Today’s Comic> Doctor Who Classics S5 #1

“Is that a Police Box in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

Doctor Who Classics Series 5 #1

IDW Publishing (March, 2013)

Originally published in Doctor Who Magazine #145-147

Two stories appear in this issue and frankly both of them are not very good. The first story has the Doctor landing on a planet where the sea is about to kill the inhabitants of an island. They are not only resolved to their fate but gleefully kill each other and the Doctor barely escapes becoming the final meal before convincing one pregnant being (and I’m not sure said being is supposed to be female because one character refers to “the Worrier” as “father”) to escape on a raft. This story is ridiculous but not as bad as the second one. It’s a two-parter where I found myself rooting for the sea. I’ve never seen such unlikable characters in a Doctor Who story. {insert Rose Tyler joke here}

I’m not much on the alien designs either. They are easy to tell apart, but that’s it. The Doctor gets a bad treatment as well, and just looks kind of like a skinny nerd stereotype.

If you know of and enjoy the Sleaze Brothers, you’ll like “Follow That TARDIS!”. I had heard of them but never seen them before. Sorry I finally did. In this story the Monk damages the brothers’ car and they force the Doctor to chase after him. The results (because the brothers, more El Ape than Deadbeat, are rather stupid) include a mini-nuke being set off in Tunguska, the sinking of the Titanic (El Ape convinced that the Monk disguised his TARDIS as the iceberg), and creating the Bermuda Triangle by blowing up the Monk’s TARDIS. What hurts this story more is that more than one artist worked on it. Sometimes the Doctor looks right, sometimes he looks as bad as the first story (as one of the artists shows up again), and it’s very distracting to see.

The stories in this comic were just terrible and it is not one I can recommend, not even to Whovians.