A Cold Day in Hell! by: Simon Furman with pencils by: John Ridgway, inks by: Tim Perkins, and letters by: Zed

 

“A Cold Day in Hell!” is written by: Simon Furman with pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, and lettering by: Zed (a pseudonym for Richard Starkings.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issues 130-133 (October 1987-January 1988) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! by Panini Books.

 

The Seventh Doctor is my favorite Doctor, this is no secret.  However, going into his Doctor Who Magazine comic run I was generally dreading starting this because in 1987, the show itself was in a complete state of flux.  Eric Saward left in anger in 1986 during production on Season 23, Colin Baker was fired and rightly refused to come back for a regeneration, John Nathan-Turner had to commission the first serial of Season 24 and was still being promised the ability to move on from the show if he stayed just one more season, and new script editor Andrew Cartmel was barely able to script edit Sylvester McCoy’s first serial Time and the Rani while getting three other serials commissioned.  On the side of Doctor Who Magazine, the sales were going down because the show was dying; John Ridgway, the comic strip’s artist becoming high profile enough to request better compensation; editor Sheila Cranna leaving and being replaced by letterer Richard Starkings; and the decision to switch from a single artist to a rotating troupe of pencillers and inkers after one last story for Ridgway and inker Tim Perkins.  Perkins would remain with the strip as inker and occasional artist entirely.  The pair do work well together and this is a story where the art is the best part, Ridgway’s style is just as detailed as you’d come to expect and keeps things moving.  The writing would continue to be a rotation until Doctor Who made a brief television return with Alan Barnes and Scott Gray essentially taking over the script for the Eighth Doctor version of the strip.

 

Top all of that off with the fact that the first strip “A Cold Day in Hell!”, began releasing October 8, 1987, three days after the airing of Part One of Paradise Towers, the fifth episode the Seventh Doctor featured in.  Simon Furman as an author had already contributed to the strip twice with two shorter strips, “The Nature of the Beast” and “Salad Daze”, neither being particularly great ones, but he is given six issues to essentially cover the opening of the Seventh Doctor’s time.  “A Cold Day in Hell!” takes up four of those issues, certainly to allow the Seventh Doctor to develop a little bit by the end, probably beginning scripting just as Time and the Rani has started to air.  Time and the Rani not really establishing who the Seventh Doctor is because as previously stated, Andrew Cartmel couldn’t actually properly edit the scripts.  The home video market also would have recently released The Seeds of Death, so Furman clearly stuck the Ice Warriors into the plot to entice fans to read with a returning monster.  This leads “A Cold Day in Hell!” to just be an almost grab bag of ideas putting together, seeing what we can stick to a wall before completely jettisoning off any remaining elements of the previous strip because this is a new Doctor, we need a new companion.

 

The Doctor is characterized as a generic Doctor, understandably, and is often sidelined in the plot by being knocked out in between issues so Furman doesn’t have to try characterizing him.  The characterization in the opening is also really reflective between the Doctor and Frobisher on Peri’s fate in The Ultimate Foe, continuing the comic strips’ loose grasp on continuity because in these early scenes it almost feels like it’s meant to be the Sixth Doctor but the magazine just had to continue with the Seventh.  The Doctor is also just kind of obsessed with giving Frobisher a holiday, something that he would do with Mel during Season 24 making me wonder if Furman was given that as his only starting point, Furman latching onto that as his only character trait.  Frobisher leaves at the end to help the people of the planet A-Lux because that’s something he thinks he can do while the Doctor goes off with Olla, a heat vampire who starts the story as rabid because A-Lux has become a planet covered in snow.  The Ice Warriors are here because a faction of them wish to have their own empire, so they turned A-Lux into a cold wasteland echoing The Seeds of Death.  The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon are also frequently referenced.  Both Olla and the Ice Warriors are characterized fairly well, Olla just wanting to go home in the end and the Ice Warriors being at least fun Doctor Who villains but that’s really about it.

 

Overall, “A Cold Day in Hell!” is a story with potential: the Doctor faces Ice Warriors on a holiday planet that has been terraformed into being cold could be something great if there was anything to say.  It’s a story that just hits every expected beat of what Doctor Who is with barely any characterization to elevate it into anything interesting.  A whimper of a start.  5/10.