The Menace of the Monstrons

odd little 60s origin story for the daleks but definitly not a recommend avoid these i fear

Having described the Monstron spaceship as Movellan in my last review I slowly realised that this comic strip, as a whole, actually does feel like a television story but not Destiny of the Daleks.  The Menace of the Monstrons is basically The Daleks vs The Dominators!

Aboard the Monstron spaceship are two Monstrons.  They proceed to use their robots the Engibrains to destroy the Dalek city and are ready to send word to their invasion fleet that Skaro is ripe for exploitation when a lone Dalek causes the volcano they landed in to erupt, destroying them in the process.  It does sound familiar, doesn’t it?  However, this strip was written years before The Dominators (around the time of The Mythmakers according to the Altered Vistas website) so if anyone is to be accused of ripping off a story idea it’s surely Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln.  It is, of course, probably a total coincidence, but the parallels are striking.

Beyond this intriguing coincidence though, I didn’t enjoy this strip as much as some previous.  The Monstrons themselves are, like the Dominators, a little dull and shouty.  The Engibrain robots look fabulously weird, but ultimately are just tools (and I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense).  The Daleks are pretty pathetic too, failing miserably to defeat the Monstrons and preferring to run away and hide in the city (which then proceeds to collapse on them).

There is a hilarious scene, though, which recalls the glories of Duel of the Daleks where the Emperor is trapped under the city and pleads with his Dalek subjects to rescue him ‘with a magnet’ but the magnet won’t work without electricity and a mutated eel is advancing quickly towards the Emperor.  This allows this instalment of the strip to end with the glorious frame showing the Daleks studying the impotent magnet and a tiny speech bubble peeking up from below with the legend ‘Help!’.  Imagining the Emperor pathetically pleading for help like a helpless 60s heroine actually had me laughing out loud.

One unfortunate aspect of the strip is the depiction of the Monstrons.  They are blue-skinned with yellow lips and slightly odd oval-shaped helmets but have distinctly stereotypical, cartoon-like ‘African’ features.  It smacks of the way ‘Black Sambo’ would be drawn during the early part of the 20th century.  I’m probably being way to sensitive about it, but it did strike me immediately I started reading the strip.

This is also another rather tragic script with no real victors.  It has distinct echoes of The Amaryll Challenge where a lone Dalek commits suicide but takes the enemy with him.  Only a few Daleks seem to survive the destruction of the city and the Monstrons pay the price for landing in a volcano.  It seems odd that the strip is obsessed with showing the Daleks taking defeat after defeat but it seems this is designed to show how determined the Daleks are to be all-conquering and how, despite the numerous setbacks they encounter whether its murderous plant life, plagues or rust, human rebels or alien invaders, they start again, rebuild and continue to view themselves as the greatest force in the universe.  There is some serious self-denial going on!

The next strip is one I was really looking forward to as it introduces the Daleks’ recurring nemesis, the Mechanoids!