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Once Upon a Time Lord
Rob McCow's guide to the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips

What’s the story called?

A Glitch In Time

It was Doctor Who Magazine #One-Seven-Nine; that first published the strip ‘A Glitch In Time; It gave readers fun, in October ’91, and it’s not been reprinted up to this time.

Script – John Freeman

Art – Richard Whitaker

Letters – Caroline Steeden

Editor – Paul Neary

Ace has little faith in the Doctor’s repair of the Chameleon Circuit. Her vocabulary of invective goes as far as ‘Dog breath’, for which remark she gets the butt of a gun in her stomach. She is sympathetic to those on the receiving end of physical violence.

The Doctor is aiming for Middlesbrough, but lands at a Nexus Point in Earth’s pre-history instead. He tells Ace to be careful and to try not to change anything. A group of time travelling humans arrive and start shooting the local animals. The Doctor tells them to stop, but their ‘Technos’ have told them that they can’t change history, because by coming to the past they become a part of the past. The time-travelling hunters carry on their hunt elsewhere and the Doctor does some research in the TARDIS.

Going Crazy in the Cretaceous. Zreeek!

Later, the hunters have lit a fire and are cooking their dinner. One of them complains that someone spooked the game. As they talk, Ace sneaks around the camp and steals their weapons. The hunters spot Ace and lure the Doctor out of the wood. The chief hunter intends to show the Doctor that they can’t change history by shooting a mammal. However, when he shoots it there is a strange noise (ZZREEK) and some intelligent lizards appear, armed with laser guns. They shoot and kill the human hunters. The Doctor explains that the lizards are time-travellers from an alternative future. Just as the last hunter is killed, the Doctor activates a device from the TARDIS that sends everyone back to their respective timelines, bringing them back to life.

Don't worry - it's a time glitch! So it isn't happening!

The Doctor explains to Ace that this was a self-correcting time anomaly.

The Doctor has visited the Earth’s prehistory in Time-Flight.

Temporal anomalies play a big part in the new series adventure Father’s Day.

The alternative world reptiles are completely different from Silurians and Sea Devils, they look more like two-legged dinosaurs.

Richard Whittaker produces some very stylised and angular art for this one-off. Although the action sequences are quite effective, a lot of the dialogue-based panels are dull and unclear.

I think this style of art is very difficult to pull off in a TV-Tie in comic strip. The reader will be expecting to see familiar faces from the TV show, so unless the artist can do a convincing likeness or a distinctive caricature, it ends up disappointing. Although the art style is distinctive and eye-catching, it doesn’t do justice to the characters from the TV show.

The proposed new title sequence for Season 27
employed 'Batman' style sound effects.

Here’s a forgotten old Doctor Who comic strip from the Dustbins of the River Styx.

The story is a classic sci-fi cliché of the first order, asking what would happen if you killed the mammals that eventually evolve into mankind. The artwork is different, but its neither good, nor bad, or even plain old different enough to stand out. The Doctor and Ace don’t discover anything new about themselves, don’t get into any particular peril and don’t save the day for anybody.

The whole mammals versus lizards idea is fairly tired, especially for Doctor Who fans, who have had numerous stories involving the Silurians and Sea Devils, the lizard-like creatures who ruled Earth before man.

Like the self-correcting time anomaly that the Doctor fixes in the story, when you get to the end of A Glitch In Time the very essence of the story melts away as though it never existed.

The hunters refer to a Tyrannosaur, which suggests that this story takes place at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 70 million years ago.

Ace tells the Doctor that his repairs on the Chameleon circuit were a botch job. Indeed, the TARDIS is back in its Police Box form after taking on the shape of a Cadillac in the previous story, The Good Soldier.

This comic strip is yet another Marvel crossover, featuring a character who is an Ex-Warhead. The Warheads are mercenaries who travel through wormholes to acquire new technologies. Read about them here.

A Glitch In Time was written by the ‘Senior Editor’ of Doctor Who Magazine, John Freeman. The ‘Editorial Director’ Paul Neary was credited as Editor for the story. DWM #179 also lists contributors such as a ‘Resident Yeti’ (Harry Papadopoulos), the ‘Emperor Dalek’ (Louise Cassell) and ‘Excelsior’ (Stan Lee).