3-G Redubbed (8)

What's that, you say? You're been clamoring for more relettered parodies of four year old comic strips? Well, your long nightmare is over! Here's the next installment of Apartment 3-G, just like the original but with gay subtext made explicit. Need to catch up? Click the "comic strips" tag for the first seven parts!

6/10/07

6/11/07

6/12/07

6/13/07

6/14/07

6/15/07

6/16/07

Companions: Ben Jackson

Ben Jackson

(Michael Craze)

Ben Jackson was introduced to Doctor Who as a successor of sorts to departed companion Steven - Ben took on the "action hero" role that Steven, and Ian before him, played opposite the elderly Doctor. Ben was a Cockney sailor from modern-day Earth. Together, he and Polly would ground the show in the present and represent the point of view of the audience perhaps a bit better than spaceman Steven or the soon-to-depart dull-as-dishwater Dodo.

Oh, and also, he was freaking adorable. Look at him! You can't not love him!

Right, sorry. I'll try and keep that reined in. Ben was an Able Seaman (YEAH HE WAS!) in the Royal Navy. His heart belonged to the sea, and when we first see him he's feeling blue because he's stuck on a six month shore posting while his ship patrols in the West Indies.

Here he is in his first story, The War Machines, meeting his soon-to-be-best-friend Polly and soon-to-be-Doctor-Who-history-footnote Dodo. Polly and Dodo fail to cheer him up, but when Polly gets harassed by a drunken goon, Ben rushes to her defense. Soon he's swept up in the fight against the evil computer WOTAN, and with Dodo and Polly both hypnotized into working for the enemy Ben quickly becomes the Doctor's go-to assistant. He traps one of the titular machines for the Doctor, and rescues Polly from the final firefight.

Dodo stays on Earth, and when Ben and Polly slip aboard the TARDIS to return the Doctor's dropped key, they're both rather surprised to find it's bigger on the inside. (It's only the third season, that hasn't gotten old yet.)

The Doctor had put the TARDIS in flight before he realized the duo were aboard, and he was irritated by their presence, but amused by their refusal to believe that they were travelling in space and time.

The trio arrive in 17th Century Cornwall. Ben grudgingly accepts that they're not in London anymore, but refuses to believe that they've traveled in time - or that the Doctor can't control the ship and return them home. Worried about being arrested for desertion, he stalks off, determined to walk back to civilization. The Doctor and a slightly more credulous Polly follow along. Soon the TARDIS trio are caught up in the machinations of The Smugglers, a ruthless gang of pirates searching for Captain Avery's missing treasure.

Huh. I meant to insert a picture of the pirates, but instead put in a picture of Ben with no shirt on by mistake. Whoops. It's also much larger than the other pictures for some reason. Oh, look, Polly and the Doctor are in the picture, too! I didn't notice them before. Anyway, they beat the pirates and escape in the TARDIS and it all works out.

Here they are at the end of the story - they look much happier than they did at the beginning, don't they? Ben's accepted that the Doctor has been telling the truth, and although he never stops hoping that the TARDIS will take them home, he does begin to enjoy his adventures - although his focus is always on protecting Polly, for whom he seems to be developing some strong feelings. He calls her "Duchess" due to her comparatively posh manner, because there's no surer route to a girl's heart than to mock her upbringing.

In The Tenth Planet, the TARDIS takes them to a military base in Antarctica in the year 1986, where the travelers help fight off the very first invasion of the Cybermen. With actor William Hartnell unwell, the Doctor doesn't appear in a good chunk of the story, leaving much of the action to Ben.

Here he is in a radiation suit or something, as he sabotages a rocket that would destroy the Cybermen's home of Mondas but would take the Earth with it. When the Doctor and Polly are captured, Ben rescues them, and the young couple help the ailing Doctor back across the ice to the TARDIS, where he collapses and undergoes a peculiar metamorphosis, for the very first time...

I did it again! That's not a picture of the Doctor regenerating, it's just another picture of Ben looking adorable. Honestly, you'd think I didn't know what I was doing! It's from the right story, though - The Power of the Daleks saw Ben and Polly dealing with the Doctor's first ever regeneration. Ben flat-out refused to believe that this strange younger man was the same crotchety racist old Doctor he had been travelling with. (Did I say racist? Sorry, sometimes I get the behind-the-scenes gossip mixed up with the on-screen stories.)

The TARDIS lands on the planet Vulcan, where they emphatically do not encounter any pointy-eared logicians. Instead the Doctor is surprised (because he didn't watch the opening credits and doesn't know the title of the story) to encounter his old enemies the Daleks. The Doctor overcomes the baddies despite his somewhat erratic behavior, and Ben slowly comes to accept that he really is the same man with a new face and stronger line-memorization skills.

When the TARDIS takes them to the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746 Scotland, the Doctor is, unusually, the one who wants to get right back in the ship and take off again, but Ben wanders off to take a look around.

How much phallic imagery can YOU spot in this picture? After the usual historical shenanigans the crew takes off, with Highland lad Jamie McCrimmon in tow, making our TARDIS traveling trio a less alliterative quartet. The time-space machine takes them to Atlantis for the marvelously bonkers story The Underwater Menace, where Ben spends most of the story in a wetsuit.

Also there are Fish People. Seriously, watch this story. Ben's original role of the go-to action guy has become redundant twice over by now, with Patrick Troughton playing a much more physically capable Doctor than William Hartnell's, and now strapping young buck Jamie added into the mix. This combination of characters is unusual for a TARDIS crew throughout the show's history - discounting the UNIT team, this is the only time we'll see two male companions at once. Perhaps the writers were worried about finding enough for the actors to do when more than one filled a similar stock-type, but there's nothing to worry about if you're writing for actors as good as these, and Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Anneke Wills and Michael Craze are quite good indeed. These four rank as one of the strongest TARDIS teams in the show's history, so of course not a single complete story featuring all four exists, only scattered episodes.

I know, guys, it's a bummer. But cheer up - next stop is the moon!

Ben, you look worried. Adorably worried. And you should be! In The Moonbase, the Doctor's kooky quartet encountered the malevolent Cybermen for the very second time. Jamie's flat on his back for a lot of the story, so Ben gets quite a bit of action. And if this blog were all slash fiction, that sentence would be a good jumping-off point, but all I mean is that Jamie's sick with the same malady the Cybermen are infecting the crew with, so Ben gets the action-hero spot to himself until he's better. Maybe I need to start a second blog?

Ben gets an even bigger share of the spotlight in The Macra Terror, when the TARDIS takes its crew to an evil holiday camp...in spaaaaaace! The apparently happy human colony is actually being controlled by the evil Macra, a race of giant crab things who the production team wisely keeps mostly in the dark until they're able to CGI themselves up for the Tenth Doctor and Martha in Gridlock decades later. I already showed a picture of the Macra in my entry on Polly, so instead here's Ben getting a massage.

I'm booking my vacation now! The Macra try to take over the minds of the foursome, but they're all able to resist - except Ben. Michael Craze gives a great performance here, as Ben is brainwashed, believing that all is right in the colony and becoming frustrated with his friends' attempts to subvert the status quo - he struggles with his desire to do what he sees as the right thing and turn them in to the authorities. He finally comes round and saves the day when their lives are in danger, but Ben spends a good portion of this story as an antagonist for the other three.

The Macra Terror is the last full outing for Ben, as he's sidelined fairly early on in his next and last story, The Faceless Ones.

Cheese! That's the manly travelers pausing for a photo while making plans to rescue the once-again kidnapped Polly. Ben would be captured as well by the end of the second episode of this six-part story, with the pair only returning to say goodbye to the Doctor and Jamie at the end. The TARDIS has landed them back on the exact same day they left - July 20, 1966 - and they decide to stay behind.

Ben doesn't appear again on the show, but some of the spin-offs have suggested what might have happened to him. Several licensed short stories have given brief looks into Ben and Polly's lives after leaving the TARDIS - according to those, they drifted apart and married other people, but were reunited by the Doctor in 1999. Polly had divorced and Ben's wife had died, and the two finally admitted their feelings for one another. On The Sarah Jane Adventures it was suggested that in the present day the two are running an orphanage in India together.

Ben is one of the most under appreciated companions of the classic series, even more so than Polly, I think - certainly because of the sheer number of his episodes that are missing, but also perhaps because of Michael Craze's untimely passing in 1998. If you haven't seen any of his stories, take a look - there are audio and video reconstructions of the missing episodes, so it's possible to fill in the missing pieces if you're motivated. Just look at how adorable he is!

What...?

Thanks for keeping it clean, Robin. Hey, comics writers - just put in the "what". You're not saving much space and it doesn't sound as realistic as you think it does.

Panels from:
Justice League: Generation Lost 17 (Judd Winick, Early March 2011)
Avengers Origins: Ant-Man & The Wasp 1 (Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, January 2012)
Catwoman 1 (Judd Winick, November 2011)
Fear Itself: The Home Front 5 (Si Spurrier and Jason Latour, October 2011)
Grifter 1 (Nathan Edmondson, November 2011)
Incorruptible 21 (Mark Waid, August 2011)
Iron Man 2.0 8 (Nick Spencer, October 2011)
Superman/Batman 80 (Chris Roberson, March 2011)

Doctor BOO!

Doctor Who may be a science-fiction show at its core, but it's had its dalliances with the supernatural on more than one occasion. In honor of Halloween, let's put aside the Daleks and the Sontarans and take a look at some of the more more traditionally spooky monsters to vex the Doctor and his friends...

Ghosts

Ghosts in Doctor Who are generally waved away as either some kind of alien trick or psychic residue left over from a traumatic event. The people of Earth believed they were being visited by the spirits of their deceased loved ones in Army of Ghosts, but the Tenth Doctor, Rose, Mickey and Jackie proved that they were just Cybermen. So the next time you visit a medium and she tells you your dead aunt Tillie wants you to live life to the fullest, ask her if she's SURE she's not really talking to a killer cyborg from a parallel universe.

In The Sarah Jane Adventures story The Eternity Trap, Sarah Jane and her friends Clyde and Rani investigate an apparently haunted house - Ashen Hill Manor seems to be haunted by the ghost of its original owner, Lord Marchwood, and his two children. In truth, they and others who have disappeared over the years have been trapped "between dimensions" by a hostile alien's technology. Sarah Jane defeats the alien, allowing the Marchwoods, centuries after their apparent deaths, to finally move on - but not before bidding Sarah Jane a ghostly goodbye from the window.

Well, that's what the show is suggesting. I took it to mean that Sarah Jane failed and the Marchwoods are still trapped in a nightmare hellscape between dimensions, but that's just me. So have there been any clear-cut ghosts in Doctor Who at all? Actual spirits of the formerly living? No. Well, yes. Well, sort of.

In the Torchwood episode Random Shoes, Captain Jack and the gang faced the loss of Eugene Jones, the team's friendly stalker who died after being hit by a car. After death, Eugene was surprised to find himself up and about, unperceived by those around him, able to watch but not help as Torchwood team member Gwen Cooper investigated his death. Turns out Eugene's spirit walked the earth due to his having swallowed an alien artifact called a Dogon Sixth Eye. So sure, this is the world of Doctor Who, there needs to be some handwave of a sci-fi explanation, but Eugene died and then his spirit got up and walked around. Sounds like a ghost to me.

When Gwen's life was threatened by a speeding car, Eugene was able to make himself corporeal long enough to shove her to safety. Gwen was stunned to see the ghost of Eugene, but her pleas for him to stay weren't enough to stop him from moving on. It's actually quite a sweet ending, if you forget that Torchwood has already established that the afterlife consists of unending darkness where you can't see or hear anything but can sense the presence of unspeakable creatures coming to get you. Good luck, Eugene!

Werewolves

The Tenth Doctor and Rose saved Queen Victoria from a werewolf in Tooth and Claw. Once again, the origin of the beast was alien, not magic - it wasn't a werewolf, it was a lupine wavelength haemovariform.

Still, in every other way this is a traditional werewolf tale, and worth a watch in a Halloween marathon. There are kung-fu monks in it too, so you could watch it again during your Martial Arts marathon. You watch a lot of TV.

In The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the Seventh Doctor and Ace meet Mags, a werewolf from the planet Vulpana who has no control over her transformations and lives in fear of hurting those she loves. It's never made clear if everyone on Vulpana is a werewolf or if Mags is an alien/supernatural mutt.

The spin-off media stop worrying so much about explaining the lycanthropes' origins away with some kind of sci-fi alien background, and just get on with having the Doctor fight werewolves without worrying so much about where they came from. The Fifth Doctor and Turlough encountered an entire pack of werewolves in the audio adventure Loups-Garoux, and Turlough fell for one and got his heart broken. The Fourth Doctor's companion Harry teamed up with an amnesiac Eighth Doctor and encountered werewolves in the novel Wolfsbane. Sadly, Harry was killed by a werewolf at the end. Or possibly got bitten and spent the rest of his life transforming at each full moon. Or possibly got bitten, transformed in the TARDIS and ripped Sarah Jane to pieces. The novels were very confusing before the TV series came back and simplified things. Also, kind of depressing.

Zombies

Zombies are reanimated corpses, the living dead, and the Ninth Doctor and Rose had a close encounter with them in The Unquiet Dead.

The bodies are in fact being animated by the Gelth, an incorporeal alien species looking for a new home. They're baddies, but they don't go around feasting on the flesh of the living, so The Unquiet Dead doesn't quite make it as a zombie story, as good as it is otherwise.

Torchwood is always a good place to look for some real horror. Torchwood team member Suzie Costello got brought back from the dead in They Keep Killing Suzie.

This was more of a resurrection along the lines of Captain Jack's life/death boomeranging, so isn't quite satisfying for our purposes either. Owen Harper, although brought back to life in the episode Dead Man Walking in the same manner as Suzie was, stuck around a lot longer and had to deal with all the unpleasant consequences of being a walking corpse.

Despite all his angst about not being able to eat or sleep or have sex or heal from injuries, Owen steadfastly refused to feast on the flesh of the living. Spoilsport. For that, we'll have to look to the Torchwood novel Bay of the Dead. 

A horde of zombies invade Cardiff, eating Welsh people and converting them into the undead while Jack, Gwen and Ianto try to stop them without getting eaten themselves. Sure, it's got an alien explanation, but if you want a real zombie story set in the world of Doctor Who, this is pretty good.

Frankenstein's Monster

Frankenstein's Monster seems like a perfect fit for Doctor Who, as far as classic spooky monsters go - while it's generally considered part of the genre of supernatural monsters like vampires and werewolves (thanks, Universal Studios!), its origins are scientific, not supernatural. And indeed, the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane encountered a monster much like Dr. Frankenstein's carb-loading fiend on the planet Karn in The Brain of Morbius.

Morbius was a renegade Time Lord believed executed by his people, but whose brain was actually spirited away by the mad scientist Solon. Solon constructs a new body for his master out of bits and pieces of the various aliens who have crash landed on the planet. He plans to use the Doctor's head to finish off his creation, but when he's unable to acquire it, he goes with this instead...

A reasonable facsimile. I believe it's the head of the Capital City Goofball from The Simpsons. Six of one.

The Doctor has had more direct contact with the historical Frankenstein, in the person of his creator, Mary Shelley, who travelled in the TARDIS for a time as one of the Eighth Doctor's companions, beginning in the audio story The Company of Friends: Mary's Story. He probably told her about his adventure with Morbius and she just took out the alien bits. Unoriginal hack.

The First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki met what seemed to the real Monster of Frankenstein in The Chase.

They also encountered a ghost and Dracula. Fleeing the Daleks, the travelers left in the TARDIS before figuring out what was going on - the Doctor surmised that they had landed inside the human imagination. Turns out they were in a haunted house, and the monsters were all robots. Sometimes the simplest explanations are best, Doctor. The haunted house was part of the Festival of Ghana in the year 1996. Remember that? Man, that was fantastic, Ghana was the place to be in 1996 what with their economy soaring thanks to their booming robot industry. I went to the Festival of Ghana, as a matter of fact. I was twenty-four years old, I got trashed and made out with a Creature from the Black Lagoon robot. Best week of my life.

Witches

Sarah Jane and K9 met some real-life witches in the one and only episode of Doctor Who's first spin-off, K9 and Company. I say real-life witches in the sense that there's nothing remotely supernatural or even alien about them, but they're TV's version of real-life witches - a bunch of rural villagers committing human sacrifice in order to ensure a healthy crop, or some crap like that. I don't mean like that girl in your Intro to Philosophy class who carried a pocket cauldron around with her and would say "Goddess bless you" when you sneezed. K9 and Company is pretty dreadful despite Sarah Jane's presence, but it does get pretty funny when K9 starts blasting the hell out of all the coven members.

The Tenth Doctor and Martha fought off witches of a more traditional sort in The Shakespeare Code.

The witches are an alien race called Carrionites, and the Doctor tries to explain that their apparent use of magic is really a variant type of mathematics using words instead of numbers, but really - speaking words aloud to alter reality? Sounds like magic to me. This story is about as close as televised Doctor Who gets to just giving up on the sci-fi pretense and acknowledging that the menace is supernatural.

If you like your Doctor Who REALLY crazy, look no further than the original comic strips from the pages of TV Comic. In the comic strip The Witches, the Second Doctor, John and Gillian were threatened by the titular crones on the planet Vargo.

The comic strip makes no attempt whatsoever to suggest that these are anything but supernatural witches using magical powers. The Doctor tries and fails to beat them with his own scientific devices. All seems lost until they discover the head witch's spell book. This being the bloodthirsty comic strip Doctor from which this blog gets its name, he uses a spell in the book to slaughter every last one of the witches, turning every witch everywhere in the universe to dust. Yay comics!

Vampires

The Doctor has had numerous encounters with the most famous of all the vampires. As mentioned above, the TARDIS crew meet a robot Dracula in The Chase.

If you're not sure if you should bother watching The Chase, let me say again - the TARDIS crew meet a robot Dracula. A. Robot. Dracula. The whole story is ridiculous. Go watch it.

The Sixth Doctor and Zoe return to the Land of Fiction and team-up with Bram Stoker's Dracula, along with a host of other literary creations, in the audio adventure Legend of the Cybermen. But in the genre of Doctor Who Meets Dracula, the best is the audio story Son of the Dragon. 

The Fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem travel back to the 15th Century and meet Vlad the Impaler - the historical inspiration for Dracula. This story is a purely historical, there are no supernatural or even science-fiction elements besides the TARDIS itself, and it's brilliant. Well worth a listen if you're curious about Big Finish Production's line of original audio plays.

Ok, so that's Dracula. But what about honest-to-evil bloodsucking creatures of the night? The Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory encountered what appeared to be traditional vampires in The Vampires of Venice - a bevy of beautiful Hammer horror girls, with fangs, no reflection and an aversion to sunlight.

Sadly, they turned out to be alien fish people called Saturnyns in disguise. No Halloween fun here. It's a shame, since there's no particular reason, story-wise, that they couldn't have been real - after all, the Doctor's met actual vampires before.

In State of Decay, the Fourth Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9 met Zargo, Camilla and Aukin, a trio of genuine bloodsuckers ruling an unnamed planet in the pocket dimension of E-Space.

The trio's resemblance to a deck of playing cards is never explained, but they serve their master, the Great Vampire, a giant monster sleeping under their castle, by feeding him the blood of the local villagers. The Great Vampires were the ancient enemies of the Time Lords and were believed to be extinct until the Doctor and friends stumbled upon him, waiting for the day when he would be strong enough to rise up and take his revenge. Spoilers! The Doctor stops him. State of Decay is a great story, fun and spooky even if the vampires chew the scenery as much as they chew their victims. If you're looking for some Doctor Who to watch this Halloween, look no further.

And really, why would you be doing anything else on Halloween but watching Doctor Who? You've got plenty of suggestions here, so turn on the TV and put a bowl of jelly babies out for the trick-or-treaters. Boo!

Happy Gay Monsters

I have tried both of these lines. Neither worked.

This is from House of Mystery 41, November 2011. It's a fantastic series, I enjoyed it a lot even if I barely understood what was going on most of the time. This panel is from the penultimate issue. I'm very glad writer Matthew Sturges gave Tursig the gay Goblin King a happy ending.