Living in the Past (short story)

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Living in the Past was a short story in DWM 162. It was significant for being the first appearance of Ace in DWM fiction. Morever, it offered an explanation for where she had been for the several years that had elapsed since her introduction on television — namely, that she had been living in the Cretaceous period of Earth's pre-history.

It, and Teenage Kicks that followed it, were unusual cases of DWM prose that was narratively continuous with the DWM comic strip. The events of this story were in fact prefigured by the issue's comic story, Doctor Conkerer, which was explicitly said to be the adventure immediately before the Doctor "picked up Ace".

Summary

The Doctor arrives in Mongolia during the Cretaceous period to pick up Ace, whom he had dropped off there. Along the way he encounters a pit of Dholes and an alien slave who has escaped from a nearby construction site. Ace arrives with a herd of various dinosaurs to trample the site, destroying it and freeing the slaves.

Characters

References

Notes

Continuity

  • Ace first expressed a wish to visit the Cretaceous in DW: The Happiness Patrol.
  • The Doctor mentioned Ace was visiting the Cretaceous in DWM: Train-Flight, which explained why he was travelling alone during his early DWM comic appearances.

Timeline

This was the first appearance of Ace in a Marvel UK publication. It is unclear precisely what story precedes this for her. The Seventh Doctor's entire runs in DWM and IHP precede this story. Somewhere between DW: Survival and DWM: A Cold Day in Hell (the Seventh Doctor's first comic strip adventure), he dropped off Ace to live with dinosaurs only to pick her up again in this short story.

So the best we can say is that:

Since Teenage Kicks is another short story, though, Ace's proper comic debut, however, isn't until DWM: Fellow Travellers. Nevertheless, these intervening prose stories do "count" in the Marvel UK continuity, because the Doctor mentions in Doctor Conkerer that he's about to "pick Ace up". Since both Conkerer and Living in the Past were in the same issue, the connection between the two is especially obvious.