The Monsters from the Past (comic story)

The Monsters from the Past
Doctor:	Second Doctor
Companion(s):	John, Gillian
Main enemy:	Scientist
Main setting:	New York City, 1960s
Key crew
Writer:	Roger Noel Cook
Artist:	John Canning
Release details
Printed in:	TV Comic 807-811
Release date:	3 June - 1 July 1967
Reprinted in:	DWCC 22
Format:	Comic - 5 parts (13 pages)
TVC comic stories
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Next →	The TARDIS Worshippers

The Monsters from the Past was a TV Comic story starring the Second Doctor, John Who and Gillian Who.

Plot

It is the 1960s and the TARDIS materialises in the Grand Museum in New York. The travellers emerge in a room full of artificial, model dinosaurs. The Doctor takes John and Gillian on a tour of the city and while they are away a scientist brings the dinosaurs to life. The Doctor manages to escape from the teeth and claws of the creatures and contacts the army. He tells the artillery where to aim their shells, but the dinosaurs seem impregnable and burst out onto the streets. The Doctor makes for the zoo where he discovers the scientist giving drugs to the animals that will make them obey him. The scientist orders a panther to attack the Doctor who drives it off with acid.

The scientist leaves his laboratory lair on a brontosaurus. This allows the Doctor to create an antidote to the Life drug that the scientist was using. Before he can get the antidote to the army, the scientist and his tame dinosaurs attack the building. The Doctor escapes, however, and gets back to John and Gillian at an army shelter. He puts his antidote into syringes which the army loads into their rifles. The first three dinosaurs to attack are transformed back to the museum models that they began as, but the other one the scientist is riding attacks the Doctor and knocks him out. Gillian shoots the dinosaur with a syringe, the scientist is thrown off as she does so, and the dinosaur becomes a model once more. The soldiers carry away the unconscious scientist on a stretcher and the Doctor, John and Gillian return to the TARDIS.

Characters

• Second Doctor
• John Who
• Gillian Who
• Scientist

Worldbuilding

• The brontosaurus knocks down an advertisement for Coca-Cola.
• The Doctor drives down 47th Street.
• Named creatures drugged by the scientist include a brontosaurus, lion, tiger, and panther. Unnamed but recognisable creatures include a bison, elephant, alligator and triceratops.

Notes

• Starting with part 4 of this story, each part is reduced from three pages to two.
• Although it appears that Gillian shoots the scientist dead at the story's end, resulting in an unusually violent ending for a Doctor Who comic strip, this is not the case. A closer examination of the frame in question (the second panel on the second page) clearly shows that Gillian fires the rifle loaded with an antidote-filled syringe at the dinosaur, while the scientist is simply thrown off as she does so. Furthermore, the scientist's face is uncovered when he is taken away on a stretcher by the military; if he were deceased, his whole body would have been covered.
• From Issue 810, the comic strip's title changes back from Doctor Who and the Daleks, as it had been from Issue 788, to just Doctor Who.

Original print details

(Publication with page count and closing captions)

• TVC 807 (3 pages) [No closing caption]
• TVC 808 (3 pages) [No closing caption]
• TVC 809 (3 pages) [No closing caption]
• TVC 810 (2 pages) [No closing caption]
• TVC 811 (2 pages) [No closing caption]

Continuity

• The Doctor had previously wished to see "prehistoric monsters" before he arrived at Atlantis with Ben Jackson, Polly Wright and Jamie McCrimmon. (TV: The Underwater Menace)