1988.

The World Shapers

Script – Simon Furman

Art – John Higgins

Lettering – Zed

Editor – Richard! Starkings!

Fellow Travellers

Another Marvel-Universe character from the pen of Simon Furman, Keepsake was readily available for all manner of cartoon crossovers. Keepsake is a rugged and repulsive space scavenger. He keeps a giant alien pet vulture as a 'keepsake', to remind him of either his wife or misery. He's an unpleasant, self-centred salvage merchant from the distant future and has his own spaceship.

The Deal

Keepsake arrives on Ryos, a desolate and miserable planet. He is on the trail of a distress call, but his priorities are to salvage the crash wreckage rather than rescue anyone. He lands his ship only to find a man being chased by a horde of savages mounted on giant beasts. The stranger cries out for help, but Keepsake takes off instead. In an attempt to save himself, the stranger grabs hold of a landing strut. In doing so, he knocks out the spacheship's gyros.

Keepsake is forced to land nearby, where the stranger thanks him and introduces himself as the Doctor. Against Keepsake's wishes, the Doctor insists that they rescue one of the crash survivors from the savages. The Doctor is unnerved by Keepsake's pet vulture.

The Doctor and Keepsake

Using explosive charges from the ship, the Doctor conducts an aerial bombardment of the savages' village to scare them off. Keepsake finds that he is enjoying himself. They save the female medic who survived the crash.

The Doctor is thanked by the medic, but he says that Keepsake is the real hero. As Keepsake prepares to take off, the buxom medic gives him a kiss.

TV Action

This story features a character called 'The Doctor'. He is almost nothing like the character of the same name from the TV show, Doctor Who.

'Keepsake!' would be far too expensive to be made as part of the TV series. If the Keepsake character ever graduated to his own movie, nothing from this story would be included.

4-Dimensional Vistas

The artwork is mostly sketchy and pedestrian. McCoy's face predictably changes from frame to frame and never once looks like that guy off the telly. The proportions of the characters twist and change in an unnaturally cartoonish way, which works against the gritty style of the artwork.

There's a half decent opening shot and the alien vulture looks quite good, but it's hard to make out what's going on in the action sequences and there's lots of boring empty white space in many of the panels. Plus, the alien savages seem to live in circus tents.

I'll be Raak!

End of The Line

Truly dire, Keepsake is possibly the worst Doctor Who comic strip ever printed. Even when the TV Action comic was bad, at least it was fun. This is a nasty and pointless little story with no redeeming features, it's reminiscent of the 4^th Doctor adventure, The Deal, but exceeds the terribleness of that story in every way imaginable.

Whatever they were trying to do with the character of Keepsake, it didn't work. He's an ugly, repulsive creation that says things like ‘Holy Spit!’ Perhaps Keepsake was intended to appear in his own comic. There may have been a good idea there somewhere, but Keepsake is far too unlikable even for a one-off shot in DWM, never mind a whole strip to himself.

What a funking load of ballocks

The morals of the Doctor are again called into question as he uses explosive charges from Keepsake's ship to frighten off some alien savages. The thought that some of the savages might get hurt never seems to cross his mind. He even describes Keepsake as a 'hero', proving himself as an enormously bad judge of character.

Good grief. Please let that not just have happened

We don't even see the rescue of the female scientist at the end of the story. It’s as though a page is missing, or the writer was rushing to end the story earlier than he had planned to.

A disaster on every level, Keepsake would only be beaten for awfulness by the woeful run of Doctor Who strips in 'Hulk Presents'.

Keepsake also appeared in Death's Head issue #4-5. For more on how this character doesn't fit into any version of the Marvel Mega-multiverse.

The landing strut from Keepsake's ship was used for a piece of artwork that appeared on the cover of #140 of Doctor Who Magazine. This showed McCoy hanging on to the strut and his hat, while the TARDIS was buried up to it's neck in the lava below. A poster of the artwork was available from DWM for £3.50 (UK), or free with a £15 subscription. Extreme Sidebar – Sylvester McCoy posed for the artist by dangling off a gantry during the filming of Greatest Show In The Galaxy.