The Crossroads of Time by: Simon Furman with art by: Geoff Senior and letters by: Zed

 

“The Crossroads of Time” is written by: Simon Furman with art by: Geoff Senior, and lettering by: Zed (a pseudonym for Richard Starkings).  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 135 (March 1988) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! by Panini Books.

 

Doctor Who Magazine was originally published by Marvel UK, the UK division of Marvel Comics.  That technically means there are parts of Doctor Who canon to the Marvel universe, there could have been a crossover between Doctor Who and Spider-Man in theory.  In practice that didn’t actually happen, but Simon Furman and Geoff Senior had created a character called Death’s Head for a Transformers comic in 1987.  The character has a backstory that “The Crossroads of Time” decides isn’t important to relay really to the reader, nor does the reprint actually say where to go to get the original appearance of the character because Simon Furman and Geoff Senior actually use this story as the beginning of a series of crossovers.  I will not be reviewing the crossovers, mainly because I have little interest in the character outside of his appearance in the Doctor Who Magazine comics and partially because I have not read any of the other series that the character crosses over with.  Those interested in Death’s Head’s story should seek out a reprint of The Incomplete Death’s Head (or the original 12 issue miniseries).

 

“The Crossroads of Time” is basically a prelude: the Doctor crashes the TARDIS into Death’s Head and then tricks him into being catapulted into the 81^st century, promising him the TARDIS.  The best thing I can say about this story is that Furman seems to be aware that the Seventh Doctor’s characterization is becoming more trickster like, but this also is overtly the characterization seen in Season 24.  He also complains to a time warden which feels like a character meant to be another character in the Marvel universe that couldn’t be used, but I couldn’t really place my finger on who it could possibly be.  Maybe the Watcher, maybe not, it really isn’t clear.  The biggest problem here is that even for a single issue story, this takes almost too long to get going so there isn’t time for any sense of story structure.  It is possible to tell a good story in a single eight page issue of Doctor Who Magazine, “The Collector”, “War of the Worlds”, “Spider-God”, and “The Neutron Knights” are peak examples of how to tell small stories and make them work.  Furman and Senior clearly want to write something bigger but clearly only have a few pages to do it so the story needs to be introduced and pushed forward for the crossover to work.

 

Overall, “The Crossroads of Time” is a quite silly little story that doesn’t actually work when it comes down to it.  It’s an example of a crossover issue taken out of the context of the crossover and the writer not really doing the legwork to make it work on its own.  The burden is from only having eight pages and not actually using it to tell a story, but to introduce where a character is before they are sent to their next story.  The Doctor Who of it all is incidental.  4/10.