Backtime

With Backtime, we finally cross paths with the world of Countdown, the comic which hosted a long run of Third Doctor comic strips.  As I’ve discussed before, the comic strips pre-DWM have only a loose relationship with their parent show.  The TV Comic versions of the 1st and 2nd Doctors bore very little resemblence to their TV counterparts with both magic and violence being far more prominent in the comic than they ever were on screen.  The 3rd Doctor Countdown comics move a little closer to the TV series and do in part reflect the tone of Seasons 7 and 8.  Backtime, however, is a strange beast.

We find the 3rd Doctor pottering around Victorian London in 1863.  In the first instalment no mention is made of the fact of how unusual a trip into history is for the 3rd Doctor but then, from the second part onwards, the text keeps referring to how the Doctor has used ‘backtime’ to travel into the past.  ‘Backtime’ is never explained – is it a process, a machine, something different to his TARDIS (which, if memory serves, hardly featured at all in the Countdown comics, with the Doctor more often being based in a country cottage and travelling around in his vintage yellow roadster, Betsy…)?

Whilst apparently researching 19th century flying machines (by reading a book!) he has his pocket picked by a young boy called the Artful Dodger…I mean Charlie Fisher.  Charlie is so obviously the Artful Dodger it is painful.  Indeed the final frame of the comic strip is a copy of a publicity photo of Jack Wild, the actor who played Dodger in the musical film, Oliver!  There are even a couple of frames of the first two London-set parts which look like copies of scenes from the film (particularly the one of the Doctor and Charlie running to find the TARDIS).  Charlie is arrested, but then the Doctor is too for producing a modern bank note.  Charged with pickpocketing and forgery, respectively, Charlie and the Doctor make a break for freedom and escape in the TARDIS.  The Doctor promises to take Charlie to start a life somewhere nicer but ends up materialising in the midst of the American Civil War, a short while before the Battle of Gettysburg (also in 1863).

This begins the main part of the story which sees the Doctor and Charlie travelling from Union territory to Confederate territory to Union territory again in an effort to avoid being executed as spies.  The Doctor, rather brazenly and recklessly uses a hot air balloon to map the Confederate lines, which he then proceeds to give to Abraham Lincoln himself.  Gettysburg is won by the Union soldiers but the TARDIS is taken away forcing the Doctor and Charlie to follow it on horseback.  On the way they are accosted by the rather nasty Bamford brothers.  Bizarrely, the Doctor almost takes them with him in the TARDIS to also find a better life along with Charlie, but they are spooked by the interior of the TARDIS and scarper, only to be captured by soldiers themselves.

The Doctor then takes Charlie to Australia (also in 1863 it is implied) and leaves him with a spotted handkerchief tied to a stick and miles and miles of outback to trek through!

This is a decidedly odd story.  The Doctor acts nothing like the Doctor and is very much like the character usually seen in the TV Comic strips, particularly their version of the 2nd Doctor.  Admittedly, Pertwee’s portrayal of the Doctor, particularly in Seasons 7 and 8 was a lot more brusque and condescending to those around him, but this version seems motivated by self-preservation far more than his TV counterpart.  His treatment of Charlie is also very odd.  He plans on taking a boy who cannot be more than 13 or so to some other place for a better life and ends up leaving him in the Australian outback in 1863!  It seems rather ill-thought out.  I wonder if, somewhere, Charlie Fisher’s bleached bones lie in the orange sand being picked at by the local wildlife and given a wide berth by the Aborigines for fear of some dark evil that brought a young white boy to the middle of the outback.

The whole American Civil War section is thoroughly uninvolving with the Doctor and Charlie running from one group of soldiers to another and seemingly escaping various deadly predicaments with a wave of the artist’s pencil.  The coda with the chasing of the TARDIS on horseback and their encounter with the villainous Bamford brothers is pointless and nonsensical (especially when the Doctor offers to take them in the TARDIS like some taxi service for the time vortex)!

For the marathon I read the reprint of this comic strip presented in the shortlived Classic Comics.  Rightly or wrongly this publication coloured all of the strips.  On some this works really well and its lovely to read.  Unfortunately, with the line artwork for the Countdown strips it just looks awful when coloured.  There are massive blocks of colour and the fine detail on many of the characters is lost when colour is added.  Some frames are impossible to work out what is actually being depicted.  It is a massive shame and made me wish I could view them in their original black and white form.  Also, the strip is split across two issues of the magazine and the colouring in the second part is much worse than that in the first.

We’ve rarely crossed paths with the 3rd Doctor in this marathon and it is a shame this comic strip is a poor representation of his character and era.  Charlie Fisher is a rather pointless temporary companion and is horrendously cliched uttering such gems as ‘Cor luv a duck’ and dropping his H’s left, right and centre.  The fact that he is clearly just the Artful Dodger is embarrassing and the whole Gettysburg bit is dull and nonsensical.  The ending is awful and the whole idea of ‘Backtime’ is bizarre as it is written into the text as if we should all know exactly what the writer is talking about.

Shocking!