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"THE MONSTER MAKERS – CORPORATE NIGHTMARES, EYEBALL ALIENS, AND MEME-SPEWING VILLAINS"

Alan Barnes and Mike Collins return to Doctor Who Magazine's comic page with The Monster Makers, a direct follow-up to The Hans of Fear that trades snowy fairytale battles for chaotic, corporation-run monster mayhem. This five-part story takes the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday on a bonkers, biting, and sometimes baffling journey into a testing ground for off-the-shelf alien invasions—complete with customer surveys, meme-quoting megalomaniacs, and shape-shifting nightmare fuel.

FROM FAIRYTALES TO FOCUS GROUPS

The action kicks off with immediate energy: the Doctor and Ruby land right in the middle of a brutal alien invasion by giant gun-wielding eyeballs. It's a delightfully surreal start, and the page layouts cleverly split when the pair are separated—allowing parallel storytelling as they both infiltrate alien war machines and meet resistance fighters. There's real flair in how these mirrored sequences play out, showing their shared resourcefulness.

But in classic Doctor Who fashion, things aren't what they seem. The story soon reveals a delicious twist—this isn't a “real” invasion, but a test run for pre-packaged invasion forces offered up by a war profiteering company. It’s The War Games meets The Android Invasion with a dash of The Happiness Patrol’s corporate satire.

The assessors—observers who pause the simulation to gather feedback—are a wonderfully weird inclusion, adding to the dystopian absurdity. A planet's government can simply buy an invasion to reinforce their power? Capitalism really does ruin everything.

MONSTERS MADE TO ORDER

Ruby takes centre stage this time, which is refreshing. She’s roped into working for the monster-making company as a “creative consultant,” forced to pitch her own designs for fearsome invaders. Naturally, this backfires when the biomaterial used to create the monsters starts mining her memories for inspiration—leading to the creation of creatures that look suspiciously like fairy tales with a sinister twist.

This idea of personalised monstrosity—manifestations pulled from a character’s own mind—is rich with potential, even if it doesn’t get quite enough room to breathe here. The callbacks to The Hans of Fear and Liberation of the Daleks provide some nice connective tissue across recent DWM comics, helping to form a sort of ongoing arc for this TARDIS team.

EYEBALLS, EXTORTIONERS, AND EXCESS

Enter Xirxis: a space tyrant with a love of the letter X, a hatred for others using the same, and a personality composed entirely of internet references and grating pomposity. He’s supposedly the grandson of the long-forgotten villain The Extortioner from an early DWM comic—a fun continuity nod, if obscure. Unfortunately, Xirxis himself is less fun in execution, feeling more like a rejected Guardians of the Galaxy baddie with an overused Twitter feed. He even quotes GIFs unironically.

The climax piles on the chaos, as Ruby’s fairy-tale-fuelled monsters cause havoc, the TARDIS jukebox is used to play a calming melody, and the Doctor belts out the Venusian Lullaby (which, charmingly, he notes sounds a bit like a Christmas carol). There’s a lot going on, and the final chapter buckles under the sheer weight of its ideas. Concepts collide—biomaterials, corrupted memories, long-lost villain families, space capitalism—but little gets the space it needs.

Mike Collins’ art remains a reliable anchor throughout, with expressive character work and a vivid sense of movement. Still, even his work can’t always save sequences that feel cluttered or overloaded with exposition.

📝THE BOTTOM LINE:

The Monster Makers has its heart—and eye-stalks—in the right place, spinning an imaginative satire on militarism, commercialism, and memory. Ruby gets a strong showing, and there are some top-tier Doctor Who ideas scattered throughout. But a messy third act, a cringeworthy villain, and stilted dialogue hold this one back from greatness.

It’s another colourful, chaotic entry in the Fifteenth Doctor’s comic run—but unlike the monsters it conjures, it doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Rating: 6/10