Doctor Conkeror is a short one-shot comic strip with more than a whiff of the old TV Comic approach to Doctor Who in cartoon form. It’s a slight tale which sees a solo 7th Doctor arrive in 9th Century England (I assume) on the trail of conkers. After narrowly avoiding Viking invaders and meeting a local inhabitant, the Doctor collects his conkers and returns to the TARDIS. On the way, he finds the spear belonging to the local boy and surmises something has happened to him. Indeed, a group of locals have been taken captive by the Vikings and are being led away to their longboats when, suddenly, they are on fire. The Doctor has set the boats alight as a distraction which allows the captives to escape. In the ensuing chaos the Doctor knocks out a Viking called Olaf with his conker. The local boy is very grateful to the Doctor but the Time Lord declines his offer to be honoured by the elders of the village. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS to continue his game of conkers and ponders on who first invented the game. The final frame shows the local boy demonstrating how to play the game.

There is very little to this comic strip which is a criticism I have levelled at many of the ‘one-shot’ strips I have already read as part of this marathon. It seems it is difficult to tell a satisfying story in only a few pages of frames. Here we have some fairly stereotypical Vikings – horned helmets, longboats and all and some unnamed locals in Celtic-style clothes; even the boy who interacts with the Doctor remains nameless throughout.

There is a forest and a beach and one frame shows us a very small village with thatched stone houses and a well.

The story is basically one extended joke – the Doctor invented conkers. There is nothing more to this story than that and it certainly isn’t an in-depth exploration of this period of history.