By Rob McCow

Follow That TARDIS!

The Collector

Readers of issue #147 of Doctor Who Magazine were able to Follow That TARDIS! in April 1989.

The World Shapers

Script – John

Art – Andy/John/Kev/Dougie and Dave

Lettering – Bambos

Editor – Rich!

Fellow Travellers

Deadbeat and El Ape are brothers and work as a pair of private investigators from the future. El Ape is round-faced, short and stocky, while Deadbeat is tall and thin with a long face. Dark glasses and porkpie hats are the order of the day. They drive a hover-car that resembles a Volkswagen Beetle.

OK, they're supposed to be like The Blues Brothers, but they differ in a number of ways. They are not into blues music or any kind of music as far as I can tell. Instead of being born in the normal way, they were created in a clone bank. They're also not as funny as The Blues Brothers, or even The Blues Brothers 2000.

The Deal

In the not-too-distant future, Deadbeat and El Ape are out driving during an election. El Ape asks who Deadbeat voted for, but Deadbeat is more interested in the book he is reading. The brothers crash into a portaloo that materialises in front of them. The portaloo is the Meddling Monk's TARDIS. He has arrived on Earth to stop President Sinatra winning another term. The Doctor arrives in his TARDIS and demands to talk to the Monk, but the Monk gets away.

Deadbeat and El Ape want the Monk to pay for the damage to their car, so they force the Doctor at gunpoint to follow the Monk.

Follow that TARDIS!

They arrive in a dense forest in Tunguska, 1908. They try to find the Monk's TARDIS, but El Ape uses a grenade to clear the forest. The grenade turns out to be a mini-nuke, so they escape in the TARDIS before it destroys the forest. Then they follow the Monk to the Titanic, where El Ape sees the Monk's TARDIS disguised as an iceberg. He seizes control of the ship and rams it.

Finally, they land in Bermuda, 1945. The Monk's TARDIS has become unstable and is about to explode. The Doctor and Deadbeat drag the arguing El Ape and Monk back into the Doctor's TARDIS before the explosion tears a hole in time and space.

The Monk's TARDIS is on the right

The Doctor chucks El Ape and Deadbeat out of the TARDIS back in their own time. Deadbeat finishes reading his book – Unexplained Mysteries and Disasters by Smedley B. Clarke.

TV Action

The Meddling Monk appeared on TV in the 1966 adventure, The Time Meddler.

The Doctor may have seen the launch of the original Titanic, as a picture of him was seen at the launch in Rose, the first episode of the 2005 series. In the 2007 Christmas special Voyage of The Damned the Doctor landed on a space-faring version of the Titanic.

Another mystery the Doctor was apparently involved in was the disappearance of the crew of the Marie Celeste. This occurred in the 1966 adventure The Chase, which was a similar ‘time-machine pursuit’ story with multiple locations.

4-Dimensional Vistas

Despite apparently having five artists working on it, the look of this strip is fairly sloppy. With so much hoping around in time and space, the varying style of artwork should have created a sense of each location being a different world, but the end result is merely disorientating.

Some artists manage to get McCoy just about right, while others make him look like a cartoon tramp or goofball. This is really brought home in this story, where we see both examples. The problem is that when he's drawn badly it jars in the readers' mind and those are the images that you remember. When he’s drawn well you just accept it. Deadbeat and El Ape are drawn consistently, but the Monk is barely more than a sketch throughout.

The Doctor brings the Monk to task for littering his past with comic book crossovers

End of The Line

Although the previous Doctor Who comic crossover (Planet of The Dead) was a moderate success, this meeting of Doctor Who and The Sleeze Brothers was a step too far. El Ape and Deadbeat take centre stage, leaving the Doctor as a guest in his own comic strip. It's an unashamed and unsubtle eight-page advert for another comic.

It's supposed to be a comedy romp and while it's certainly fast moving, it isn't terribly funny. The basic premise that they go back in time and cause all the disasters listed in Deadbeat's book is OK, but borders on bad taste. It makes light of disasters where hundreds of people lost their lives.

Oddly enough, the Meddling Monk is far more in character in this story than he was in 4-Dimensional Vistas. His casual and gleeful attitude to changing history comes across far stronger in this madcap chain of events and his basic motive is still to improve history for the better. Although having a TARDIS disguised as a Portaloo was an old joke even back in 1989.

The Sleeze Brothers were not without promise as a comic duo, but they needed a far stronger introduction to gain the appreciation of the readers and an audience for their own comic book. They’re not really suitable for younger readers, but they’re too silly for the mature audience. Follow That TARDIS works as a one-off, but it leaves you hoping that the Doctor will never meet these two weirdos ever again.

Follow That TARDIS!

The Meddling Monk previously appeared in the comic strip story 4-Dimensional Vistas, where he had some unlikely allies, but looked a lot more like Peter Butterworth.

As you may have guessed, the original concept for the Sleeze Brothers was cooked up in a pub after a late night drinking session. I bought the first issue of their own comic book when it came out. The comic had a limited run of six issues, but I was surprised to discover this because after the first issue the comic never again turned up in my local newsagents.

The Tunguska event was most likely caused by a meteorite or comet fragment that exploded in mid-air near the Tunguska river in Russia on June 30^th, 1908. The Titanic famously struck an iceberg in 1912. The Bermuda Triangle is an area in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean where numerous sea vessels and aircraft are believed to have vanished in a very mysterious way.

Richard Collins of Ringmer, Lewes, East Sussex had just one grip in #149 of DWM: ‘Please find someone who can draw Sylvester McCoy competently. The current plethora of artists (including those involved with Follow That TARDIS) are terrible. Please find more suitable people – and quickly!’

Daniel Slater of Rotherham was kinder: ‘Congratulations on producing a rather ‘different’ comic strip in recent months. With the humour rapidly disappearing from the tv series, it is a relief that it is kept where it belongs – in your comic strip. The two recent ones, Time and Tide and Follow That TARDIS were especially great. I particularly like the creation of The Sleeze Brothers and I hope we haven’t seen the last of them. The only thing it is lacking now is Frobisher.’