From TV Comic #713-715
Published: 1965
A Review by Finn Clark 11/3/05
TV Comic enters the Twilight Zone... or to give a more Who-specific example, something vaguely akin to the first episode of The Space Museum (which had been broadcast only a few months earlier). This is a completely bog-standard six-page "get captured and escape" runaround, but for one small twist.
Well, actually a total brainbuster of a twist.
In Dr Who's words... "Something must have gone wrong with the TARDIS, and it turned us back to front in time. That makes everything very awkward for us, I must say!" It's not a deep concept, but at six pages long the story doesn't need to run deep. It just needs to run weird, and that it certainly does. Since time is running backwards, our heroes start at the end of the adventure and must work their way backwards to the beginning. In the end, this means deducing what must have happened previously, which to them means next. I just spent two minutes trying to parse that sentence.
At times, it's kinda scary. Dr Who deduces that they must have escaped from a prison camp, so if they want to find the TARDIS again that's where they must go! "Oh dear," says Gillian, "I wonder what was happening to us in this prison before we escaped?" Hmmm, good point. Most sensible thing she's said yet in the pages of TV Comic.
It's set in the "present day on the planet Earth" - which given the publication dates presumably meant 1965. These days that's practically a historical! The local authorities don't seem very friendly, so I guess that it's Russia or some affiliated East European dictatorship from the height of the Cold War. The locals talk English (albeit backwards English) but that doesn't mean much given the TARDIS's translation abilities. Come to think of it, translation conventions might explain why word order has been reversed in dialogue, but not the letters in the actual words themselves. The TARDIS may have screwed up in a manner never seen before or since, but perhaps its telepathic circuits are doing their best to ameliorate the situation?
Reprinted in DWCC 22, this showcases the comic strip doing what it does best. These are six pages of sheer brain-bending imagination, transporting you to a world of "what if" and "you must be bloody joking". In its own way, one of the best ever TV Comic stories. At only six pages long, it doesn't have room for depth or characterisation... but what it does do, it does like a mad bastard. Awesome. Neville Main does it again.