World Without Night was the second comic strip story in the 1968 Doctor Who Annual. It featured the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly.
Summary
The Doctor, Ben and Polly visit a planet with three suns, where night falls only once every three hundred years.
Plot
Ben, Polly and The Doctor landed on a new planet and as they leave the TARDIS, they are surrounded by flying men in a stadium. The Doctor is intrigued, and so one of the flying men tell him they have been sent by the elders to observe the festival.
He takes them through roads in the sky to an observatory where the ancients work. This is where the travellers meet Igor, and he tells them he was expecting to arrive earlier. He explains that they have 3 suns on this planet, and one of them has disappeared. That every 300 years they go into an eclipse and there will be a scene of devastation. He asks the Doctor to take notes on everything they have learned and to come back to give them to the future generation. As the travellers leave they see the planet engulfed in flames. But the Doctor was still determined to re-visit the planet of light.
Characters
References
to be added
Notes
- The plot borrows heavily from the 1941 Isaac Asimov story "Nightfall".
- The comic strip is not in colour, but monochromatic, with pages 1, 4 and 5 with purple shading and pages 1, 2, 3 , 6 and 7 with blue shading.
- While Ben and Polly refer to the Doctor as "Doctor", the linking text refers to him as "Dr Who".
- This comic seems to have been written with William Hartnell in mind for the Doctor, as he calls Ben and Polly "children" and is mistaken for an envoy of the Ancients.
Continuity
to be added