From The Incredible Hulk Presents #4; Reprinted (coloured) in DWCC #21
"There Should Have Been Another Way" by Tim Roll-Pickering 19/10/98
I must first declare an interest: War World was the very first Doctor Who strip I read, back in 1989, and so will always have a special place for me. At the time I thought the story was brilliant, telling of the true cost to the soul of war and the art wonderful.
Upon rereading the story, it’s difficult to see why I formed those opinions. Art Wetherell’s art isn’t particularly spectacular and he completely fails to achieve a likeness of Sylvester McCoy. His rendition of the robots is lifted straight out of fifties’ B-Movie, whilst some of the character poses are extremely bizarre, and the ‘beautiful’ garden Deldran shows the Doctor doesn’t look anything like the Doctor’s reaction suggests.
The script is so simple that it could have come from a sixties’ TV Comic story, with the Doctor arriving in the midst of a war and agreeing to help one side destroy the other, whom he makes no attempt to even meet!
There is an original twist at the end, where the Doctor finds out how he has been used, and this is the story’s only redeeming moment, as it raises the question about whether anyone is ‘built’ for peace. However, this does not make up for the previous material. Like most of the strips written for The Incredible Hulk Presents, War World suffers from the low page count and the low panel per page ratio, resulting in little room to produce anything decent. For The Incredible Hulk Presents, this is an average strip. 3/10