I really envy the generation of fans who grew up reading the Magazine Comics of the 90s and early 2000s, the comics I read as a kid were those crappy Adventures magazines and Battles in Time (loved the cards though!), the ones where very little effort was put in to the stories and they were just there to provide the kids with a couple pages of bright colours. Whereas the Magazine Comics, especially during the wilderness years were top tier and one of the earliest home runs was Ground Zero. This culminated a series of quick stories setting up this adventure where Ace is abducted and finds herself on a plain of existence beyond the Doctor's reach along with two of his former companions. Meanwhile the Doctor is reunited with his granddaughter Susan as he's confronted by a member of the Threshold who warns him something hidden inside the human consciousness is about to break loose.

Ground Zero is admittedly a very brisk story, one you could read in about fifteen minutes and the inclusion of Sarah-Jane and Peri doesn't really play that big a role in the story, they could honestly have been any other companion. But it's the striking imagery that really sells this story and the massive cliffhanger to part four. For a comic to kill off a televised companion is probably one of the ballsiest things I've ever seen in Doctor Who, this was back when the expanded media had free reign to take the Seventh Doctor anywhere they wanted and they weren't yet bound by the continuity of the show. It's such a spectacle of a comic story that it's well worth buying the omnibus.

I can see why this is a higher rated story. It’s very epic and represents a significant milestone for the series, tying up the seventh Doctor’s era in comic form. There are a handful of full page visuals which are particularly striking, including the TARDIS materialising inside a creature and obliterating it as a result.

I am not sold that this story needed multiple companions from the past. With the exception of Susan, they do not get a great deal to do. You could swap out Peri and Sarah-Jane for any boiler plate companion, even keeping the dialogue the same, and it would still work.

The baddies are distinctive, but occasionally, because their epic nature is sustained over 5 issues, it varies in impact.

The death of Ace is a wild choice, they are really swinging for the fences with that, setting up The Doctor nicely for the TV Movie. Her death, in this timeline at least, is real. In others, she survives!