The Good Soldier (comic story)

The Good Soldier
Doctor:	Seventh Doctor
Companion(s):	Ace
Main enemy:	Leader
Main setting:	United States, 1954 Earth orbit, 1954
Key crew
Publisher:	Marvel Comics
Editor:	John Freeman
Writer:	Andrew Cartmel
Artist:	Mike Collins (pencils), Steve Pini (inks)
Letterer:	Glib
Release details
Number of parts:	4
Printed in:	DWM 175-178
Release date:	13 June - 5 September 1991
Cover date:	10 July - 2 October 1991
Reprinted in:	The Good Soldier, Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection
Format:	Comic
DWM comic stories
← Previous	The Chameleon Factor
Next →	A Glitch in Time
DWM "New Adventures order"
← Previous	Seaside Rendezvous
Next →	A Glitch in Time

The Good Soldier was a Seventh Doctor comic strip published in Doctor Who Magazine.

Summary

The Doctor's TARDIS pulls into a service station in 1950s Nevada, in the shape of a vintage Cadillac. A squad of soldiers, led by Colonel Rhodes, are nervously anticipating an attack by flying saucers, but instead their unknown enemy lifts an entire section of the desert out of the landscape and transports it to a waiting shuttle, which in turn takes it to a much larger warship. Cybermen dig up through the ground and attack the service station, killing most of the soldiers; only the Doctor and Ace escape. The other survivors are taken prisoner, and Rhodes is electronically brainwashed to believe that he is fighting the Red Chinese; thus conditioned, he shoots and kills the rest of his squad. The Cybermen decide that he is a suitable acquisition, and wire him into their warship's control pod. The Doctor explains to Ace that the Cybermen intend to use this ship to attack Earth, but first they need an aggressive, warlike pilot. He steals one of the interface mechanisms the Cybermen used to connect Rhodes to the ship, and Ace uses it to interface through the TARDIS to the shuttle which brought them here. The Cybermen pursue the escaping shuttle, and when an escape pod is launched, the Cybermen use a tractor beam to bring it back aboard the warship - but the Doctor and Ace are still on the shuttle, and the escape pod contains an overloading reactor. The reactor explodes, destroying the warship, and delaying the Cyberman invasion until the historically accurate 1986.

Plot

to be added

Characters

• Seventh Doctor
• Ace
• Colonel Rhodes
• Sergeant Condon
• Jerome Wyler
• Leader
• Surgeon
• Russell
• "Red"
• Cannon
• Reserve reactor

Worldbuilding

• The TARDIS' chameleon circuit is working, and has changed its form into a Cadillac car.
• Ace says she is wearing Doc Martens.
• Ace asks the Doctor if he has ever been to Southend.
• Rhodes remembers fighting in Korea during December 1950.
• A poster in the diner advertises an adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard the Third, retitled as Tricky Dicky!, starring Howard Keel, Sonia Hieny and Mickey Rooney.

Notes

• Similar to the Cyberman in COMIC: Junk-Yard, the standard Cyberman are depicted with Cyber-bodies mostly resembling those from The Tenth Planet, with the sleeve hosing from The Moonbase and The Tomb of the Cybermen.
• Though the term is not used in this story, the drones used by the Cybermen are evidently Cybermats. Indeed, they are described as "caterpillars" by Ace, just Jamie McCrimmon mistook a Cybermat for a caterpillar in TV: The Tomb of the Cybermen.

Continuity

• Ace asks the Doctor if she can get a curry, but he says they had not been imported into the US at that point in time. She asked a similar question at Gabriel Chase in 1883. (TV: Ghost Light)
• The Cybermen's ship is adorned with the same embossed logos that also adorn their tombs. (TV: The Tomb of the Cybermen)
• Ace remembers battling the Cybermen (TV: Silver Nemesis) and diving into icy water. (TV: The Curse of Fenric)