Ah, PBS back in the day. Every Saturday afternoon, from 1-4pm, they'd show Doctor Who. Pertwee, Tom Baker, Davison, Colin Baker, McCoy. Heck, they even aired Troughton during the week at 11pm.

So imagine my joy back then to discover a DW comic released by Marvel on the racks. I loved that series and it's reprints.

Great retro pieces on the history of the comic series. Absalom Daak is one of the my favorite characters. In fact, I nearly wore out the pause button on my TV remote trying to catch that glimpse of him in the NuWho episode Time Heist. (Well worth it. Bravo Moffat!)

I'm glad Titan is having such success with the new license. It seems like there's a new DW comic being released each week nowadays which isn't a bad thing, but man, it sure hurts on the budget. Which is why I wait for the trades to be released for I've heard nothing but good reviews about all the titles.

The sixth Doctor arrived in comics in Doctor Who Magazine #88 in May 1984, in the first installment of The Shape Shifter, the story which introduced his new shape changing companion, Frobisher: a Whifferdill, able to assume any form at will, who used his talents to make a living as a private detective (his real name was Avan Tarklu, he adopted the name Frobisher because he thought it sounded British and would therefore appeal to the Doctor). Frobisher was initially hired to infiltrate the Doctor's TARDIS by his old foe Josiah W. Dogbolter, a froglike alien businessman who had first appeared in the fifth Doctor strips, but the shape changer quickly decided he liked the Time Lord and the pair stole Dogbolter's money before heading off to new adventures. Those adventures, mostly illustrated by new regular artist John Ridgway, included Steve Parkhouse's surreal epic Voyager, a truly bizarre storyline which began an arc that also included Polly the Glot and Once Upon a Time Lord, all of which pitted the Doctor and Frobisher against the renegade Time Lord Astrolabus.



The collected edition of Voyager.

Following this, Parkhouse departed the strip to be replaced by other writers including the magazine's editor Alan McKenzie, Jamie Delano, Simon Furman, and most notably Grant Morrison (who crafted an incredibly convoluted story which asserted that the Cybermen were descended from the Voord (from 1960s story The Keys of Marinus) and ended with the death of former companion Jamie McCrimmon). From DWM #104 the Doctor and Frobisher (now stuck permanently in the form of a penguin after the writers decided that his shape changing powers were a bit too convenient and tended to dilute the drama) were joined by TV companion Peri, Marvel having obtained the rights to her image. The terrific trio's adventures continued until DWM #129, cover dated October 1987-the sixth's Doctor's comics incarnation having outlasted his TV incarnation by almost a year! Six of the stories, in heavily edited form, were reprinted in issues of the Doctor Who Marvel Adventures Comic, given away free with packets of Golden Wonder crisps.

Whie DWM #129, and the conclusion of Morrison' s earlier alluded to The World Shapers, marked the end of the sixth Doctor's regular comics adventures, there was still one rather special postscript to this era still to come. It arrived in October 1994, in the form of the graphic novel Doctor Who: The Age of Chaos, which saw the Doctor and Frobisher engage in a hazardous adventure to pay off a debt to an old friend, the now long departed Peri. Drawn by John M. Burns and Barrie Mitchell, it was the first original graphic novel in Doctor Who history, the first full colour Doctor Who story to be published by Marvel UK, and the first Marvel UK graphic novel. And it was written by the sixth Doctor himself, Colin Baker, the first (and, to date, only) time that a Doctor Who comic story has actually been written by an actor who played the Doctor!

Freedom by Fire from the 1969 annual, in which the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria save a peaceful tribe from man eating plants by...er...setting fire to the jungle they live in (!)

Death's Head #8, as mentioned earlier, contained a rare appearance of the Doctor outside his own title, which placed him firmly in the mainstream Marvel Universe. Death's Head himself made one of his earliest appearances in the DWM strip (and another in Transformers) before finally getting his own book, and this story built on that by having the mechanoid freelance peacekeeping agent hired by the Doctor's old enemy Josiah W. Dogbolter to kill him and steal his TARDIS, a nice piece of direct continuity with the DWM strip itself. The story is notable in a number of ways, not least the fact that a computer file shown in this issue finally gives the fourth Doctor's long departed former companion, Sharon (from the Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly days) a second name, "Davis", but the real twist comes at the end, when the Doctor drops Death's Head off on the roof of the Fantastic Four's headquarters, Four Freedom's Plaza. This not only establishes the Doctor himself as being able to visit Earth 616, it also establishes DH as an inhabitant of the Marvel Universe proper for the first time! The following issue would feature a full-on FF/Death's Head battle.

The ninth issue of DWCC treated British comics audiences to something they'd never seen before: it reprinted in full the 1966 Dell Comics adaptation of the first of the two Dalek movies starring Peter Cushing. The original American title had never been distributed in the UK.

Really interesting updates, tingramretro. This thread never fails to fascinate me...and I'm not even a fan of Dr. Who really. Keep up the good work.