Time Bomb by: Jamie Delano with art by: John Ridgway and letters by: Annie Halfacree

 

Time Bomb is written by Jamie Delano with art by John Ridgway and lettering by Annie Halfacree.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issues 114-116 (June-August 1986) and are reprinted in their original form in Doctor Who: The World Shapers by Panini Books.

 

Jamie Delano is a name familiar to comic fans for his work on Hellblazer for DC Comics/Vertigo starting in 1989, but in 1986 he provided two stories for Doctor Who Magazine during the Sixth Doctor’s run.  Time Bomb is the first and it’s quite a simple story, with the Doctor and Frobisher being jostled by a time cannon in the TARDIS catapulting them throughout time.  Frobisher gets in trouble, the Doctor rescues him, and throughout all of this time gets messed up leading to intelligent reptiles who are not Silurians taking over the world.  Delano is allocated three issues to tell this story, cramming it into about 24 pages incredibly well, though there is an overreliance on dialogue and narration to tell the story.  Peri is at a baseball game which is a smart decision since there really isn’t a whole lot of time to tell the story so Delano really needs to get things going.  What’s interesting is that Delano isn’t really trying to say anything interesting outside of having genuine fun exploring the science fiction concepts of a time bomb and the danger.

 

If we’re being honest, Nature of the Beast! was a story that made me stop reading these for being quite boring so bringing in Delano to do something almost off the wall is the perfect antidote to that.  John Ridgway is clearly also having a lot of fun with drawing the dinosaurs and aliens.  There’s also this robot that he’s clearly having fun with.  Delano is also having so much fun writing the character of Frobisher since he’s kind of in the damsel in distress companion role which has been memory holed as a thing that happened a lot in the television show despite being more complex than that on screen.  Frobisher’s sarcasm and just being a penguin means that the emotions in Ridgway’s art can be more exaggerated than the human characters without breaking the realistic (occasionally traced from promotional photos) style that Ridgway adheres to and had become the standard of Doctor Who Magazine in terms of style for the mid to late 1980s before the 1990s brought more stylization to the comic strip.

 

Time Bomb may be a strip that isn’t exactly for everybody as Doctor Who Magazine has moved away from the overarching plot of Steve Parkhouse’s time on the strip (and the reason The Tides of Time is all one collection), but as an individual story it does fill a niche the television show wasn’t really filling at the time of the hiatus and allows the Sixth Doctor a much kinder portrayal.  Frobisher is incredibly creatively used and Delano’s script goes as crazy as he is able to in three issues for a very fun time.  7/10.