Colin Baker was announced as the sixth actor to play Doctor Who in 1983. He took over from the incumbent Time Lord in the TARDIS, Peter Davison, during the 21st season of the Classic run of the series in 1984. He made his debut in the final moments of that season’s sixth story, The Caves Of Androzani. His first story, The Twin Dilemma, closed out the season and instantly divided audiences who were torn between what was a fairly impressive performance by Baker and a rather average opening story featuring a couple of highly controversial moments, not the least of which was the Doctor trying to strangle his companion Peri during the throes of his post-regenerative trauma.
Colin Baker’s run on the series could almost be considered cursed. He was afflicted with a truly awful costume, some terrible stories, an inconsistent characterisation, a script editor who hated writing for him and, worst of all, a crippling eighteen month hiatus after his first season that nearly killed the series forever. Then, after the return season was broadcast, Baker became the first actor in the history of the role to be fired from it. He was told he wouldn’t be resuming the role for the 24th Season. Then he was asked to come back and film a regeneration story, in which he would transform into his successor, Sylvester McCoy. This was later downgraded into him being asked to come and film a single scene in which he would regenerate. Baker refused and audiences were treated to a fairly awful regeneration in which he was portrayed by McCoy in a wig.
I want to interrupt here by saying that Doctor Who has one of the most toxic, factional and opinionated fandoms outside of serious rock music aficionados. But there is not a fan alive who, having been apprised of the situation, begrudges Baker’s refusal to do this simple scene. In a series full of risible production gaffes, this is one that just gets shrugged at and ignored as being completely reasonable.
One place where Baker’s Doctor was treated respectfully was in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine, currently holding the position as the longest-running professional magazine devoted to a television show. It made its own debut during the run of the other Baker, Tom – who portrayed the Fourth Doctor, as if you didn’t know – and it has been going ever since, even during the “Wilderness Years” of the 1990s and early 2000s when there was very little about Doctor Who to write about after it was put to rest (although not officially cancelled) after its 26th Season in 1989.
One of the most beloved features of DWM (as it is known) is its comic strip. It usually features the adventures of the current incarnation of the Doctor along with his television companions or some that have been invented for the magazine. It is also famous for featuring a lot of early work by some of the UK’s most famous comic writers and artists – as an example, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons both worked on it before they teamed up for Watchmen.
The run of pictorial adventures featuring Colin Baker’s Doctor is one of my favourite things about the entire history of Doctor Who. I wasn’t a huge fan of the TV stories he was in – although I thought he was great – and the comic was a fabulous substitute.
Something that helped with this was the consistency of tone. Although it had many writers and editors over the 40 months it ran, it had only one artist for the entirety of that time: the legendary John Ridgway, most famous for his work on Constantine and 2000AD.
Ridgway’s art made every instalment of the comic (eight pages out of every issue) a hugely comforting event. Even when the stories varied in quality and theme, you could rely on the artwork to have the same consistency and tone.
It didn’t start with a bang, though: the first story to feature the Sixth Doctor was a fairly modest two-part piece called The Shape Shifter written by Steve Parkhouse (a regular writer with the magazine almost since its inception). It was there to tidy up some loose ends from the previous range of stories featuring Peter Davison’s Doctor. It also featured a rather bland characterisation of the new Doctor because the first part of the story was published in May of 1984, just two months after The Twin Dilemma had been broadcast! So the first few magazine instalments would have been written without a clear grasp of Baker’s interpretation of the role.
It also didn’t help that the focus of the story was not the Doctor but his soon-to-be comics companion, Avan Tarklu, a shape-shifting private detective, who thinks he might have hit the big time when he gets on the trail of a fugitive who goes by the alias of “The Doctor…”
Fortunately, after the events of The Shape Shifter, we were treated to a tale in which the Doctor’s personality took a back seat to a truly epic storyline that ran for three stories across ten issues, and was also penned by Parkhouse.
Voyager, Polly The Glot and Once Upon A Time-Lord are the stories that probably define this era more than any others, and it’s no wonder. They feature superb artwork and mindbending science fantasy concepts that feel quite a ways removed from the regular fare you would see in Doctor Who (until you remember that this is a version of a television universe that includes characters like the Black and White Guardians, the Eternals, and the Celestial Toymaker… not to mention a race of conservative observers of history known as the Time Lords).
But it looks glorious. The art in Voyager takes inspiration from a sweeping vista of history and mythology, while Once Upon A Time-Lord parodies a particular type of old-fashioned storytelling that most readers of the magazine at the time of publication would have been familiar with.
And then there’s Frobisher. Avan Tarklu, the P.I. from The Shape Shifter, has begun travelling with The Doctor and adopts the name Frobisher. He begins as a fairly traditional looking Emperor Penguin but several stories later he has begun to be drawn with a more comical looking shape, anticipating Feathers McGraw from Wallace and Gromit . He does still adopt other forms, but there are some plot devices that prevent this from being too useful and convenient to the story.
The middle story, Polly The Glot, is sometimes overlooked, but it too contains a multitude of lovely images. It also features a witty climax that is possibly the only piece of writing that doesn’t suffer by a comparison to Douglas Adams (one day, by the way, I may treat you to my theory of “Doctor Who destroyed the writing career of Douglas Adams.” But today is not that day).
So all up, it was a pretty triumphant first year for the regenerated comic strip.
It was followed up by a different but equally bonkers second year.
My favourites for that year are War-Game and the four-part epic …’s Story, a tale told from the perspective of four characters, each leading the narrative with their point-of-view.
War-Game features a rather brilliant pastiche of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, with Frobisher assuming the form of a barbarian warrior who bears a more than passing resemblance to the Frazetta cover paintings of said hero. In a brief sixteen pages it pokes a few holes in some hoary old fantasy cliches, linking them brilliantly to the Doctor Who mythos. There’s also a clever call forward to …’s Story with one character being a younger version of a character from that story.
…’s Story gives us a glimpse into a wider universe. Set in the midst of a battle with the Skeletoids, a rampaging cyborg army reminiscent of the Cybermen (a long-running foe of the Doctor, in case you didn’t know) and giving more than a hint of Star Trek’s Borg (still a few years into the future), we get scenes from the perspective of people trying to influence the outcome of the war or who are affected by events within the story. It all adds to the epic scope and drama of the tale.
This story also included the appearance of Peri Brown in the comic strip. Played by Nicola Bryant on television, Peri was the current companion of the Doctor, taking part in the televised adventures with him. Since Colin Baker’s first complete season had been airing while the comic was running, it only seemed appropriate to include Peri and she made a great foil to Frobisher as they often teamed up when arguing with the Doctor in their adventures, notably in Exodus/Revelation!/Genesis, where they convince the Doctor to solve a murder mystery that turns out to involve Cybermen (although why the story didn’t make more use of Frobisher, who was an actual private detective remains an exercise for the reader).
The third year kept up the tradition of great stories that linked to the wider Who-niverse while not really impacting on it, rather like all good tie-in fiction does. My favourites for this time in the comic are probably Time Bomb and Profits Of Doom, stories that both involved generation ships, coincidentally. They are smart and witty, with storylines that captured my imagination.
The Colin Baker era of the comic was rounded out by The World Shapers, another story that featured the Cybermen, but in a way that still astonishes me forty years later. This was penned by comics legend Grant Morrison at what was almost the beginning of his career.
It begins modestly enough, with the Doctor, Peri and Frobisher responding to a distress call from a planet that the Doctor eventually recognises as being Marinus, from an adventure he had during his first incarnation (The Keys Of Marinus, with William Hartnell’s First Doctor). It then leads on to the Doctor witnessing the accelerated evolution of the villainous Voord from that adventure into Cybermen, followed a by a trip into his own past to pick up Jamie, a companion who travelled with him during his second incarnation (where he was played by Patrick Troughton). This leads to a completely bonkers denouement which mirrors the events of the recently broadcast second Colin Baker season on television that had featured the (very quickly retconned) death of Peri, prior to the revelation that she had in fact married King Yrcanos of Krontep, a man she had met during the events of her final story (who was also played by BRIAN BLESSED).
There is also a not-very-quiet corner of fandom that will forever despise the plot of The World Shapers because it does some thoroughly audacious things to the established history of the Cybermen at the time, as well as to other parts of the show’s internal chronology. Of course, there are those who would remind us that a show about time travel doesn’t really have a proper history… which also didn’t stop showrunner Steven Moffat referencing the story in The Doctor Falls, an episode starring Peter Capaldi which aired thirty years after the comic was first published (Capaldi also appeared in the Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood where he played a character named Frobisher. Coincidence? Hmmm…).
Anyway, The World Shapers was the final adventure featuring the Sixth Doctor, as Sylvester McCoy had already started his run on TV and his incarnation smoothly slid into the comic a month later, with Frobisher mourning the loss/departure of Peri and exiting the comic shortly after that.
(It’s also worth noting that Baker’s first adventure was The Shape Shifter, while his last story was The World Shapers. While I very much doubt that it was intended as a theme, there is an undercurrent throughout many of the comics of metamorphosis. People who are smarter than me or who have more spare time can discuss this further.)
But all was not lost for this fabulous trio – in 1994, seven years after his final appearance in DWM, Colin Baker himself penned a follow-up adventure called The Age Of Chaos. In this story, the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher were called back to Krontep to investigate a mystery… which is revealed to have been orchestrated and perpetuated by Peri. While not drawn by Ridgway, it’s still a fun read and picks up effortlessly from where the characters left off back in 1987.
Shortly after that, Frobisher and the Sixth Doctor were back in David A. McIntee’s novel Mission: Impractical, part of the Past Doctor Adventures published by the BBC
Several years after that, Big Finish Productions produced two audioplays featuring the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher; The Holy terror and The Maltese Penguin. These are a lot of fun if you want to seek them out, and Robert Jezek is delightful in the part of Frobisher.
Frobisher has also appeared in more DWM comic strip adventures with the Eighth, Tenth and Twelfth Doctors.
I came to these particular comics fairly early on in my reading of DWM. I had been a regular reader of the magazine for less than a year, although I’d been a fan of the show for several years before that. And while I loved the wealth of knowledge about Doctor Who that DWM gave me, it was the comic that gradually became my favourite section of it. After the show was rested in 1989, I stopped buying it regularly, although I would poke my nose in every now and again to see what was happening. Of course, I no longer have my collection: it was amongst the mass of stuff that was gotten rid of during some instance of moving house or another, but I have managed to replace the comics with their omnibus editions, which have brought me a good deal of nostalgic joy.
I’ve often wondered why I enjoyed this era of the comic strip so much when other incarnations of it left me a little cold. I was never a big fan of comics before this: I was an avid reader of Jackpot!, a UK kids comic of the late 70s, and – like many Australians – I regularly devoured the adventures of The Phantom (which would have featured here as a blog entry before if it weren’t for the sheer number of issues available). I dabbled in reading comics for a few years after I gave DWM away but never really committed to anything until I got into Marvel’s Silver Surfer in the early 90s, after which I treated graphic novels a little more seriously, although they make up only a small portion of my reading life to this day.
After some thought – usually prompted whenever I pick up the omnibus editions of the comics – I think that it might be because I prefer these illustrated versions of the Sixth Doctor to most of what was televised.
I said earlier that I thought Colin Baker was great, and I still do. His florid, stagy style of acting suits the show perfectly and he usually elevates whatever scene he is in. But his era of the show is a low point for me: it felt like a program that was trying to be like other shows when it had previously had its own identity. Part of that issue was that producer John Nathan-Turner was beginning to dislike working on the show and was trying to get away from it. He was also contending with a combative script editor, Eric Saward, who was not a fan of Colin Baker’s Doctor (when Saward is writing stories at this time the Doctor barely appears in them!) and was also writing a version of the show that hadn’t existed before.
This was a darker version of the show than we’d previously had before. Baker’s first Season copped a lot of flak for being excessively violent and for making the Doctor more cheerful about committing acts of violence than previous incarnations would have been. For me that’s a debatable point – the Doctor detests guns but is frequently less troubled by other weapons – but it’s certainly true that Saward’s vision included a lot more allegedly witty pre-mortem one-liners than we’d seen before, as well as morally-beige characters without any redeeming features rather than the sympathetic villains we’d occasionally met before.
It was darker in another way, too: sets and costumes were frequently put together in a muted, unimaginative palette that was unsettling to watch: there’s a lot of greens, whites and browns in the background of Colin Baker’s run. The only real brightness seems to come from his costume, which is largely hideous: Nathan-Turner wanted something “tasteless” so we got a mish-mash of colours and styles that never really caught on and became a sartorial laughing-stock (Baker himself favoured a costume that resembled what Christopher Eccleston wore when he starred in the show’s triumphant 2005 return, but he was over-ruled).
So the comic felt like the traditional show, but with an unlimited budget and put together by people who still actively enjoyed it. The Doctor was heroic and cranky, rather like his televisual original, but was tempered with more compassion (something Baker brings to his audio adventures with Big Finish as well). And it rewards repeat reading, too: there are a lot of details that you can pick up on subsequent readings that felt inconsequential the first time through which have greater importance later on. The artwork is wonderful, too: Ridgway uses a lot of tricks of perspective and layout to increase the tension and scope of the story being told, as well as giving us a glimpse into the wider world behind it as well.
It was this idea that, despite it not being my thing at the moment (a “moment” that really lasted until Ben Aaronovitch’s superb script for Remembrance Of The Daleks, which opened the 25th Season), I could continue to call myself a fan of the show. Previously when I had grown to dislike something I had just shrugged it off entirely, but because I had such a history with Doctor Who, I really didn’t feel like I could jettison such a large part of my interests. Saying I was still a fan of this part of the extended universe left with an option to go back in someday, if I felt that I could renew my interest in it. Which I eventually did… but that is also a tale for another day.
You can find out more about Doctor Who comics at https://doctorwhomagazine.com/
