Conflict of Interests

There was a Conflict of Interests in #183 of Doctor Who Magazine, which threw the readers of February 1992 into a quandary. It’s a tale of the FHD and doesn’t feature the Doctor at all.

Script – Dan Abnett

Pencils – Richard Whitaker

Inks – Cam Smith

Letters – Caroline Steeden

Editor – John Freeman.

It’s the return of Foreign Hazard Duty, the future-UNIT whose origins were shown in The Mark of Mandragora.

Here are the FHD Team Stats:

Stratton – Heavy weapons expert.

Captain Geoff Monmouth – The Captain. Level headed, cool, with an ironic sense of humour.

Spaight – Glasses-wearing cynic and tech expert.

Heskith – A woman. Good heavens, a WOMAN!

The FHD ship Trenchant is ordered to Aleph 777 in the Deneb Sector to investigate a Foreign Hazard. This turns out to be a squadron of Sontaran warriors. On the planet’s surface a fire-fight breaks out at an ancient temple. Captain Geoff Monmouth recalls the old saying: ‘Sontarans – can’t live with ‘em, can’t shoot ‘em.’ Although he is quite happy to shoot them.

Little Chef unveil their new mascot

His team fall back from the temple into the boggy marshland surrounding it. They try and second-guess the next move of the Sontarans, at the same time as the Sontarans are doing much the same thing.

The FHD team detect the approach of the Sontarans, but are surprised to see them showing a white flag. One of Monmouth’s men uses their shirt as a white flag and they go to parley. The Sontarans say they are on Aleph 777 to protect the site of historic archaeological interest from the humans; and the humans say they are here to protect it from the Sontarans. The talks break down straight away and they run back to cover to resume the fire-fight.

The Sontarans first appeared on TV in the 1974 Pertwee adventure, The Time Warror and returned in such stories as The Invasion of Time, The Two Doctors and more recently in the new series two-parter, The Poison Sky / The Sontaran Strategem. The Sontarans seen in this story are taller than the humans. They most closely resemble the clone batch that was seen in Shakedown, which was a fan-produced video released in 1995, three years after this strip.

Sontarans negotiate from a position of strength. And standing on a box

It’s hard to imagine the FHD interacting with any televised variety of Doctor Who. They’re very gung-ho in a horribly violent way. Actually, I’ve changed my mind. They’d fit right into Earthshock or Revelation of The Daleks.

Say goodbye to the FHD. Who said "Good Riddance"?

More stylish and angled art for this one, from Richard Whitaker. The style is good, but the execution is poor. There are lots of odd poses and unclear panels, which makes it seem like the work of a developing artist. The script doesn’t make much effort to tell the story visually either, relying too much on dialogue to move things forward, so there’s little room for the art. It’s quite atmospheric though and suits the tone of the story.

The Sontarans are well realised. They’re tough and have very expressive features, which means they look just as good striding across the battlefield as they do in the comic parley moments.

Filler.

This kind of story might have been acceptable back when Doctor Who Magazine had a back-up comic strip, but it’s not nearly strong enough to constitute the main strip. It feels like a story that’s been written for something else and then had the Sontarans shoehorned into it so that it can be put in Doctor Who Magazine.

The Sontarans are an identikit alien race here, with none of the belligerence or bravado of their TV counterparts. And I’ve no idea why they would be interested in archaeology. Perhaps the Draconians would have been a better choice of alien for this story.

As a one-joke war story it almost works. The idea that they have both been told by their superiors to hold the ruins at all costs, purely so they don’t fall into the hands of the philistines on the other side, is a good one. If the ending had been made a bit clearer, it could have been quite amusing.

Richard Whitaker’s brother is called Steve and he did the artwork for the ‘Age of Chaos’ Doctor Who Magazine special.

Richard Whitaker went on to do the inks for issue #10 of the Zorro comic in 1990. He’s probably done lots of other things in his life, but the internet isn’t telling me what. So Zorro #10 is going to get chalked up as his other achievement in the world of comics.

This is the last gasp for Foreign Hazard Duty, though the Sontarans would return in the Seventh Doctor comic strip, Pureblood.

The rocket-ship patch that the FHD closely resembles those worn by the human crew of the spaceship in the TV story, The Sensorites.

Speculation: With Evening’s Empire falling by the wayside, whether through accident or design, Doctor Who Magazine was stuffed for a comic strip for several months. The effort and the cost of producing the strip must have made it tempting to bin it altogether. Between DWM #181 and #184 we had a number of reprints from the early days and a text story, Heliotrope Bouquet, which was also by Dan Abnett. With the New Adventures series of novels now in their stride, with Cats Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel released the same month as DWM #183, the comics were no longer the only branch of new Doctor Who fiction.