Funhouse by: Alan McKenzie with art by: John Ridgway and letters by: Annie Halfacree

 

Funhouse is written by Alan McKenzie with art by John Ridgway and lettering by Annie Halfacree.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issues 102-103 (June – July 1985) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: Voyager by Panini Books.

 

This is an odd one.  The second Doctor Who Magazine strip from editor Alan McKenzie and it kind of reveals McKenzie’s philosophy in writing stories.  The strip is essentially back to doing self-contained yarns with perhaps little character development between them which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  After Steve Parkhouse and his sprawling epics, going small-scale works really well, especially as at this point the television show was on hiatus and had a year before it would be coming back with The Trial of a Time Lord.  Funhouse is also one that has a trippy idea for a plot and is smart enough to not make the two issues overstay their welcome.  It’s essentially a two hander with the villain being this unexplained being taking the form of a house.  The image of a house on a desolate planet is a creepy one and John Ridgway’s art is stylized here in a way that brings up ideas of cosmic horror for the story.

 

The second issue also is another example of the Doctor going back through his regenerations before defeating the house by flipping a switch on the TARDIS console and throwing it into the Time Vortex, once again allowing a beautiful panel of Ridgway’s rendition of said vortex.  There’s also an interesting implication with a hallucination of Peri being used by the house as a piece of temptation to get the Doctor and Frobisher to stay.  Again following the idea of cosmic horror there are shadows and unearthly things in this house that makes this feel almost a tribute to horror movies of the early 1980s mixed with gothic horror from Hammer Studios.

 

This is overall a comic that actually doesn’t do much of interest.   The art is good and the plot works really well for softening the Sixth Doctor, and of course Frobisher’s sarcasm is great, there just isn’t a whole lot going on in terms of plot or character work that had been done so well in previous strips.  It almost feels like the strip is devolving slightly to the late Tom Baker era with its single and double issues not really allowing the comic to have enough space to tell stories.  Luckily, this is something that is almost immediately rectified with the Voyager collection ending with four connected single issues, and only one more single issue story for the rest of the Sixth Doctor’s strip run. 7/10.