Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

It works pretty well here. When we last saw the Doctor, Peri, and Frobisher, they were travelling together having fought the Cybermen on Planet 14; evidently in the interim, The Trial of a Time Lord happened (without Frobisher, maybe he went fishing), and now Frobisher and the Doctor periodically check in on Peri on Krontep, the planet where she settled down with King Yrcanos after Trial. Assume the Doctor regenerates off-panel (as he always does in DWM-land), and this leads right into A Cold Day in Hell!

So how's the story-- written by none other than Colin Baker (the first Doctor to write licensed fiction; Tom Baker became the second twenty-five years later with Scratchman)? Well, it's fun. None too deep, but fun. Krontep is in a time of crisis when a solo Doctor visits; Peri's granddaughter Actis asks the Doctor to get Frobisher and help. The Doctor, Frobisher, and Carf (a Krontep warrior) go on a quest to figure out what ails the land, then they go on another to find Actis when she goes missing. There's a bit too much gubbins at times-- what is up with the alien the Doctor meets?-- but if your idea of a good time is a quest story where the participants are the Doctor, a talking penguin, and a giant bearded warrior who shouts "VROOMNIK" a lot, then you will have one. Mine is, and I particularly enjoyed their forays into the underground cult. The Doctor's ultimate foe being a hallucination that he is on This Is Your Life is delightfully bonkers.

The first quarter is drawn by John M. Burns; the remaining parts by Barrie Mitchell. Both are good artists, working well with the story's epic nature. I did have the impression, though, that Barrie Mitchell wasn't drawing Colin Baker so much as the steel-jawed hero of a men's 1950s adventure comic wearing a Colin Baker wig. And of course the sixth Doctor was made for color!

It's not all good. Somehow though the Doctor and Frobisher have visited Krontep and Peri's family a lot over the years, Actis knows them but her older brothers don't! The resolution of the political subplot is rushed and sudden, too. But on the whole, I enjoyed this, a weird slice of Doctor Who history that plugs a hole in the tv show but does something uniquely DWM at the same time.

Stray Observations:

• I like the idea that the Doctor periodically drops in on Peri and her family and gives them odd presents. I didn't like that part 14 of Trial undid Peri's death, but if she was to live, I don't like the idea that the Doctor never looked in on her, and I find this take on her future preferable to that offered by Nev Fountain over in the audio dramas.
• Speaking of which, this would be a good one for Big Finish's stillborn range of audio adaptations of DWM comics. Colin Baker and Robert Jezek would crush this!
  
• It's rather nice and unexpected that upon getting to write a Doctor Who story, Colin Baker picks as his Doctor's companion a character he never actually appeared opposite on screen! I guess he likes Steven Parkhouse and John Ridgway as much as the rest of us. It is a bit odd that a black-and-white companion was chosen for DWM's first (I think) full-length color endeavor, however!
• I didn't need to read the Tardis wiki to know that this was originally written and drawn as a four-issue miniseries; it was obvious when on the 22nd page, there was suddenly a splash panel on a dramatic moment, and then the 23rd page was the same moment again, and this repeated two more times.
• On the other hand, the Tardis wiki claims this volume "nearly doubled the number of comic panels that had been devoted to [Baker's] incarnation of the Doctor." There are 88 story pages here; the two DWM graphic novels of sixth Doctor strips total about 350 pages. For Age of Chaos to nearly double the number of panels those 350 pages contained, this would have to have over three times as many panels per page! It doesn't seem likely.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

http://nhw.livejournal.com/932339.html

Yes, it's a real rarity - the only full-length Doctor Who book written by one of the Doctor Who actors. Colin Baker had written three Sixth Doctor stories featuring his own character and Bonnie Langford's Mel, but here's a full 96-page graphic novel published by Marvel in 1994, taking the story of Peri further. I have not seen the series in which she gets married off to Brian Blessed (or killed, depending on the interpretation), but Colin Baker obviously feels as strongly about it as most fans do.

Anyway, it's a fun quest story, rather in the Conan the Barbarian genre of medieval romps, though with inevitable science fictional overtones; the Doctor, his penguin-shaped companion Frobisher, and a locally recruited warrior set off to save Peri's grandchildren and their kingdom, Peri herself having disappeared some time back. My only problem with it is that the artist who drew three quarters of the book, Barrie Mitchell, referred to so positively by Baker in the introduction, doesn't actually draw the Doctor to look very much like Baker at all! (Mitchell is apparently best known for having drawn "The Four Marys" in the girls' comic Bunty, though I doubt that he did it for the whole run from 1958 to 2001 as WikiPedia implies.) The artist of the first quarter of the book, veteran John M Burns, seemed to me to catch him rather better.

This book is something of a curio, admittedly, but quite fun. ( )