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This volume transitions us out Mills & Wagner era into that of first Steve Moore and then Steven Parkhouse; at the same time, the Doctor Who magazine goes from a weekly to a monthly, and the stories decrease in length. I'm guessing this is because it's one thing to serialize a story in eight parts when that means it takes eight weeks, and another when when that means it takes eight months! Later the mag would reverse this decision-- which I think was the right call, based on this volume.

Dragon's Claw
This is the last of the big fourth Doctor comic stories; in a way, it feels like Steve Moore's attempt to do a Mills & Wagner, so to speak. Interesting setting, big enemy, long-form storytelling... yet this never clicked for me. I'm not sure I could say why. (Dave Gibbons actually says something similar in the intro to Iron Legion.) Maybe it's because the Doctor and Sharon and K-9 spend most of the story sitting around? For a story about ninja warrior monks (there's your RTD connection again!) and Sontarans, it's surprisingly light on action; compare this to The Iron Legion or The Dogs of Doom, which are constantly moving moving moving. The stakes feel very abstract too. I guess the emperor is threatened, but so what? Anyway it seems to me that this story marks the beginning of a slump for the strip. The Time Witch was a wobble, but could have been an aberration; this story confirms it.

The Collector
This one starts out pretty good: the Doctor and Sharon land in Blackcastle, but get sucked to an asteroid by a guy who's been kidnapping humans and putting them on display for centuries. Trying to get him free from a deranged computer, the Doctor accidentally gets him and K-9 killed... so he just goes back in time and undoes it, the end. Sure, there's some bafflegab to justify why he can't always do this, but it's a big cheat regardless. Plus he never actually sets the victims of the Collector free! (The bit of bafflegab is lettered in a slightly different hand, which makes me think it was added at the last minute when someone objected that the Doctor would do this all the time if it were possible.) I think it debuts a formula we'll see through the rest of Steve Moore's time on the strip: more on that later.

Dreamers of Death
The TARDIS lands on an Earth colony planet where the Doctor has some old friends; the use of alien creatures to create shared dream experiences has become all the rage since his last visit. Well, it turns out the alien creatures are evil. You probably could write an interesting story about this concept, but this isn't it; the dream stuff is abandoned in favor of the creatures merging into a giant devil-shaped gestalt creature and stomping through the city. The Doctor defeats it with a hose.

This is Sharon's last story; suddenly she's decided to start a new life with a guy she meets in the story, even more sudden than Leela falling in love with Andred, which is saying something. It's disappointing but not too disappointing because introductory story and maybe Dogs of Doom aside she's never really had much to do except stand there while the Doctor explains things. She feels a very RTD companion, like I've said, but without storytelling actually focused on her as a character, she quickly becomes generic. The idea that she could go straight from 14 to 18 raises more problems than it solves... and now she's settling down!? It's all a bit weird. (Sharon says there's nothing for her in Blackcastle now that she's grown up... yet in one of these stories, she mentioned having a father! I am pretty sure Big Finish made her into an
orphan.)

The Life Bringer! / War of the Words / Spider-God
Here we settle into the Steve Parkhouse pattern (into which you could also insert The Collector and, to a lesser extent, Dreamers of Death): mediocre sci-fi adventures that feel like rejected Twilight Zone scripts with some kind of sting in the tail. In The Life Bringer!, the Doctor meets and liberates Prometheus. Is he the real god? At the end, Prometheus heads to Earth to make life. Is this the origin of humanity in the distant past, or its resurrection in the distant future? I feel like the end wants you to go "spooky..." but frankly I didn't
care.

War of the Words is about aliens fighting over a library; it has a pretty dumb resolution. Spider-God is about a weird alien biology, where the whole story is built around a twist ending that feels like it comes from a mediocre American sf story of the 1930s. At least Dave Gibbons draws the hell out of everything!

The Deal / End of the Line
Here is the debut of Steve Parkhouse as strip writer, who quickly makes his style known: bleak stories of an ineffective Doctor. In The Deal, the TARDIS and an alien soldier get stuck on a battlefield, and team up to get off, but the Doctor ditches the soldier and he dies when the Doctor realizes he's a monster. In End of the Line, the Doctor faces zombies in a ruined cityscape; he helps some survivors escape but the story ends with him realizing there's no place for them to escape to... and they all die en route anyway! Ouch, geeze, way to cheer me up, New Steve. The dark brooding cityscapes of End of the Line are pretty neat, though.

By this point, things that remind me of the RTD years have largely vanished from the strip... with the exception of the fact that End of the Line is about a bunch of people trapped in a dystopian urban center yearning to get out to an edenic countryside, but who need the Doctor to repair their transport system. So, yeah, "Gridlock" again!

The Free-Fall Warriors
This is like one of those episodes of a tv show where the main cast does little except meet some people who are clearly being set up for a spin-off. The Doctor's on vacation, where he meets a science fiction writer named Ivan Asimoff (!). The two of them then meet a group of stunt pilots called the Freefall Warriors (that's how it's always written in the story, though part one is called "the Free-Fall Warriors" and part two "the Free Fall Warriors"). One is a big tiger and is named "Big Cat"; another has a machine head and is called "Machine Head"; one is named "Bruce." You can tell Parkhouse put a lot of work into this. The Doctor and Asimoff mostly sit there while the Freefall Warriors thwart a raider attack in contrived circumstances. I barely get why the Doctor is in this story; the purpose of the Asimoff character is even less clear!

Like I said, it feels like the Freefall Warriors are being set up for bigger things, but if so, they didn't amount to much; Big Cat reappeared solo in the Doctor Who Summer Special for 1982, and there was a four-issue back-up strip in Captain Britain in 1985 showing how they all met. None of this material has been collected as far as I know.

Junk-Yard Demon
For the first time in my DWM journey, we have a strip not drawn by Dave Gibbons. (I know he didn't draw #17-18, but I haven't got there yet!) Mike McMahon and Adolfo Buylla have a drastically different style: lots of dark, distorted proportions, sparse backgrounds, detailed mechanics. I love their boggle-eyed Tom Baker. The story is fun, probably the best Parkhouse-written tale in this volume. Actually, the best-written tale in this volume full stop. The Doctor meets some scavengers who repurpose Cybermen as servants; one is accidentally reactivated and it steals the TARDIS, along with one of the scavengers. It's a neat, atmospheric story, slightly injured by some unclear storytelling from McMahon and Buylla; there are times I didn't follow the action right away.

The Neutron Knights
The fourth Doctor departs DWM at his most ineffectual in Steve Parkhouse's most depressing tale yet: the Doctor stands and watches as barbaric space knights invade a castle; everyone dies when Merlin overloads an atomic reactor! Wow, Steve Parkhouse really hates happy endings, huh? This one foreshadows The Tides of Time but I didn't think it really worked on its own. Which, to be fair, it's not meant to be read on its own. I might be pausing a bit before picking up my next volume, but back in the day, it was straight from this to part one of The Tides of Time in Feb. 1982!

Stray Observations:

• I am reliably informed that The Collector features the introduction of that old Doctor Who comics convention, the use of "VWORP! VWORP!" to represent the sound of the TARDIS materializing. This is a surprisingly hard thing to research on the Internet; I found one article on BuzzFeed that clarified it dates back years... all the way to the Matt Smith era! Wow.
  
• The Free-Fall Warriors features, I believe, the debut of the long-running DWM future space currency, the mazuma.
• Weirdly, The Neutron Knights's narration captions are in the past tense. I feel like this almost never happens in comic stories (unless there's some kind of retrospective frame). I found it jarring, but I think it's just a Steve Parkhouse thing, as I noticed he did this in some of his Transformers strips as well.

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The second volume of Fourth Doctor strips from Doctor Who Magazine, in between those published in the collections The Iron Legion and The Tides of Time. These are all solid stories, with the two standouts for me being "The Life Bringer" also by Moore and Gibbons, which brings the Doctor into the Prometheus legend, and the grim "End of the Line" by Steve Parkhouse and Dave Gibbons, in which there is no happy ending. I enjoyed them a lot when I first read them almost forty years ago and I enjoyed revisiting them. ( )