Once in a Lifetime by: John Freeman with art by: Geoff Senior and lettering by: Stuart Bartlett

 

“Once in a Lifetime” is written by: John Freeman with art by: Geoff Senior and letters by: Stuart Bartlett.  It was released in The Incredible Hulk Presents issue 1 (October 1989) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: Nemesis of the Daleks by Panini Books.

 

The Incredible Hulk Presents was a Marvel UK exclusive magazine where the main feature of the strip was reprints from The Incredible Hulk, but each issue was bolstered with comics for G.I. Joe, Indiana Jones, and most relevant for my purposes Doctor Who.  This was published weekly, Doctor Who being allocated five pages per issue.  The last time a Doctor Who comic was weekly were the early days of Doctor Who Magazine, though for The Incredible Hulk Presents the team of writers and artists are on a rotation as to not burn out.  The book ran 12 issues in 1989, coinciding with the end of Doctor Who on television.

 

The few good things that can be said about the first strip, “Once in a Lifetime”, is that it is short and Geoff Senior’s art is quite good.  Senior excels at capturing emotion and a wacky tone that the strip is going for, as well as clearly having fun with some of the alien designs.  The actual story is simple but relies on the Doctor being outright villainous towards a journalist called Miff.  Miff is slightly annoying to the Doctor, so he sends him to a bar where association with the Doctor nearly gets him killed.  The Doctor then strands him ten years into the future where his newspaper is out of business.  That is everything that happens in “Once in a Lifetime”.  What makes this the weakest Seventh Doctor strip thus far is just how out of character the Doctor is, he’s a villain being portrayed as a hero.  John Freeman writes the script and like John Carnell’s “Follow That TARDIS!” the script suffers from not wanting to be Doctor Who.  While the tone is slapstick and aimed at children, it plays out as quite cruel when actually being read.

 

Overall, “Once in a Lifetime” is a terrible start to The Incredible Hulk Presents.  While a five page gag strip has potential, even as a Doctor Who story, the gags have to actually be funny and not just cruel.  The Doctor is the villain and that’s a problem when the perception of the Doctor is in the midst of shifting the character to examine his morality.  2/10.