Cuckoo (comic story)

Cuckoo
Doctor:	Seventh Doctor
Companion(s):	Benny, Ace
Main enemy:	Thomas Gideon
Main setting:	Lifton 15 October 1855
Key crew
Publisher:	[[publisher::Marvel Comics UK]]
Editor:	Gary Russell
Writer:	Dan Abnett
Artist:	John Ridgway
Letterer:	Janey Rutter
Release details
Printed in:	Doctor Who Magazine 208 - 210
Release date:	19 January - 16 March 1994
Format:	Comic - 3 parts
DWM comic stories
← Previous	Time & Time Again
Next →	Uninvited Guest

You may wish to consult Cuckoo (disambiguation) for other, similarly-named pages.

Cuckoo was a Doctor Who Magazine comic story featuring the Seventh Doctor, Benny and Ace. Barring the coda of The Last Word, it was the last in the short run of DWM comic stories that attempted to hew to the continuity of the Virgin New Adventures.

It therefore featured a different Ace to the one otherwise seen in most DWM comic strips, since what might be called the "DWM Ace" died at more or less her Survival age in Ground Zero. The Ace here was the older, more "suspicious-of-the-Doctor" Ace of the New Adventures, and therefore had, amongst other things, an expanded vocabulary that was inconsistent with the televised/DWM Ace.

The story took advantage of having two independent, sexually-liberated female companions by having a story that was focussed clearly on gender politics. Not only was the story set in the dead centre of the Victorian era — giving Benny and Ace plenty of cause to object to their surroundings — but the character who espoused the most virulently anti-feminist ideas was shown to literally be a monster.

Summary

to be added

Characters

• The Doctor
• Ace
• Bernice Summerfield
• Mary Anne Wesley
• Doctor Thomas Gideon
• Gilbert Mackley
• Reverend Wesley
• Sir William Gadling
• An unnamed Surcoth
• Boy
• Landlord

References

to be added

Notes

• The title has nothing to do with a literal cuckoo bird, but rather the British slang cuckoo, in the sense of something being where it's not supposed to be. In part two, the Seventh Doctor refers to the alien fossil in the caves around Lifton as being a cuckoo that needs to be pushed out of the nest of human history, so that Charles Darwin will properly publish The Origin of the Species, rather than being suppressed by Mary Anne Wesley's incorrect assumption that somehow the alien fossil should "fit" into Earth's evolutionary "table".

Continuity

• The Seventh Doctor takes a drop of Madeira in Lifton, evoking the scene in The Smugglers where the First Doctor also had some whilst visiting another part of the English coast. Indeed, the scenes of Ace and Benny wandering around the caves at the beach are very reminiscent of surviving telesnaps of Polly, Ben and the First Doctor walking on a Cornish beach in part one of The Smugglers.