The Iron Legion - ★★★½☆

What makes The Iron Legion such a good first story for the Magazine is how full of wonder it is. It has a lot of creative, engaging ideas that come to life quite well with a gorgeous art; it never loses steam and is fun the whole way through. There a quite a lot of colorful characters, my favorite being the old robot Vesuvius.

The Iron Legion starts when the Fourth Doctor encounters the titular characters slaughtering an entire village. The first page alone is very evocative. The Doctor then is caught up in an interdimensional conflict when he finds out the Iron Legion came from an alternative Earth that never saw the fall of the Roman Empire, which is now determined to conquest all things.

The quick pace is both a blessing and a curse. I have come to appreciate it because these comics reminded me how much you can fit in so few pages, but we are still in the early days of the strips - we have only four pages per part, which establishes a weird pace to the story (I much prefer the 8 to 12 pages we get with later Doctors) and don't let all of the wonderful locations we visit be exploited to their fullest. The ending is also a bit rushed. I do think the villains are a cool idea - demon-like aliens influencing time itself by manipulating ancient history is quite fun - but I'm not in love with the execution. They end up just a little bland.

Just a few tweaks and The Iron Legion could be an absolute classic. It kind of is already, to be fair. Weirdly enough, there are quite a lot of ideas not completely realised here that a future DWM story would use wonderfully - how religious devotion can turn out a tragedy and justify horrors, a city made a hellscape by that belief, a "cult" bent in bringing the end of the world, and an even bigger menace behind it all just waiting to take its chance at the Doctor. Still, I like it for what it is. It's worth a read.