Mera Meets the Manta Men

Oh, Hostess comic ads of the seventies and eighties! How I love your particular brand of madness! Let's dive deep below the sea and discover what joys you have for us this time.

I found this particular ad in Batman Family 16 (March 1978). I know, it's too tiny to read. Don't fear, an obsessively detailed panel-by-panel analysis follows.

Hey, look at Aquaman's logo, so large and prominently displayed! I don't see Aquaman here, but I'm sure he'll show up eventually, since it's his comic. The title character here, though, is Mera, a surprisingly minor character to star in one of these Hostess ads. Even Aqualad, who is mentioned in neither the title nor the logo, is better known than her, being Aquaman's sidekick and his co-star in a series of 1960s Filmation cartoons. Mera was Aquaman's wife. She was the queen of an other-dimensional undersea realm, who helped Aquaman out a couple of times; they fell in love and got married; shortly thereafter she gave birth to...I shit you not...Aquababy. They honestly named their son Aquababy. Years later, in less innocent times, writers would realize how ridiculous that was and retroactively rename him Arthur Jr. But seriously. Aquababy. Some time after that, Black Manta murdered Aquababy, and a devastated Mera left Aquaman.

But that's all in the future! The horrible, horrible future. In the here and now of 1978, Mera has time to ride around on her giant mutant seahorse across the beautiful radioactive-green ocean bottom and Aqualad says things like "Suffering swordfish" and nobody smacks him. But what could be driving those sharks against their will, making them resistant to even Aqualad's mighty telepathic powers???

Aaah! Manta men! Meet them, Mera! Meet them and despair! They have an evil plan to freak out sharks and drive them towards the beach, which will give Black Manta complete mastery of the oceans somehow! Oh, if only SOMEONE here had a useful super power! I am most definitely not looking at you, Aqualad.

Aaah again! Freakish giant hand! Every comic of this panel brings some new grotesque abomination to haunt your nightmares!

Ahem. Here's the main problem with Mera. She was meant to be a supporting character in Aquaman's comic, but she was soooooo much more powerful than him. She couldn't chat with halibut, but she could form water into "hard-water" shapes - not just scary hands, but also columns that could carry her up and out of the ocean, or giant balls she could hurl at her enemies - all sorts of useful things. (Although she mostly just did hands, columns and balls.She was powerful, but not very imaginative.) When she first appeared in the 60s, her sheer womanliness was used as the reason Aquaman had to save her, but as we moved into the more liberated 70s, the idea that she couldn't save herself seemed more and more unlikely. Suck it, Aquaman. Talk to the hand.

In the comics, her hard-water hands were drawn to look like they were made of water.They were not horrifying amputated flesh-things, as here.

Imagine this panel out of context. You would never, ever be able to figure out what was going on, but you would know that it was something wonderful. "God giving snacks to monsters" would be my guess. But where did Mera's floating hand get the Hostess Fruit Pies? Did she make them out of hard-water too? ("Hard-water", by the way, is not the same thing as ice. I'm not sure where the distinction lies.) I notice in these ads that the Hostess snack food-like products always seem to magically appear out of nowhere just when you need them most. Like Jesus, but useful.

When I eat, I talk just like the Manta Men. Last night I had spaghetti for dinner, and I sat in my apartment shouting, "Sauce! Soft boiled noodles. Meatball! Real chopped onion." I was so busy eating I didn't have time to emit stun rays.

Hostess Fruit Pies are extra delicious when you completely immerse them in sea water. Mmmm! Makes the crust extra tender. I think it's interesting that the sound effect Manta Men make when eating is the same sound they make when emitting stun rays, except plural. Maybe they make that sound whatever they do. Or maybe they kraccked a tooth on the artificial apple filling.

I don't think they should just toss the wrappers into the ocean like that. Although I suppose they don't really have another option. 

This panel is unspeakably filthy. "Fingers and hands were meant for good things." "So were mouths." Wink. I'm shuddering in a mixture of revulsion and desire. Oh, Manta Men, how you tease me.

Why does the Fruit Pies wrapper have a picture of a penguin smoking a cigarette? Oh, wait, that's Fruit Pie the Magician. Remember him? He was one of the Hostess mascots, like Twinkie the Kid and Captain Cupcake and Childhood Obesity.

So...where was Aquaman? Wasn't this supposed to be his comic? He did not appear at all. Neither did Black Manta, who was allegedly the mastermind behind this sinister plot. This story belonged to Mera, Aqualad, the Manta Men, the Freakish Giant Hand, Fruit Pies and insanity. Hostess has given us the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of comics. Somewhere at this exact moment, Aquaman is defeating Black Manta, who's thinking, "Oh well, at least my Manta Men are ruining some family's beach outing."

3-G Redubbed (9)

More from the gang in Apartment 3-G! This week, meet self-absorbed mom Nora Mills! Also - Luann takes a turn for the worse! (Need to catch up? Click the "comic strips" label for prior entries.)

6/17/07

6/18/07

6/19/07

6/20/07

6/21/07

6/22/07

6/23/07

Date Goofus, Marry Gallant

Remember Goofus and Gallant? I loved these comics when I was a kid.

Time and Relative Dimension in Slash

And now here's Rory kissing the Doctor.

And that is just one reason why you should be reading IDW's line of Doctor Who comics. Amy's response to this moment mirrors my own.

TV adaptation, anyone?

From Doctor Who 11, November 2011.

Love Doctor

Valentine's Day is bearing down on us once again! Last year I looked at the worst companion romances in Doctor Who history because I'm a cynical single bastard. I'm still a cynical single bastard, but I'm going to take a slightly happier tack this year. Enough with the companions, let's take a look at the many, many loves of the Doctor himself! Let's start with the obvious, and work backwards, shall we?

River Song

River, as you probably already know if you're reading this blog, first encountered the Tenth Doctor in Silence in the Library. First from his point of view, at least; last, from hers. There's a strong implication right from the start that their relationship is romantic; River knows the Doctor's name, and the Doctor says there's only one time in his life he could share that with someone - his wedding? His death? His series finale? We're not told, but when River resurfaces in the life of the Eleventh Doctor the sparks really start to fly, and by Day of the Moon she's tasting Time Lord tonsils. She may or may not have married him in The Wedding of River Song - she technically married a robot, but he was inside it, after all. Whether that was the happy day or not, all signs point to River Song, at some point in their knotted timelines, becoming the Doctor's wife. Speaking of...

The TARDIS

Men and their toys, huh? The Doctor's relationship with his TARDIS has always been intimate, but the story The Doctor's Wife took that to extremes. There had been intimations that the TARDIS was in some way or another sentient since all the way back in the third story ever, 1964's The Edge of Destruction, but this story finally made it explicit. All that console-stroking pays off when the spirit of the TARDIS is sucked out of the police box and put into the body of Idris, an attractive young woman. Idris may not literally be the Doctor's wife, but it becomes clear that the bond between the two is stronger than any romantic relationship the Doctor could ever develop.

Marilyn Monroe

The Doctor met Norma Jeane off-screen during the events of A Christmas Carol, and although he claimed to have only accidentally accepted her marriage proposal, he went through with it quick enough when he couldn't drag his companions Kazran and Abigail away from their own romantic festivities. He must have gotten cold feet, though - when she called the TARDIS looking for him, he claimed the marriage was invalid. She rebounded pretty well - their quickie wedding happened in 1952, meaning she consoled herself by jumping into the arms of Joltin' Joe DiMaggio.

Of course, if the Doctor really did marry Marilyn, that would have made him a bigamist when he got hitched to River. Or maybe a trigamist, thanks to...

Queen Elizabeth I

The Doctor has had multiple encounters with Queen Elizabeth I across multiple media, most of which are referred to only obliquely without actually being shown. In The Chase, the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki spy on good Queen Bess with their new Time-Space Visualizer, as she apocryphally instructs William Shakespeare to write a play about Falstaff in love.

A sequential string of Doctors spend some time with the Virgin Queen, according to various licensed novels and audio plays - the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn pay her a visit, the Seventh Doctor makes her acquaintance, and the Eighth Doctor takes his companions Samson and Gemma to court. Whether Elizabeth knows all these Doctors are one and the same man is unknown, but for some reason she decides to elope with the Tenth Doctor in an untold but probably highly disturbing adventure. He implies that the sobriquet "Virgin Queen" is no longer accurate - look at those pictures above, think of David Tennant, and consider that for a moment.

Joan Redfern

The Tenth Doctor's already looking like a bit of a man-whore, and we haven't even gotten to the biggies yet. The Doctor and Martha met Joan Redfern while hiding from the Family of Blood in Human Nature. The Doctor had wiped his own memory and turned himself human in what seems, by the end of the two-parter, to be a vast overreaction to the situation. Joan was a nurse at the school where "John Smith" was teaching, and the two fell in love. To stop the Family, John turned back into the Doctor, and Joan viewed the man she loved as having died. Of course, you either know all this, or I've just spoiled one of the best Doctor Who stories ever, but you know what you're getting into when you read a list like this on the internet.

Human Nature was based on the book of the same name, which starred the then-current Seventh Doctor and his companion Benny. At the end of the book, Joan gives the Doctor her cat, Wolsey, who travels in the TARDIS for a time. After the Seventh Doctor regenerates into the Eighth, he seeks out Benny (who had since moved on) and gives Wolsey to her. Regeneration always causes personality changes major and minor in the Doctor - the Eighth Doctor was less dark, less mysterious, more straight-forward, more open with his companions, even open to romance in a way he hadn't been before. But it still must have been odd for him to suddenly realize that he didn't want his cat anymore.

Madame de Pompadour

The Doctor, Rose and Mickey met Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson aka Reinette aka Madame de Pompadour while on board a 51st Century spaceship with very user-unfriendly time-travel capabilities. The Doctor's clearly in love with Reinette, and while the whole thing is very romantic it's also stone cold mean towards Rose. Seriously, am I the only one who thought that? I'll get to Rose two entries from now, but so much of their relationship is spent dancing around the whole "I love you but I can't love you because you're a human and I'm a Time Lord" thing, and then he just flat out invites Reinette to move in with them. If I were Rose, I would have thrown Madam la Pomplamoose right back in his face when I was on that beach in Norway. 

Jabe Ceth Ceth Jafe

Jabe was a representative of the Forest of Cheem and a descendant of Earth's rain forests encountered by the Ninth Doctor and Rose at The End of the World.  The romance factor here is minimal - the Doctor and Jabe didn't get beyond some light flirting before she went up in smoke (only Who can prevent forest fires, and he was busy). But their relationship, coming as it did in the second episode of the new series, was the audience's first inclination that this new Doctor might not be as asexual as many of his previous incarnations. Which was no doubt a comfort to...

Rose Tyler

Rose, of course, was the first companion of the revived series, and traveled with both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. Rose had a profound influence on the Ninth Doctor, and his next regeneration seemed tyler-made for Rose (see what I did there?). Rose's relationship with the Ninth Doctor was intense but not particularly romantic - she was still on-and-off with boyfriend Mickey, and had minor flirtations with secondary companions Adam and Jack. But her relationship with the Tenth Doctor quickly deepened into something more. The Doctor can never quite admit to the full depths of his feeling for Rose, but he does give her his human clone as a lovely parting gift, which...is a happy ending...I guess? He still looks like David Tennant, so I guess I'd settle for that too.

Emma

For all you obsessive Whovians, or those of you who aspire to be, let me be clear right off the bat - Emma doesn't count. Emma was the companion of an alternate version of the Ninth Doctor, played by Mr. Bean's Rowan Atkinson, in the 1999 charity comedy special The Curse of Fatal Death. The Doctor and Emma had fallen in love, and the Doctor was planning to retire so they could get married. After an encounter with the Master and the Daleks caused the Doctor to regenerate into Joanna Lumley, Emma broke things off, an inexplicably poor decision even by this gay man's standards. The Curse of Fatal Death was written by somebody named Steven Moffat, who was never heard from again and whose crazy ideas about the Doctor getting married would certainly never be taken seriously outside of a comedy special.

Iris Wildthyme

Iris Wildthyme is an eccentric Time Lady whose TARDIS is smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. Her origins are shrouded in mystery - even to herself - but in most of her recent appearances she seems to hail from a planet in a parallel universe which may or may not be a version of Gallifrey depending on whether the Doctor has been licensed from the BBC for use in that particular adventure or not. The Doctor tends to find her infuriating although he will reluctantly admit to a fondness for her; she claims that he's madly in love with her, and occasionally hints at a prior torrid affair. Iris has appeared in various spin-off novels and audio plays, although her first encounter with the Doctor is unrecorded. The earliest Doctor we've seen her with is the Third; the fact that her current incarnation (the Sixth Iris, as it were) is played by Katy Manning, the same actress who played his companion Jo Grant, lends a whole new metatextual level to Jo's goodbye scene that I'd rather not think about.

  

Charlotte Pollard

Charlotte "Charley" Pollard was a companion of the Eighth Doctor in a series of original audio plays from Big Finish Productions. The Doctor saved Charley from the doomed airship R101 in the year 1931 and the two became travelling companions and the best of friends. Charley fell in love with the Doctor, and the Doctor showed signs of possibly reciprocating. They worked out their relationship issues in the excruciatingly boring story Scherzo, in which the Doctor was angry with her for following him into exile in a parallel universe because he had sacrificed his freedom for her but then he acknowledged his feelings and they almost had sex but then something happened and there was a monster that I think symbolized their potential child or something and I guess they decided to just stay friends? I couldn't tell what was happening when I listened to it the first time, I'm certainly not putting myself through that again just for a lousy blog post. Charley is a great companion and actress India Fischer is marvelous, but her storyline is completely incomprehensible. After leaving the Eighth Doctor's company, she winds up anachronistically travelling with the Sixth Doctor, towards whom she is, for some reason, much less romantically inclined.

Professor Bernice Summerfield

Benny Summerfield is Doctor Who's original time-travelling archaeologist. She first appeared in the novel Love and War where she replaced Ace as the Seventh Doctor's companion. After Virgin Publishing lost the rights to Doctor Who, they continued the range with original adventures devoted to Benny. Big Finish Productions began producing original audio plays with Benny stories before gaining the rights to Who, and they continue to produce stand-alone Bernice Summerfield adventures as well as the occasional Doctor Who crossover, all starring Lisa Bowerman as the Professor. Benny is a fantastic character, and Lisa Bowerman is brilliant, and she deserves multiple blog posts all her own. She's in this one due to the novel The Dying Days (and not just because it's where he gives her his ex-girlfriend's cat - see above). She had parted ways with the Seventh Doctor some time back, but he showed up on her doorstep shortly after regenerating into the Eighth. As he's saying good-bye after a shared adventure with the Ice Warriors, she grabs him, throws him onto her bed, and, well...the Doctor dances. The scene ends discretely, of course, but it's still the first depiction of the Doctor having sex. (Well, the first officially licensed by the BBC. Your Fifth Doctor/Turlough fan-fiction doesn't count.) It's a little odd, given their close but completely platonic friendship up to that point, but I suppose if my good friend Sylvestor McCoy suddenly changed into my new friend Paul McGann, I'd be tempted too.

Doctor Grace Holloway

Nowadays, the Doctor is pretty much expected to kiss all his companions at some point - I'm surprised Mickey got away without a lip-lock. But back in 1996, when the newly regenerated Eighth Doctor planted one on his new friend Doctor Grace Holloway in the made-for-TV movie Doctor Who, fandom was outraged in a way that only fandoms can be. It's fairly tame by the new show's standards - he first kisses her impulsively in a moment of happiness. She later makes her feelings for him explicit, shouting the excruciatingly awful line "I finally meet the right guy and he's from another planet" in response to absolutely nothing while riding on the back of a motorcycle, possibly just because the writers thought it would sound good in a commercial but probably just because this movie is terrible. They share a more clearly romantic kiss in the final moments of the film, when he invites her to travel with him in the TARDIS and she declines for no reason whatsoever. This is another example of Grace's motivations being unclear to me. If the Doctor showed up on my door in one of his better-looking bodies and was all, "Would you like to travel with me in my TARDIS and have adventures and also crazy space sex?", my response would not be, "Nah, I'm good. I've gotta work in the morning." I doubt yours would be either. Although this would be the only TV outing for either character, Paul McGann continues to play the Eighth Doctor in original audio adventures from Big Finish, whereas rights issues have kept Grace from appearing anywhere but a couple of comic strip appearances in Doctor Who Magazine. No big loss.

The Second Romana

The real romance here was an off-screen one. Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor, and Lalla Ward, who played the Second Romana, were married shortly after she left the show, and legend has it that the romance bloomed while the two were on location in Paris filming City of Death. Whether that romance bled into their characters' relationship is open for debate...

... but the two do spend an awful lot of the story skipping through the streets of Paris holding hands for no discernible reason.

The First Romana

Whether you think there was anything going on between Romana's first incarnation and the Doctor rather depends on whether you consider this little Christmas sketch, filmed as part of an in-house Christmas present for BBC staff, canonical or not...

 I like to think so.

Cameca

In the first season story The Aztecs, the First Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Susan arrive in 15th Century Mexico. After Barbara is mistaken for a goddess (long story, long brilliant story), the Doctor is taken to the Garden of Peace, where he meets Cameca, an elderly Aztec widow. The pair are instantly taken with each other. Seriously, look at his face as he watches her walk away.

He is admiring himself some fine Aztec booty. The Doctor inadvertently proposes to Cameca (he misunderstood a local ritual), and although he's a bit thrown by how quickly things have gotten serious, there's the feeling that it's more because he knows he can't stay with her than that he's actually disturbed by the prospect of marrying her. Cameca helps her beloved escape into the tomb in which the TARDIS has been sealed, even though she knows it means saying goodbye.

She says farewell, giving him a brooch to remember him by. He's not happy about the situation - here he is after she departs.

Romana subtext aside, this is the only real on-screen romance for the Doctor in the classic series, and William Hartnell makes the most of it. He clearly has genuine feelings for Cameca, but knows that a relationship is impossible. If he didn't have a granddaughter and two humans to cart around, I suspect he would have been quite content to spend the rest of Cameca's life with her before resuming his wanderings. I wonder if the Eleventh Doctor still has that brooch?

Cameca is the first on-screen romance for the Doctor - but she's not the last entry in this list.

Patience

We know the Doctor had a family. The very first episode introduced his granddaughter Susan; the Second Doctor mentioned a family, long lost, to Victoria; and the modern series has had him mention being a father and a husband (in tones somewhat too serious to suggest he's talking about any of the ladies above). So the question has always remained - who was the Doctor's first wife? Who was the mother of his children? Who was Susan's grandmother?

The TV series has never answered this question, but the licensed original novels have. Sort of. Pay attention, this gets complicated. Way back in the ancient days of Gallifrey, there was a ruling triumvirate of legendary Time Lords - Rassilon (recently resurrected in the person of Timothy Dalton), Omega (from The Three Doctors) and the Other (don't bother, he's never mentioned on the TV show).

The Time Lords were cursed by the sisterhood of witches known as the Pythia to be forever barren - no more children would be born. Rassilon invented "Looms", great machines which would weave fully grown Time Lords from genetic material, as a way to perpetuate the species.  All Time Lords since then were born from these Looms with the bodies of adults but the minds of children - the Doctor, the Master, Romana, everybody.

When the Doctor first stole his TARDIS and fled from Gallifrey, he had no family in the conventional sense - no wife, no children, no grandchildren, just a House of cousins woven from the same Loom. His first trip in his new ship took him to Gallifrey's ancient past - something expressly forbidden by the Time Lords' laws. He landed in a time of great civil unrest, and rescued a young girl named Susan. Susan was the last child born on Gallifrey, and, although they had never met, she insisted that the Doctor was her grandfather. He didn't understand why, but sensed a connection between them, and fled with her in his stolen TARDIS.

A couple of regenerations later, the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric, in the novel Cold Fusion, encountered an injured Time Lady in an ancient TARDIS. Not knowing her name, they called her Patience. Turns out Patience was the wife of the Other and the grandmother of Susan. In this and other novels, we gradually learn that the Other, in order to escape the persecution of Rassilon's reign, hurled himself into a Loom, where he was ripped apart, his genetic material eventually being reconstituted as the Doctor. Patience recognized her husband, just as Susan had recognized her grandfather so long ago, even if he had no memory of his prior life.

Or...maybe not. The tie-in novels written in the time between the classic and new series are confusing, to say the least. The writers were trying to bring a sense of mystery back to the Doctor's origins, so everything was ambiguous, nothing was stated conclusively. The account of Patient's origin I've given here is the most common interpretation, but by no means the only one. And the new series has most definitely put paid to the idea of the Looms - we've seen a child version of the Master, and a fully-grown newborn Doctor would have had a pretty hard time fitting into that crib from A Good Man Goes to War.

So the Doctor's first love remains a mystery, but our favorite Gallifreyan heartbreaker has had no shortage of potential partners since then. Happy Valentine's Day, and may both your hearts be filled with love! Sexy, sexy Time Lord love!

The Doctor in the Dell

In 1965, less than two years after Doctor Who aired its first episode, the good Doctor made his big screen debut in Dr. Who and the Daleks. The film starred Peter Cushing as eccentric scientist Doctor Who, who lived in a cozy little nondescript house in London with his granddaughters Susan and Barbara. Doctor Who built "Tardis", a time and space machine, and kept it in his back garden. While showing his new invention off to Barbara's boyfriend Ian, the quartet were accidentally whisked off to the planet Skaro to have an exciting technicolor adventure with the Daleks.

Dr. Who and the Daleks is based on the second television story, The Daleks, which introduced the titular monsters. I hated this movie as a kid - it wasn't the REAL Doctor, after all. For one thing, he wasn't called "The Doctor" in it; people actually addressed him as "Doctor Who" (making his granddaughters Susan Who and Barbara Who, presumably).  He was human, he lived in a house, he had two annoying granddaughters instead of just one...to the twelve-year-old me, these differences made the movie just plain wrong, which meant it couldn't possibly be worth my time. But watching the movie again as an adult with a slightly broader perspective on what counts as "real" Doctor Who, I was surprised to find that, taking it for what it is - a children's adventure story - it's actually quite good. 

In 1966, tying in with the film's release in America, Dell Comics released an adaptation. While the movie moves at a breakneck pace, condensing seven television episodes into about eighty minutes, the comic moves at a shatter-every-bone-in-your-body pace, condensing those eighty minutes into just one issue. Let's fasten our seatbelts and take a look!

"Everywhere! Watching and waiting...the incredible robots, the Daleks!!" If you read that and found yourself thinking, "The Daleks aren't robots! They're living creatures inside armored travel machines!", then you are a colossal nerd and I like you very, very much. 

The movie throws a whole five minutes away on introductions, but the comic cuts right to the chase, telling us pretty much everything we need to know about the characters and the situation on the very first page. And yes, that's the TARDIS - sorry, just TARDIS, no definite article. (Or maybe it's Tardis? Hard to tell, lower case letters aren't allowed in comics.) It's still a police box in the movie, but the comic glosses that over - it was intended for American readers, who presumably wouldn't know what a police box was. (I've been watching Doctor Who for thirty years and I still only have a vague idea what they were actually used for.)

Here is the first of many full-panel close-ups of Doctor Who's face. The artist is Dick Giordano, a comics legend, and he seems to be justifiably proud of how well he's captured the likeness of actor Peter Cushing. The three other characters bear a passing resemblance to the original actors, but I doubt many American readers were too distressed by an off-model Roberta Tovey.

Sorry, Grandpa Who, I interrupted you. Do go on...

Oh, I see. It's dissolves everyone in it. So, you've not so much built a time machine as you have a disintegration chamber. This is a pretty standard explanation for teleportation in science-fiction, and it's always bothered me. Isn't that just killing somebody and then making a double of them in another location? I don't care if that other person is identical to me and has all my memories, the original me is still a pile of ash in Doctor Who's back garden.

Having your time-space machine operated by a giant red "start" button is just asking for trouble, and sure enough, clumsy but lovable Ian trips and smashes his head on it. Since Doctor Who didn't have a chance to set the controls, he announces that they could be anywhere in time and space! Given how much of space is an empty void you'd think they'd just be floating aimlessly, but no, they manage to find themselves on an inhabited planet capable of supporting their kind of life. What luck! But Ian doesn't think they've moved at all, and tries to open the doors, with no success.

I'm not really sure about the point of these panels. The doors are stuck, which Ian inexplicably finds inexplicable, so he uses a screwdriver to pry them open. This doesn't happen in the movie - Ian opens the doors just fine. Given how much story is crammed into every panel in this comic, I'm having a hard time figuring out why the uncredited writer decided to add in this seemingly meaningless bit of business. I don't have a joke. I'm honestly hoping someone can tell me the point of this.

And here's an even more off-model representation of our cast, based on the publicity shot used on the cover. Yes, TARDIS is green throughout the comic. No, it's blue in the movie, just like on the show. The St. John's Ambulance sticker is a nice touch, though, don't you think?

Doctor Who discovers that everything in the jungle is petrified, and there's no sign of life - except possibly for...

Whee! Must be a low gravity planet with the way they all seem to be bouncing and floating above the surface of the planet! Oh, it's not? Normal gravity? Ok then. Everybody is down for investigating the city except killjoy Ian, but it's the 1960s and he's the young white male so they all listen to him and head back. Except for Susan, who wanders off on her own.

Stranger danger! The quartet flee from the terrifying hand to the safety of TARDIS. Doctor Who is skeptical about the possibility of human life existing on this planet, but then there's an unexpected knock at TARDIS' door!

But the mysterious granddaughter groper has ding-dong-ditched, and the scanner shows nothing. We're on page 7 now, and Barbara finally gets a full line of dialogue, asking her grandfather to please take them home. All she's said up until now was "Ian!" when her boyfriend tripped and hit his head on the controls. Barbara is not exactly showcased in this comic, is what I'm saying, and she didn't have all that much more to do in the movie. In the TV series Barbara is one of the greatest companions the show has ever had. In the film, she's mostly a plot device to get Ian into the story, and probably could have been written out entirely if the producers didn't think they needed a pretty girl in there somewhere.

Doctor Who agrees to set the controls for home, but there's a problem...

Oh no, the fluid link is empty and all the mercury has run out! Now they have no choice but to explore the city in the hope of finding more mercury. 

THAT'S what the knock was - a drug delivery! Because Doctor Who is not me cautious, he does not immediately sample some of the drugs to see if they do anything cool, but instead places them inside TARDIS for later analysis. On to the alien city!

A mysterious ailment has struck our crew! My first guess would be mercury poisoning from the fluid link that spilled all over the floor, but no, they probably won't see the effects of that for several years. (Barbara and Ian aren't in the sequel - coincidence?) It could also be vertigo induced by the psychedelic architecture they're wandering through. Dizzying heights and pointless places to climb - did cats build this city?

The travelers decide to split up to speed things along, because what this comic really needs to do is move faster.

Barbara is caught in a mysterious metal grip! The artist takes this opportunity to show that modern comics did not invent this pose - even in the sixties, comic book heroines would stand so that you could see their rack and their ass at the same time.

Doctor Who, Susan and Ian hear Barbara scream and try to find her, but come across a Geiger counter instead, revealing that the atmosphere of the planet is highly radioactive, which is what's been causing them all to feel so wonky. Ian bemoans the fact that they can't leave without mercury, but Doctor Who reveals a little secret.

"I'm not angry, Dr. Who. I'm just disappointed." Dr. Who's kindly old grandfather shtick is belied by this colossal dick move. He made the decision to lie about the fluid link after Susan had her encounter with the mysterious groper, and he continues to lie after they all start to feel sick but press on because they're convinced they can't get home without finding mercury. Seriously, fuck him. William Hartnell pulled the same move on the TV show, but at least you knew from the start that he was a jerk.

The first of these two panels is the first full appearance of the Daleks in the comic. The movie gives them a grand entrance as they glide in from all sides and surround our heroes; the comic just plops them into the action so abruptly you're flipping back a page to see if you missed something.

I've kept these two panels together to highlight another difference between the comic and the movie, this one not due to the demands of pace. In the film, Ian runs towards the Daleks - what he thinks this will achieve is uncertain, but he's clearly trying to do something that will help Doctor Who and Susan. In the comic, he's just hauling ass as fast as he can. "Sorry, little girl, and fuck you, old man, I'm out."

The Daleks stun Ian and toss the trio in the same cell they put Barbara. The metal monsters spy on their prisoners and learn about the mysterious drugs left behind - they theorize that they are anti-radiation drugs left by the Thals, the other indigenous life form. The Daleks want to reproduce this drug so they can venture out of their city and wipe out all the Thals - no reason, haters gotta hate - so they send Susan to retrieve it. Once she's back in TARDIS she encounters the figure who frightened her earlier.

Giordano had to draw this comic without seeing it, he only had the script and some reference photos. I'm guessing those photos did not include any Thals, because poor Alydon here has been de-fabulous-ized in a most upsetting way. Here's how he looks in the movie:

Alydon, Queen of the Desert! I'm assuming this face-washing was unintentional; if a reference picture was in fact sent to Giordano maybe he saw it and thought a still from Barbarella got mixed in by mistake.

Alydon and Susan make nice-nice, and Alydon is surprised to learn of the existence of the Daleks - he thought they were all wiped out in their nuclear war millennia ago. Susan prepares to return to the city, but is worried the Daleks won't let her use the radiation drugs to help her companions.

"Don't thank me yet. The first sample was free. This one's gonna cost you." That's how they reel you in, Susan. He's gonna turn you out! It's hard out here for a Thal!

Yeah, that's right! Bipeds rule, quadrupeds drool! God made Adam and Eve, not Cyclops and Lefty!

"We're all blond and beautiful, so if they call us monsters...why, they must be stunning!"

Susan re-enters the city alone. The Daleks discover her secret stash, but let her give it to her friends anyway. The Thals want to trade the radiation drug to the Daleks for food, but the Daleks just want to lure the Thals into the city so they can wipe them out. The come up with a cunning plan - they'll get the Thals' new bestie Susan to write a note. Susan has a LOT to do in this comic; it would probably be called Susan Who and the Daleks if that didn't sound like an Eastern European Nancy Drew knock-off.

"TELL THEM WE HAVE CRAB PUFFS. AND BACON WRAPPED SHRIMP, EVERYONE LOVES THOSE. TELL THEM! TELL THEM! TELL THEM THERE IS PUNCH AND PIE OR YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED!"

The speed-of-light pace of this comic occasionally results in odd panel transitions like this, where it appears Susan teleports from the Dalek control room back to her cell and directly onto Ian's shoulders. Doctor Who, Ian and Barbara are nowhere near as quick, as it's taken them an entire day to notice the camera, which is the only feature on their otherwise completely bare walls.

Doctor Who comes up with an escape plan (finally). He hypothesizes that the Daleks draw their power from the metal floor, which is why the four humans have long since been electrocuted. He suggests that they lure their Dalek guard onto the cape Alydon gave to Susan, cutting it off from its power source. Ian points out that the Dalek will see them coming, but the old smart-ass has a solution.

A few things of interest here (to me, at least). This is not quite the plan from the movie - in the film, they use the gloppy food the Daleks provide them to blind their guard. It's in the TV serial The Daleks, which the movie was based on, that they use the mud from Susan's shoes. I don't know if the comic writer came up with this idea independently as a time-saver or whether he was, for some reason, given the television scripts as an additional resource. This is the kind of thing I spend time thinking about. You think I'd have this blog if I didn't obsess over Doctor Who minutia?

The other thing of interest is that, in both the TV show and the movie, it's Barbara who comes up with the idea to blind the Dalek with mud/food. And it's Susan, again in both media, who comes up with the idea to use Alydon's cloak to cut off the Dalek's power. The comic gives both ideas to Doctor Who. I hope this was just a way to save space on the part of our mystery writer, and that he didn't read the script and think, "Wait, the girls come up with the escape plan? The GIRLS?!? That must be a typo."

Whoever's idea it was, the plan works. The Dalek is rendered inert, and Doctor Who opens up the casing and scoops out the hideous mutant inside. (We don't get to see it, but Doctor Who assures that it is, indeed, hideous.) But what to do with the empty Dalek suit?

Roomy! It's almost like the Dalek shell was built to hold a full-grown man instead of a little green blobby thing. Ian's bluff gets them all the way to an elevator leading up and out, but the Daleks catch on.

Poor Ian! Sucks to be him, but "needs of the many" and all that. It's not like he's family. So leave him they do. Barbara's quite distraught about her boyfriend's certain death.

Maybe not so much "distraught" as "mildly interested". She's can't even muster up an exclamation point. Perhaps she's distracted by her grandfather slowly turning into Vincent Price. In any event, Ian escapes off-panel and takes the elevator up to join them, much to Barbara's delight not-total-displeasure. The quartet hurries to warn the Thals of the Daleks' treachery.

I may have altered this panel slightly for clarity and/or my own amusement. I like the one lone Thal wandering blithely ahead while the wiser, more suspicious (but still prepared for bushels for free food) Thals linger behind. He doesn't see the Daleks hiding in their cubbyholes - can YOU find the Daleks? Look closely!

Most of the Thals escape the city, but the space hippies are confused as to why the Daleks want to kill them,  and are reluctant to fight a war.

"We'll fight for you, Colonel Sanders!" The implication seems to be that Doctor Who would cheerfully abandon them to their doom if he didn't need their help to fix his own stupid mistake. Our hero! The Daleks discover that the Thal drug won't work on them, and using the sour grapes principle decide that if they can't live on the surface they'll set off a neutron bomb so the Thals can't either. Meanwhile, Doctor Who decides that a small party could get back into the city by sneaking 'round the back. Ian, Barbara and a trio of Thals set off through the swamp, mindful of the deadly mutations it contains...

Mutations with sexy, sexy eyes! Dunk your head, Ian, dunk it aaaallllll the way in! So Ian sees a monster in the water and literally three panels later Elyon the Thal has a bright idea.

Elyon is neither bright nor popular, because not a single one of his compatriots bothers to ask him if he plans on filling their water bags from the same pool that Ian saw a mutation in about thirty seconds ago.  He does, and he dies, winning that year's Skarosian Darwin Award. The remaining quartet spend a panel mourning and then move on - they see pipes leading from the pool into the city, and decide to see if they lead to a way in. Doctor Who, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to get into the city through the front undetected. The answer - it's all done with mirrors!

All they're doing is reflecting sunlight back at the Dalek's sensors, but the scene is drawn as if they're blasting the city to kingdom come. The Thals may live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but their mirror technology is very advanced.  Alas, Doctor Who's plan is worthless, as the Daleks track them through their vibrations. The metal monstrosities appear and order them into the city.

One Thal...maybe Alydon? Or did Alydon go with Ian and Barbara? I'm not really sure, the comic has stopped using their names and all Thals look alike to me. Sorry, is that racist? Anyway, one Thal dives for cover so hard his cowardly Thal fingers burst right through the panel. Sure, buddy, you hid so that you could help them later. Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night.

The other Thals who were captured along with Doctor Who and Susan are never mentioned again, so...I guess they were all killed? Smart move on Swifty McScaredyThal's part after all, I guess. The Daleks start the countdown at a hundred - you really want a nice long lead time when detonating a neutronic bomb, genocide isn't something you rush. Meanwhile, Ian and Barbara and the two Thals who didn't get eaten by a lake monster have finally arrived at the rear entrance to the city.

Don't ring the doorbell, Barbara, you're supposed to be sneaking in!

Told you. But wait!

Help has arrived!

It's Alydon! Unless Alydon is one of the Thals with you, in which case it's a different Thal. It's whichever Thal dived for cover when the Daleks broke up that whole pointless mirror attack. He rallied the surviving Thals, and they came back to the city to save Doctor Who and Susan. I'm not sure how he got the Daleks to burst into flames, but it's a trick he probably should have pulled out before now. The two groups join up, rendering Ian and Barbara's entire journey through the swamp of mutations completely pointless. It killed some time, I guess. It also killed Elyon, but no big loss there. No time to worry about that, though, there's only three pages left!

It takes some serious Thal balls (thaltecles?) to attack a squad of Daleks with your bare hands, I'll give them that. The Thals are doing surprisingly well, but the countdown to destruction has only seconds remaining!

The panel here has reminded me of one of my favorite parts of the movie - Ian's butt. Seriously, it's fantastic. I would recommend the movie on that alone. Actor Roy Castle was a dancer. Kudos to you, sir. But back to the comic, as Ian tries to stop the countdown while the Daleks take aim. Move that magnificent ass!

Ian dives for cover, and the Daleks hit...some other piece of equipment, nowhere near where Ian was in the previous panel. This comic is not overly worried about continuity. The change in background makes it look like Ian is trying to commit suicide by diving into the Dalek's line of fire. Maybe the pace of the comic finally got to him - he just wants a rest.

"Good! Fuck them!" Susan's ordeal has made her a bit bloodthirsty. Odd choice for the Daleks to have one panel control everything in the city; a panel that, if it's destroyed, causes their metal casings to melt for some reason. A little redundancy wouldn't have hurt; there is such a thing as being too efficient. Oh, well. Yay, genocide!

"You have saved our lives; indeed, you have saved our entire species from extinction. Here, have some capes."

Doctor Who replaces the reclaimed fluid link and the green, green, green Tardis rockets through the time-space vortex towards home.

In the movie they land in front of some stock footage of a Roman army, but the comic replaces that with a pissed-off club-wielding caveman. Perhaps in homage of the TV crew's real first adventure, in which they were threatened by a primitive tribe? Probably not.

I suppose the writer meant this panel to end the comic with the suggestion of more adventures to come (which Dell does not follow up on), but all I see is that kindly old Doctor Who looks absolutely furious that his granddaughter is daring to question his navigation skills, and Ian and Barbara are preparing to physically restrain him from beating Susan within an inch of her life. It's an odd artistic choice, but, like the rest of this comic, it's certainly an interesting take on Doctor Who!