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The Last Word was a Doctor Who Magazine comic story which celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Virgin New Adventures. Consequently, it featured the Seventh Doctor, Benny and an older Ace. As of June 2013[update], it remained the latest Seventh Doctor strip printed in the pages of DWM. Though the Seventh Doctor did make a few more comic appearances after Word — perhaps most extensively in IDW Publishing's The Forgotten — this was the last story in which he exclusively starred. Similarly, it was the final starring gig in comics for both his companions.
Although the Seventh Doctor had been in one fully-coloured story before, this was the character's first appearance in the pages of DWM after the magazine permanently moved to a colour strip. As a result it is, by some distance, the Seventh Doctor DWM comic that had the most sophisticated use of colour.
The story would have been taken in one of two ways by contemporaneous readers.
To those fans who followed the comic strip, but not the New Adventures, the story would likely have made little sense. Coming as it did over seven years since Benny's last appearance in a DWM comic story, and in the middle of the Eighth Doctor's run, the story was surprising for its lack of narrative introductions. Timewyrm, Puterspace, Benny, and Smithwood Manor all went without explanation in the narrative. Worse, the sudden reappearance of the older Ace in DWM contradicted her very last appearance in the magazine some five years before, when she unambiguously died.
Readers who were steeped in the lore of the New Adventures would have likely gobbled up all the continuity references, and seen Ace's re-emergence in DWM as a repudiation of her "blasphemous" death in Ground Zero. Such fans would have also enjoyed the first visual depictions of the Chelonians, a race created by the strip's writer, Gareth Roberts, and long used in other media. New Adventures fans would have also seen this story as a reasonable attempt at an anniversary story, since it reunited the Seventh Doctor with his opening New Adventures foe, Timewyrm, and appeared to end with that enemy's final defeat. The Last Word also included meta-textual elements, such as the hint that perhaps the Doctor actually wrote all the New Adventures novels and a panel in which a conveniently-placed chess board is in the foreground as the Doctor stands, out-of-focus, behind. Similarly, both Ace and Benny angrily question why adventures with with the Doctor "always have to be so bloody complicated" — a common fan complaint of the New Adventures.
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Continuity
- The Timewyrm was last seen in PROSE: Happy Endings.
