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TARDIS Guide

Overview

Released

December 1975

Pages

5

Time Travel

Past

Location (Potential Spoilers!)

Earth, England

Synopsis

The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith are returning to 20th century England in the TARDIS, but a misstep has them materialising centuries earlier. They leave the TARDIS to explore but soon have to hide from a hunting party of rampaging Danes led by Ulric.

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2 reviews

More tv comics appearing is the bane of my existence it’s almost over tho


This review contains spoilers!

My layman’s historical knowledge, based mainly on the information gleaned from Doctor Who’s very own The Time Meddler led me to believe that, if the story involved Vikings attacking Saxons, it must be sometime around the same period that the television series showed us Vikings attacking Saxons i.e. shortly before the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Unfortunately, as it is a TV Comic strip it isn’t included in A History so that dating was the best I could do.

Having read the comic strip and having done a little bit of background research, though, I find myself wondering where this strip should really be placed. It certainly fits roughly into the period I have placed it but some of the historical details in the strip muddy the waters.

Principally are the references to Woden. According to the all powerful source of information, the Oracle of Wikipedia, Woden is the name for the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Norse god Odin. In this comic strip, however, it is the Danes who invoke Woden, not the Saxons. The fact they are Danes also makes me wonder about time and place as, at no point are they referred to as Vikings, despite their horned/winged helmet get up and Viking-like names such as Ulric.

Further dating issues are thrown up by the fact that the Doctor is decidedly vague. The Doctor and Sarah are heading for the 20th Century but the Doctor gets his calculations wrong. When Sarah asks when they are, the Doctor mutters something non-commital about a century being a pin prick to a time traveller, sees a wild pig (which he claims helps to narrow their location down) and proceeds to forget the subject.

So all in all, this adventure could well be any time from the 6th century onwards (Wikipedia notes this time as when Woden first appears as a Saxon deity). The fact that historical references to Woden appear until well into the 16th century, doesn’t help a great deal. Indeed there is apparently a group in England now, called Woden’s Folk attempting to revive this particular religion. I think I’m going to plump for a vague ‘11th century’ placing for this instead of the original c1066.

The story itself is, again, a slight tale of the Doctor and Sarah losing the TARDIS to the Danes, inciting violence from the Saxons and regaining it. In between, they are chased by a wild pig and wolves and end the story at a Saxon feast – where Sarah is forced to serve until the men have eaten!

In true TV Comic style, the morality of the Doctor is decidedly questionable. When the TARDIS is carted away by the Danes, the Doctor’s first thought is to elicit the help of the Saxons – not in recapturing the TARDIS, but in massacring the Danes so that the TARDIS is free to reclaim!

The artwork in the strip is terrible and the likeness of Tom Baker in particular is not only rubbish, but in some frames decidedly sinister and creepy!

The dialogue is perfunctory but does include Sarah’s wonderful ‘that’s torn it’ when the Danes take the TARDIS and the sentence ‘with their lead nearly spent’ when the Doctor and Sarah are escaping the wolves and come upon the Saxon village. Interestingly, the dialogue of the Danes and Saxons is written in wobbly speech bubbles (as oppose to the Doctor and Sarah’s neater, more circular bubbles) presumably to indicate a different language. There is also an implication that only the Doctor can understand what they are saying.

I know I haven’t been a fan of these short comic strips, but this one is easily the worst so far as it comes from an era when the comic strip was only tenuously linked to the TV series which spawned it, losing a lot of the spirit of the series along the way.


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