The Hans of Fear (comic story)

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The Hans of Fear
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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

As the tin soldiers aim at the Doctor, their sergeant - the only one who looks different from the rest - orders them to stop, which infuriates Snedronningen. He tells Hans to look closely at him, and Hans instantly recognises him as the father he lost as a child. Hans' father speaks through the window and tells Snedronningen that because she continued to harass Hans when she promised not to, their contract has ended. The earthquake intensifies, narrowly avoiding impaling the Doctor and Hans with icicles. This also allows Ruby to unhook her chain from the ice and fly freely, although Snedronningen takes advantage of the distraction and snatches Hans through the window, closing it behind her. The Doctor talks the tin soldiers into letting him and Hans' father into the ice palace.

As Snedronningen prepares to transform Hans as she always intended, Ruby swings her ball and chain at her staff, knocking it out of her hands. However, considering she no longer needs Ruby, Snedronningen declares her fairy experiment terminated and removes Ruby's wings, nearly sending her plummeting to her doom before the other experiments save her life. Snedronningen begins to place her stories in Hans' mind again, and the Doctor, scanning her with the sonic nearby, tells Hans' father that she is using a data stream. Meeting up with Ruby again, he finally realises her goal - to implement a technological enchantment in Hans' next book, so every child on Earth who reads it will fall under her spell. Although he prepares to divert her data stream, Ruby points out that the earthquakes only occurred when people claimed not to believe in Snedronningen, which the Doctor describes as "genius". He orders everybody in the palace to clap if they do not believe in her any more; they all join in.

Snedronningen rages in vain as the diminishing belief shrinks her - first small enough to hold, and eventually nano-atomic. The Doctor explains that she and the frost bees were part of a nano-colony that came to Earth on a sub-dimensional scout ship from another reality that she repurposed as the jewel at the end of her staff. The other humans she turned into experiments were nano-creations too, and they begin to fade away as their memory cannot stay intact for long without her. As the palace begins to collapse, the Doctor, Ruby, and Hans grab onto the staff and pilot it home. Watching on, Hans' father bids his son one final farewell as he disappears.

Back in summertime Copenhagen, the Doctor and Ruby promise to take the jewel-shaped ship somewhere safe and begin to return to the TARDIS. Hans asks one more question: could the people that Snedronningen experimented on have somehow endured? The Doctor admits that it is unlikely, but says that maybe their essence was drawn back to watch over them. As the TARDIS departs, Hans admits to himself that he cannot believe in happy ever afters any more. However, as he does, he overhears the young boy Erik insisting to his mother that he saw a little mermaid at the harbour mouth, and Hans turns to him and smiles.

Characters

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

Hans Christian Andersen

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.
  • The Doctor describes Snedronningen as a "Vampire Tinkerbell".

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.
  • 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. He later references it again when telling Snedronningen's experiments to clap "if you don't believe in fairy tales".

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

v • e
DWM Fifteenth Doctor comic stories
Ruby
Mancopolis • The Hans of Fear • The Monster Makers
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