The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop

A very entertaining little story, and easily the best of the 11th Doctor DWM comics at this point in the series. A Christmassy story which in some ways predicts The Doctor The Widow and The Wardrobe from the following year. A great example of how Doctor Who can be any genre.

It’s Christmas and time for a tale from CS Lewis. This DWM comic strip is a gorgeous riff on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with the 11th Doctor – or Professor – having an adventure with two children, Amy and Rory, who stumble into his bookshop one wintertime.

The bookshop, naturally, is bigger on the inside, and even has a small hexagonal desk on one of the landings between the many shelves and staircases – a desk which looks very like the console from the secondary console room in Season 14.

When Amy reads from a book (called Shada) the bookshop travels to another planet where they find a statue of a queen who awakens and pursues them, rather like a Weeping Angel. Heading to another world, they find a place suffering from eternal winter (and never Christmas) and inhabited by anthropomorphic animals strangely reminscent of Judoon, Fish People and a Nimon (among others).

They manage to break the spell and return home, having only been away two minutes.

Published before the TV show did it’s only version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (in the severely underrated and misunderstood The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe), this story hits a few of the same beats but it is much more of a pure fantasy and this is because it is a story being told by CS Lewis to the Doctor, Amy and JRR Tolkien.

This story is packed with lovely little details from the titles of lost stories on some of the books, the secondary console, the towering shelves of books and labyrinthine interior of the bookshop, the wintery forest, the Queen, the creatures that look like Doctor Who monsters. It’s extremely charming and gives a warm glow, echoed by the glow of firelight in the final panels where we find it is all a story being told by one of the world’s greatest fantasy writers (to one of the other greatest).

CS Lewis is a perfect person to feature in a Doctor Who story (even if only in cameo). In real life, CS Lewis died on the 22nd November 1963, the day before Doctor Who aired. But the legacy of his work is threaded through Doctor Who – I’ve always been a staunch believer that the TARDIS is basically the wardrobe from the first of his books. A magical box which is larger on the inside that the out. But it goes further than that – the character of the Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has some rather Doctorly vibes. The way time passes differently in Narnia to our world and the children return minutes after they left echoes the time travel aspect of Doctor Who. The stories deal very clearly with good vs evil and while the Christian allegory is strong and the fantasy aspect is far greater than Doctor Who tends to lean into, Doctor Who and the Chronicles of Narnia have much in common.

A little gem of a comic strip if you don’t mind your Doctor Who with a fantasy bent.