Review of Under the Volcano by deltaandthebannermen
22 July 2024
This review contains spoilers
This DWA comic strip is from the very early days of the magazine when they, for no apparent reason split the story into two parts in the same issue. The first part does end on a sort of cliffhanger, which I assume is the reasoning, but the story is split roughly 2/3 and 1/3 rather than half and half, which makes for a rather anticlimatic second section.
The Doctor and Rose are in Indonesia and open the story tied to a stake by natives. Before long they are inside the volcano and have encountered lava-like aliens intent on drilling away the core of the Earth. They escape and defeat the monsters with cold water.
If this sound a little like The Fires of Pompeii, you’d be right. But let’s be fair, this was published a fair while before that story and the similarities are relatively superficial. An interesting element of this story is the characterisation of the aliens as slightly dimwitted, argumentative simpletons. It reminds me a little of the Ogrons.
The Doctor is pretty much spot on in his dialogue and characterisation, but Rose comes across as very aggressive and condescending towards the Doctor. It doesn’t seem quite right and I found myself disliking her across the quite short length of the strip.
Historically, this revolves around aliens causing the eruption of Krakatoa (and is very similar to the ‘explanation’ of Vesuvius’ eruption in The Fires of Pompeii). Presumably the 9th Doctor is somewhere on the other side of the island (he is pictured there in one of Clive’s records in Rose).
Like most of the DWA strips this gets points for its unusual time and place but is far too short to be satisfying. The unlikeable characterisation of Rose doesn’t help, but I did enjoy the silly aliens, even if their defeat was reminiscent of throwaway scenes in The Fires of Pompeii.