Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.
The Comic Strip Companion plugs one of the few glaring gaps in Doctor Who scholarship: the comic stories produced between 1964 (when the first Hartnell strip ran) and 1979, when the new Doctor Who Weekly (now Doctor Who Magazine ) assumed the rights. As well as covering adventures for the first four Doctors, it also tackles the separate Dalek comics and the strips in the annuals produced by World Distributors.
Following an episode guide format, it lists all the relevant data for each story, providing a synopsis and notes on continuity, gaffes and the like, followed by Paul Scoones’s own critical assessment. Words like “illogical” and “preposterous” pop up regularly here early on, since the rather childish First and Second Doctor tales in TV Comic existed in a bizarre alternate reality where the Doctor meets mythical characters like Santa and The Pied Piper, and often uses magical means or violence to save the day. The Third Doctor adventures published in Countdown (latterly retitled TV Action ) are, to Scoones’s approval, far more mature and faithful to the series. Long-since out of print, these adventures now cost a pretty penny to collect, so it’s useful to have a guide that makes clear which are worth buying first on the grounds of being either particularly good, or especially bonkers (like the Second Doctor strip which features both skiing Cybermen and radio-controlled gulls…)
