Salad Daze is written by Simon
Furman with art by John Ridgway and lettering by Annie Halfacree. It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 117
(October1986) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: The World Shapers by Panini Books.
With Doctor Who
Magazine’s shift from a principle writer to a rotating group of writers
working at Marvel UK it means that this back half of the Sixth Doctor’s time on
the strip can go to some very weird places.
Salad Daze is one of those incredibly weird places. Simon Furman provides a single, eight-page
comic story set in the TARDIS and then in Peri’s head, going through a pastiche
of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but with vegetables added in
characters and the Doctor as the White Rabbit.
This is because Peri has been trying to get the Doctor to eat healthier
and she needs to be taught a lesson (or at least that’s what the final two
panels of the strip imply). For such a
short story Salad Daze is just really mean spirited towards Peri and for
whatever reason has saddled her with Mel’s personality. This could be because The Trial of a Time
Lord was in the process of airing when this strip was released and the
comics may have wished to use Mel but couldn’t because she hadn’t debuted when
Furman’s strip was set to release or maybe Ridgway’s art was done with Peri,
either way both Peri and the Doctor are vastly out of character in this
strip. While short plots can work for
the strip, Steve Moore’s The Collector was brilliant in a single issue,
this one just comes across as cruel and shallow. There isn’t a depth or really an idea running
through it outside of wanting to do an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
pastiche for the sake of it, yet not making it feel even a fraction of the
imaginative nature of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ridgway’s art is pretty and it’s clear he wants
to be working with better material, so it’s at least pretty to look at and is
quite short. 4/10.
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