The Time Witch is a comic strip adventure for the Doctor and his companion, Sharon. It opens on a planet existing before the Earth was formed and sees Brimo banished to an eternity capsule for her crimes against the planet Nefrin. She eventually ends up in a blank dimension (after millions of years in captivity) and finds that her will can create anything she wishes. To do this, though, she is drawing energy from our universe, something which affects the TARDIS and drags it to the dimension’s gateway. The Doctor and Sharon battle Brimo to prevent her drawing any more energy from our universe, which would ultimately destroy it, and trick her into trapping herself again.I have fond memories of this strip. I have owned the American reprints of many of the DWM comic strips for many years, since my early days of being a fan, and have always enjoyed these stories, particularly the presence of Sharon a fun, if under-developed companion.  Brimo is a fun villain. She’s like a less insane version of Omega. Able to create a world of luxury from nothing. It doesn’t seem she’s aware what effect her dimension is having on the rest of the universe but then why should she. She only turns nasty when she realises the Doctor is also able to conjure things up and is therefore a threat to her monopoly. The fact that the TARDIS is blocking the gateway and therefore the power means that, ultimately, she was always going to be defeated as long as the Doctor could distract her for long enough.

Sharon gets very little to do in this story but it does end with the rather bizarre epilogue where, because the TARDIS was split by the dimension leak, its two sections are four years apart by the end of the story. Recombining it is a simple matter but it means the Doctor and Sharon age 4 years each. For the Doctor this is unnoticeable but for Sharon it means she skips her teenage years. I think Sharon is supposed to be around 16 when she meets the Doctor in The Star Beast, which would mean she is now 20 years old. This is shown in the illustrations by a more defined, ‘cleaner’ face and by giving her much more obvious breasts!

Overall it’s a very slight tale but marvellously eccentric. Brimo has a Guardian of the Gateway but all it seems to want to do is drink tea with the Doctor and Sharon. There is a weird part where Brimo and the Doctor fight for control of the Guardian (Doctor vs Master style in the King’s Demons) and manage to split him into two parts –one wanting to kill, the other wanting to drink tea. There is a cliffhanger ending where Brimo conjures up a menagerie of monsters which the Doctor defeats by imagining a pit which they all fall into. It does reflect rather well the tone of Season 17 which was the most recent TV series.

The fact this initial scenes of this strip are stated as happening long before Earth was formed is quite interesting. The extrapolation is that there was quite an empire (the characters are not all the same species) that Nefrin is part of and it is millions of years before it all disappears and Brimo is left alone in space.

This dating doesn’t really tie in with much else from Doctor Who although recent audio, A Death in the Family establishes another planet with a fully developed civilisation at least 7,000,000,000 BC and there is also the scientific civilisation of Daemos, so it seems there were plenty of well developed planets and peoples long before Earth was even a glimmer in the universe’s eye.

A fun strip and certainly one which I have always considered fondly throughout the many years of my fandom and wasn’t disappointed in when revisiting for this marathon.