A Review by Finn Clark 14/6/04
An overlooked oddity. Like Grant Morrison's The World Shapers (DWM 127-129), The Cybermen is a 24-page DWM comic strip that ties another race of monsters into a Genesis of the Cybermen. However more importantly it also mimics the "two-year story told in one-page episodes" format of TV21's classic Dalek Chronicles. Those are big shoes to fill. Does it get there? Well, it's nowhere near as iconic as either of its predecessors, but it's sufficiently eccentric not to be without interest.
Superficially it's like the TV21 Dalek Chronicles, but there's an important difference. The Dalek Chronicles were a two-year saga of weekly episodes, adding up to many individual stories and over a hundred pages. The Cybermen is only 24 pages long and feels like a complete tale in itself. Theoretically it's divided into sub-stories, each with its own separate title, but after a while they start merging.
It's also not a story about the Cybermen.
Yeah, yeah, I know. "What's the story's title, Finn?" The Cybermen are major players in the story, but they're not the heroes. (I'm not talking here about the fact that they're monsters, since the Daleks are even more evil but were unquestionably the heroes of TV21's Dalek Chronicles.) They're just sorta there. They wander onstage in the first sub-story, The Dead Heart, explore Mondas for a while and then quietly vanish when Golgoth appears. Even more curiously, they're passive. These Cybermen are reactive, not proactive. The Cyber-scout in The Dead Heart has a mission and I liked their ruthless moment during the Dark Flame (DWM 230), but otherwise they're merely people to whom things happen.
No, this story is thinking bigger. It's about Mondas itself. We look at the Mondasian Silurians and Sea Devils who created the Cybermen by augmenting apes. We look at Golgoth and even a post-Cybermen human civilisation in the last sub-story, The Ugly Underneath. Millennia pass during these 24 pages, with species and civilisations rising and falling. The Cybermen are just one of many such races. They keeping spouting "we will survive", but it's just a catchphrase. It never really leads anywhere.
The Dead Heart (DWM 215-220) is a decent beginning. It's long enough to be quite interesting, as a human joins forces with a Cyber-scout to investigate the lost gods of Mondas. They're Silurians, I'm afraid, but believe it or not this potentially bathetic revelation is made to seem interesting! We get our first look at that grand sweep of history, with ape evolution, the creation of the Cybermen and the relationship between Mondas and Earth. "Our world, Mondas, had a sister once. A planet, like our own, tilted into a truer orbit about the sun by a rogue planet that became its moon."
Adrian Salmon's black-and-white art is astonishing. When I first saw the preview in DWM 214, I thought they'd brought back Mick McMahon from Junkyard Demon! He even draws authentic Tenth Planet Cybermen, breaking with the comic strip's tradition of putting cloth-faced heads on Invasion-style bodies (Junkyard Demon, The Good Soldier). His black and white images are so strong that you'd think colouring art could only dilute it, but just wait until he lets loose with his felt tips from DWM 221 onwards. It's bold, extreme and as stylised as everything else he does.
The Flesh Unbound (DWM 221-223) is a waste of three pages. 1: Discover a threat, 2: learn about the threat, 3: defeat the threat. There's no space for anything more. Unluckily for contemporary readers, the three-episode format also synchronised with the three-parters running in the main strip. This story coincided with Kate Orman's Change of Mind, while the next one ran alongside Land of the Blind. For some reason, that made DWM's comic strips feel even more formulaic.
The Black Sky (DWM 224-226) is more of the same, except that here the menace simply blows a fuse without the Cybermen having to do anything. For a while I wondered if the blobby bad guy was meant to be linked with the last story's blobby bad guy.
The Hungry Sea (DWM 227-229) livens things up a little by introducing Sea Devils, but the Cybermen hit their nadir with: "We mean you creatures no harm. Let us pass." What? We don't want nice Cybermen. We want metal bastards! However at least the three-page stories are building into something bigger, with the last story leading into this one and this leading into the next. "You shall guide us through these dark lands, to this Golgoth of whom you speak."
The Dark Flame (DWM 230-233) continues the upward trend. The Sea Devils are still here and the Cybermen get to be ruthless! "We need only your leader as our guide. You others serve no purpose. Kill them." We even get cool-looking Cyber-demises, e.g. a melting death's head, or an explosion of flower power as with that Dalek in The Amaryll Challenge (TV21 18-24).
This is where the Cybermen disappear from their own strip! If you ask me, it's about time. Instead we get Golgoth, who has an agenda and superpowers. Cool! I particularly liked the Golgoth Gospel in DWM 232, in which the godlike lizard man apes God and Leonardo da Vinci. Similar themes continue in The Future Perfec' (DWM 234), in which Golgoth explains the history of the world to his new offspring.
Last of all is The Ugly Underneath (DWM 235-238) which leaps forward by two millennia, skipping over the Cybermen's battle with Golgoth and telling it as history. Huh? Was the strip meant to end like this? It seems odd that Alan Barnes put so much build-up into Golgoth's son and then never did anything with him. However by this point it was 1996 and the magazine was bursting with McGann photos and previews from Vancouver. Reformatting was in the air. Did The Cybermen fall foul of the TVM, like Virgin's NAs? I don't know.
However as a sub-story in its own right, The Ugly Underneath is quite good. It has characters, even if they don't get room to breathe, and Adrian Salmon tries to suggest a new era with a new art style. I like these watercolours less than I liked his felt tips, but I give points for effort. If nothing else, I liked this post-Cybermen human civilisation, in which "the priests of the C'iva Cult raised offerings to their lost gods". Mondas is dying, about to shoot off into deep space. Having started in The Dead Heart with the moon sending Mondas away from Earth, now the wheel has come full circle. Mankind dies and a Cyberman walks out on a new world. They will survive.
Continuity hounds tend to disregard the comic strips, but I think the various Cyber-geneses can be reconciled. The World Shapers has the creation of one Cyber-race on Marinus. Marc Platt's Spare Parts shows another Cyber-genesis up close and personal, while this Barnes-Salmon The Cybermen strip is a broader story set thousands of years later. Any contradictions could be rationalised by assuming that its historical records aren't completely reliable (he says, not having listened to Spare Parts).
Overall, this is strange and atypical Who. I don't know where Alan Barnes was aiming originally, but it seems likely that his story evolved over the two years it took to tell. You can almost see the plot wriggling in its author's hands. Even comic strip buffs often overlook The Cybermen, but if it were reprinted en bloc I'm sure we might see a major reappraisal. It's weird. Perhaps it could even get a sequel? I'd be interested in seeing what happened to Golgoth's son...
A review by Ewen Campion-Clarke 20/6/06
1994/5 was a bad year for Doctor Who Magazine in my opinion. The magazine was thinner, glossier with lots of white, larger photos and not much to say. The comic strips became three-parter Missing Adventures for the first six Doctors, having given up on the New Adventures. Having come down hard after The Dark Dimension's cancellation and before the TV Movie, for a while DWM seemed running on empty that even I at eleven years old was expecting to see the words 'FINAL ISSUE' on the cover. But it was during this period DWM brought back a one-page comic strip on their back inside cover, showing the Time Lord's oldest enemies solo. It was called The Cybermen, and clearly supposed to kick off something which would rival The TV21 Dalek Chronicles. It didn't work, and when Paul McGann exploded onto the scenes and Ace blew up in the comics, The Cybermen was forgotten and never returned, not even in a special compilation.
Everything after the initial black and white story left me baffled, and the fact every sixth issue conspired not to appear in newsagents meant the saga was for several years incomplete and when I did complete it it was hard to make much sense of it. The Cybermen may have been created to mirror The Daleks but it goes in a completely different direction. There is hardly any narration, there are no catchup boxes for what happened in the last story, and these Cybermen are properly emotionless and thus don't talk much. They don't panic, review the situation, discuss things, so we have no idea what they're doing and when strange near-magical things occur there's no acknowledgement, let alone explanation. The format of the strip is also completely different to its inspiration - the first episode of The Daleks shows the decline of the humanoid Daleks and how it ended with a big bang. The first episode of The Cybermen is a cross between The Face of Evil and King Kong with a female savage heretic being chained up and left for a Tenth Planet-style Cyberman. The reasons for this are not made clear and like a lot of The Cybermen are left to the reader's imagination. The Cybermen might as well be called The Silurians since they and their various off-shoots are given equal page count and the Cybermen vanish from the story from the penultimate four installments. That's four months where a comic strip called The Cybermen doesn't feature them!
The Dead Heart, the first story, is very different from its successors. Entirely in black and white and with several poor attempts at humor ("There are three great graven idols to the north of Ca'Ith-Mun'Du..." is the worst), it was also in the back of the magazine and had a clear beginning, middle and end. The story is piecemeal, each installment seeming to happen in real time with large gaps between chapters. For example, the very first cliffhanger has the female heretic Raven chained up by her people and presented to a Cyberman. The next episode starts with the two of them hiking through the jungle, with no reference to what the other humans had to say or even explanation for how a solo Cyber Scout became enthroned as an emissary of the Gods.
The plot concerns a Cyberman scoutship crash-landing on an unexplored continent where primitive human tribes live in superstitious awe of the sleeping gods known as Lizard Kings. A surviving scout decides to investigate these 'gods' and so travels into the Blisterlands with Raven as a guide to discover the truth. They find a Silurian bunker staffed with half-Cybermen, who were apes augmented by the Silurians to become servants. The Silurians of Mondas have decided to go into hibernation and wait for Mondas to return to the solar system (the surface is quite habitable) and in the meantime the apes have evolved into humans.
The Cyber Scout takes over the half-converted servants and siezes control of the bunker and intends to, in its words, 'civilize' this country and turn the inhabitants into more Cybermen. Raven is the first to be transformed and the story ends, with a nice 'predictive' panel showing the chained humans being led to their fate including the Preacher that worshipped the Cyber Scout in the first place.
The Dead Heart leaves a rather big question mark hanging over it, though: just where have these Cybermen come from? The native apes have only just evolved and have neither the technology nor the inclination to become Cybermen. The Silurians' augmented servants have no will of their own and all the signs are that they and the Cybermen proper are two separate races - why else is the Scout so ignorant about its past? Are these Cybermen, therefore, the evolved Voords from The World Shapers who have tried to conquer Mondas or perhaps Cybermen from the future? It's never answered and we never see the Scout or Raven again, with the latter making one last speech as she is loading into a conversion unit: "We shall never be monsters like you. You have dead hearts. Dead hearts! We will play in the sunshine, live long, prosper, happy and connected to the world, simple and full of joy! We will survive! We will... WE WILL SURVIVE..."
The next story, now in full colour and right next to the contents page, is The Flesh Unbound. Time has passed and the whole continent is now under control of Cybermen who use partially-converted dinosaurs to do their lifting as they build a huge city. The Cybermen also have Control, a huge severed Cyberman head that seems to be their equivalent of a Dalek Emperor or Brain Machine. Control is at the heart of the city's machinery and basically runs everything. The story concerns the Cybermen unwittingly releasing a Silurian creation, a genetically-reengineered life form called R'Lyeh that consumes everything it can and takes over the Cybermen's tame dinosaurs. Control realizes how to deal with R'Lyeh at the start of the third and final episode and the rest of the story is just close ups of the creature's demise. At the time I mistook the ending to be a cliffhanger, as it suggests that a T-Rex has been possessed, but no, it obviously doesn't. Indeed, I would have said The Flesh Unbound is a waste of story except it gives the first hints that the Mondasian Silurians were far more advanced in organic technology, which Cyber technology will now have to deal with. Also notable in part two of this story is one Cyberman screaming "Tooth and Claw" repeatedly.
The next story, The Black Sky, kicks off the story arc that will dominate The Cybermen for the rest of its fourteen installments. It starts with another Cyber survey mission being sent to the eastern seaboard and apparently lost before the ship returns, out of control and hurtling to Control. Control is now housed in a mountain which curiously resembles a cross between a Cyberman head and a death's head and, all in all, sticks out amongst the Cyber-City like a sore thumb. Why would they build something like that? The only real answer is that it it's a good image and probably fun to draw.
In these days, rogue aircraft being shot out of the sky before they could crash into tall buildings would no doubt be a political comment, and I can't remember what I made of this back in the 1990s. In fact, it's taken several re-readings to understand what the hell the ship was, what the Cybermen were doing to it and why it crashed. And I haven't even got to the baffling occupants as we see the crew of the scout ship have become jet-black, dripping zombie-ghosts of Cybermen who moan things like "We are the future! The future is now!" Clearly these Cybermen have been possessed by some evil force, before the next episode reveals they're not Cybermen but shape-shifting invaders sent to sieze control of, er, Control and take over the Cybermen and achieve "The Future Perfect" whatever that may mean.
Unfortunately, the shape shifters can't cope with all of Control's duties and they burn out and Control expires in only its second story. However, the Cybermen seem perfectly capable of coping without it and interrogate the bug-eyed, drooling remains of Control and learn "the future is in the east the beast of the dark in the east where the black sky spans forever more". Very helpful as you can imagine. The Cyberleader switches off Control and decides to set off for 'the dark continent' to destroy the source of this 'contamination'. It seems the only way to annoy a Cyberman is say THEY are not the future.
The Hungry Sea opens with a huge zeppelin stamped with the Cyberman logo - which eerily predicts events in this year's Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel. As they reach the continent, the sea below becomes a living thing and drags the blimp out of the sky. The sea is 'the Fury' controlled by the Seer and his army of Sea Devils who protect the Dark Lands and their secrets, most particularly something called Golgoth who is the Future Perfect and the Dark Flame (preusmably unconnected to the BF audio of the same name). It's rather sinister to see the Cybermen on bended knee begging for mercy while a Sea Devil, the cutest of Who monsters, rasps "You belong to us now." For some reason, Sea Devils speak in the same font as Daleks...
But this state of affairs is immediately changed. Despite the Seer being able to apparently rot a Cyberman from the inside out, the Cybermen wrest control of the zeppelin and the hungry sea and the scene with the Cyberman and Sea Devil is replayed - except this time it is the Seer on his knees being told he belongs to the Cybermen. The Cybermen want the Seer to take them to Golgoth, the source of the weird shapeshifting contamination business and then the Cybermen will destroy him.
This continues in The Dark Flame, where the Cybermen set foot on the Dark Continent and their first act is to murder the Seer's companions who have no use. Immediately, the lead Cyberman suffers a fate similar to his predeccesor, but instead of dissolving in slime this one dissolves into flowers. As familiar-looking birds are seen (just like the shape shifters in The Black Sky) there is a bolt of lightening and another Cyberman melts. The remainder are killed when what looks like a bomb drops on them, leaving the Seer alone with a huge, purple, Silurian-type beast - Golgoth. Onto The Future Perfect.
Golgoth and the Seer have a good long chat (it's worth noting that the caption's "Deep One" is referring to the Seer, otherwise it gets confusing) with Golgoth apparently knowing nothing about Mondas, Silurians, Sea Devils or anything. After days without water, the Seer collapses and, on a whim, Golgoth lets him "drown in air and die". At a bit of a loose end, Golgoth gets the remains of a Cyberman and transforms it into a kind of Cyber-embryo he calls his son. As you do. This allows Golgoth to explain himself... and contradict pretty much everything established in the story.
Apparently, at the time of 'great divergence' when Mondas and Earth went separate ways, the Silurians went into shelter (despite the claims of Kho'Dja in The Dead Heart they only started that when they realized how long it would take before the planets met up again) and created a pool of life containing all the genetic information of the reptile people. Which, despite its clear value, they left outside their shelters. Unsurprisingly, one bolt of lightening later and a completely new life form was created from the pool, a being with godlike powers. Golgoth, in short.
Golgoth has created his son as a back up. He is not sure if he can beat the Cybermen so his son will take over the fight should Golgoth be killed. Which begs the question... why did Golgoth pick a fight with the Cybermen in the first place? Was it down to his gadfly mind? Are the shapeshifters his subordinates or were they out for their own agenda? Why is he so ignorant of the Sea Devils that he needs their entire society explained to him? Was he just bored? We never find out.
The next and final story, The Ugly Underneath, is set two thousand years later. The Cybermen and Golgoth had their battle and Golgoth lost - but he took the Cybermen down with him, wiping out every last one with a thunderbolt. Human civilization has sprung up again, and the Cybermen are now known as the C'Iva and they even have their own cult of knights who await the return of the messiah, Golgoth's Son. The C'Iva Cult live in the remains of Cyber Control, dressed in kinky approximations of Cyber-armor. However, the orbit of Mondas starts to decay after six months it goes flying out of the solar system (which does not appear to be Earth's solar system). As the world ends, an archaeologist called Korving and his assistant Joy head for the ruins to find out if Golgoth's Son really can save them by interviewing at gun point the High Priest of C'Iva, who has survived 2000 years because he's lived in the ruins which are irridiated by Golgoth's doomsday weapon.
However, Golgoth's son never turns up and as Mondas begins its slow journey back towards Earth, the last survivor of Mondas - Korving - falls into the conversion machinery and is made into a new Cyberman. This one is more photo-realistic than the impressionistic ones that always appeared in the strip. And as Mondas and its sole occupant await for new arrivals, there's a shot of Golgoth's son still in utero, with the parting shot of: "Deep in the far reaches of space hangs a life, cold and lonely in the black. Abandoned, it awaits a becoming... a beginning."
Yeah. Clears everything up that does.
So what has The Cybermen done for us? It's original, disturbing, scary and inventive but ultimately leaves us none the wiser and contradicts not only subsequent origins stories like Spare Parts, but also all the televised evidence that the Cybermen were humans who decided en masse to replace their inferior limbs and organs until they became little more than robots. Here there is no origin, just a vague implication that the Cybermen got their original conversion machinery from the Silurians. The Daleks had the evil outer space robot people and their steady evolution from a bunch of Mekon lookalikes to being the force that could invade Earth on TV. The Cybermen has various civilizations rising and falling on Mondas with the Cybermen blundering in every so often and getting wiped out. While their constant defeats show off their true weakness is not gold but lack of imagination, it doesn't half get tedious. The Dark Flame proves why no one has done a story where the Cybermen are victims in a slasher movie, and you can see the story is far more interested in Mondas and its history than its most famous export.
Adrian Salmon's more concerned with doing illustrations for DWM's Time Team nowadays and the idea of reviving The Cybermen just won't work. Half of it would need to clarify and explain the previous 24 episodes. It's an interesting oddity, but taken in one reading or over two years it's still confusing and unsatisfying. It can scare, inspire and sadden on a dime but it can't make sense.
Oh, and anyone who has ever heard of Trenchcoat will be interested in the story towards the end, The Silver Nursery, which is inspired in story and art by this comic strip, where we see the Silurian civilization on Mondas use the surplus ape population to create an unstoppable army of Cyber Mobile Assault Nodes, and you can't help but notice the similarities between the Tenth Planet Cybermen and the Silurians (the third eye, the ears, the ridges on the head). While The Steel Nursery works better as a narrative, it's a pity The Cybermen has been so neglected.