The Hans of Fear (comic story)

The Hans of Fear

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The Hans of Fear
Doctor:	Fifteenth Doctor
Companion(s):	Ruby
Main enemy:	Snedronningen
Main setting:	Copenhagen and the Faroe Islands, June 19th century
Key crew
Publisher:	Panini Magazines
Editor:	Marcus Hearn
Writer:	Alan Barnes
Artist:	Mike Collins, James Offredi
Letterer:	Roger Langridge
Release details
Genre:	Science fiction
Release number:	209
Printed in:	DWM 604 - DWM 607
Release date:	23 May - 25 August 2024
Cover date:	June 2024 - September 2024
Format:	Comic
DWM comic stories
← Previous	Mancopolis

The Hans of Fear was the two hundred and ninth comic strip published in Doctor Who Magazine by Panini Magazines and was written by Alan Barnes. It starred the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday.

Plot

Part One: The Hans of Fear

In 19th-century Copenhagen, a young boy named Erik spots what appear to be floating snowflakes in midair that he nicknames "frost bees" while walking with his mother, but she tells him off for seeing things as it is a midsummer's day. However, a passerby notices a whirlwind approaching from the north that freezes everything it touches, including the sea itself. A nearby sailor spots something else in the blizzard too - a blue box.

On cue, the Doctor's TARDIS skids across the ice and smashes into the side of the sailor's boat. The Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday exit, ready for a wild night of partying with Scandinavia's biggest stars, but are forced to change their plans when they notice the time period. Realising that the townsfolk are whispering "Snedronningen" at them, the Doctor and Ruby climb off the ice and onto the land to find a man and his bodyguards pushing through the crowd to see them. The Doctor is delighted to see him too, as he is the famous fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen. However, he has no time to get acquainted as Hans' bodyguards Thomas and Kwame restrain him and Ruby, allowing Hans to check if Ruby is Snedronningen or not. He looks into her eyes and confirms that she is nothing to be afraid of. Hans apologises and explains that Snedronningen is a magical being capable of summoning an ice storm in June, as the Doctor examines the frost bees, nicknaming their material as "Shimmerglisten", and states that the polar cyclone came through the same fissure in the Time Vortex that the TARDIS was pulled through.

As the cyclone approaches land, however, the Doctor notices a figure at the eye of the storm: Snedronningen herself, a floating, pale blue-costumed ice queen, holding a sceptre and a book. She proclaims to have come for Hans, and when Thomas and Kwame protect him, she easily freezes them to death with her frost bees and shatters their bodies. As the Doctor leaps into action, Erik explains that Snedronningen is taken directly from Hans' fairy tales, which she describes as "a betrayal". As compensation, she has come to kill his child, wrongly believing it to be Erik. Ruby jumps in front to protect him, but Snedronningen attacks her with her beam of ice anyway, as the Doctor cries out to her.

Part Two: A Grim Fairy Tale

Snedronningen proclaims that Ruby is now her "Iceling" and demands that Hans follow her bidding. The Doctor interrupts and rationalises that the crystal on the end of her sceptre is cloaking her in the cold needed for her to survive, and therefore threatens to shatter its matrix with his sonic screwdriver to melt her. Snedronningen simply flies away with the frozen Ruby in tow, vowing to return. As the Doctor wonders how he can track them, Erik points to two twin girls who have caught a frost bee in a jar. Knowing that the frost bee's nanomatter will return to where it came from when he opens the jar, the Doctor tells Hans to take a deep breath of it, and suddenly, they both glow with the same icy energy and fly off in the direction of Snedronningen.

After crossing a sub-dimensional fissure in their flight, Hans spots their destination, which the Doctor identifies as an alternate version of the Faroe Islands. However, the nanomatter leaves them slightly too early, leaving them hurtling towards the ground, and their fall is broken by the soft Shimmerglisten that makes up the snowdrifts. The Doctor spots a large crystalline ice palace in the distance and decides that Snedronningen must be inside.

In the palace, Ruby wakes up, unfrozen but chained to a seat of ice by a metal ankle chain. She spots some figures nearby and asks them for help, but is shocked at seeing their true appearances: a fish-like mermaid, a match girl with flaming hair, and a boy with the head of a duck. Snedronningen greets Ruby and details her three "experiments" to her. Before Ruby can demand to find answers, she feels something on her back and turns to see shimmering blue wings making her take flight. Snedronningen announces her latest experiment: a fairy.

Part Three: Soldiers of Misfortune

Snedronningen explains that Ruby is now another of her creatures, transformed by her powers. Upon asking the others for an explanation, the match girl and duck boy tell Ruby that the stories of Snedronningen are infamous and that all children are told never to meet her gaze if she tries to enter their houses; they are the ones who looked. Snedronningen defends her actions, saying she took only the sick and despairing ones, but Ruby demands to know her goals.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Hans trek through the frozen wastes towards the ice palace. The Doctor asks what Hans' history with Snedronningen is, so he tells his story. As a boy, his family was very poor and could only afford the gift of stories, so eagerly listened to his father reading from The Thousand and One Nights every day. However, one day, his father left the family to work for a rich man whose son left to fight Napoleon, and with his mother illiterate, Hans desperately wished to hear more. This summoned Snedronningen, who placed stories in his head and offered to take his life, but he refused. His father had changed by the time he returned and refused to read, so Hans summed Snedronningen again, but his father sacrificed himself to keep Hans safe. The Doctor is surprised to hear that Hans did steal Snedronningen's stories, but they are interrupted when they spot a polar bear charging towards them.

In the ice palace, a giant talking beetle in shoes named Skarnbassen reports to Snedronningen about the Doctor and Hans' approach. She opens a window in space to watch them running from the polar bear. Ruby explains to her fellow captors that Snedronningen kidnapped her by mistake, shocking them all as an earthquake appears to hit. However, Snedronningen sends out her palace guard - a troop of 25 tin soldiers that shoot the polar bear dead. She tells the distraught Doctor through the window that she simply needs Hans alive, and some tin soldiers take him away as the rest aim at the Doctor. Noticing Ruby's fairy wings, he reluctantly says that there is nothing he can do, and he simply asks Snedronningen to spare Ruby the sight of his death. She refuses, saying that Ruby must believe in her power like everyone else on Earth, and orders the tin soldiers to fire.

Part Four: Unhappily Ever After

to be added

Characters

• Fifteenth Doctor
• Ruby Sunday
• Hans Christian Andersen
• Snedronningen
• Kwame
• Thomas
• Erik
• Erik's mama
• Asta
• Astrid
• Mermaid
• Match girl
• Duck boy
• Hans Christian Andersen's father
• Skarnbassen

Worldbuilding

The Doctor

• The Doctor claims that he can avoid feeling freezing temperatures due to having warm hearts.

Clothing

• The Doctor is wearing his previously used black leather jacket and light yellow tank top, but paired with a maroon and brown checked kilt, calf-length grey socks and avocado green boots.
• Ruby Sunday is wearing a white jumper with large black checks, royal blue shorts, and black boots.

Locations

• The Doctor and Ruby were attempting to visit the Scandi Superclub, which includes Avicii, Loreen and Måns Zelmerlöw in the Arctic Circle.
• Hans states that Snedronningen hails from the "Stellatundra".

Hans Christian Andersen

• Hans Christian Andersen's works include Thumbelina, The Red Shoes and The Ugly Duckling, although the Doctor gave him the idea for The Emperor's New Clothes.
• Hans grew up in a half-timbered house on Munkemøllestræde in Odense, Denmark.
• Hans' father was a shoemaker and was offered money to fight Napoleon.
• Hans' mother was illiterate.

Popular culture

• The Doctor claims that his sonic screwdriver can make a sonic pulse of the note G in the high tenth octave, which he states can shatter ice.
  • He also states that this is a higher note than Mariah Carey or Jenny Lind could hit; Hans is very familiar with Lind, nicknaming her "the Swedish Nightingale", and says that she was an inspiration for his poetry. The Doctor remembers that Hans "had a thing for her".
• Before the Doctor and Hans fall from their flight, the Doctor warns Hans that they are about to have "a Wile E Coyote moment".
• Hans' father read him The Thousand and One Nights as a child, which included stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba, jackal viziers and lion kings.

Notes

• This story's title is a reference to TV: The Hand of Fear ^[+]Loading...["The Hand of Fear (TV story)"].
• Like with COMIC: Liberation of the Daleks ^[+]Loading...["Liberation of the Daleks (comic story)"] and Mancopolis ^[+]Loading...["Mancopolis (comic story)"] before it, this story was not named in DWM 604 to spoil the surprise of its historical figure. It was referred to as "A brand-new comic strip" on the issue's spine and simply "Comic Strip" in the contents, with the title only being revealed when Hans Christian Andersen first appears on page 3.
• As implied by the character, Snedronningen is the original Danish name of Andersen's real-life 1844 fairy tale, "The Snow Queen". Several lines of narration in this story are taken almost directly from the original text.
  • Additionally, the characters of the mermaid, the match girl, the duck boy, Skarnbassen, and the tin soldiers are based on Andersen's "The Little Mermaid", "The Little Match Girl", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Beetle", and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", respectively.
• Hans' statement that nobody "has exerted a more ennobling influence" on his poetry than Jenny Lind is a real quote.
• The Doctor sarcastically asks if Snedronningen's lair is found at the "second star to the right and straight on till morning", quoting Peter Pan.

Original print details

(Publication with page count and closing captions)

• DWM 604: (6 pages): Next Issue: A Grim Fairy Tale
• DWM 605: (6 pages): Next Issue: Soldiers of Misfortune
• DWM 606: (6 pages): Next Issue: Unhappily Ever After
• DWM 607: (6 pages): The End

Continuity

• The Doctor refers to the Advance on Reykjavik, which was mentioned in TV: The Talons of Weng-Chiang ^[+]Loading...["The Talons of Weng-Chiang (TV story)"] and depicted in AUDIO: The Butcher of Brisbane ^[+]Loading...["The Butcher of Brisbane (audio story)"] and PROSE: Under Reykjavik ^[+]Loading...["Under Reykjavik (short story)"].
• The Doctor claims to have given Hans Christian Andersen the idea for the story, The Emperor's New Clothes, as the First Doctor previously claimed in TV: "Conspiracy".
• The Doctor notes that the frost bees are not the same type of snow that he and Ruby Sunday had encountered on previous occasions, starting in TV: The Church on Ruby Road ^[+]Loading...["The Church on Ruby Road (TV story)"].