The Official Doctor Who Magazine #90

History

Writer Steve Parkhouse and artist John Ridgway—already the creative partnership behind the preceding 'Shape Shifter' two-parter—continued their collaboration under editor Alan McKenzie, who had recently renamed the publication 'The Official Doctor Who Magazine' beginning with issue #85 in February 1984. The 'Voyager' storyline launched in this issue represented Parkhouse deliberately calling his shot on a multi-part arc, a structural ambition that contrasted with the looser plotting of the Fifth Doctor strip era; Ridgway, who was drawing Hellblazer simultaneously, later noted his particular affection for illustrating the Doctor Who work, and the surreal, space-spanning imagery of 'Voyager' gave him ample room to demonstrate why.

Trivia · 8 facts

• DWM #90 (cover-dated July 1984) is the issue in which the Whifferdill Avan Tarklu formally adopts the name 'Frobisher'—chosen because he felt it sounded British—and permanently settles into his penguin form for the remainder of his comic appearances.
• Frobisher is a Whifferdill, a shapeshifting extraterrestrial species; in his assumed natural form he is a pale-yellow, featureless humanoid roughly three to four feet tall, but he preferred the penguin shape he had adopted in memory of his ex-wife Francine.
• The issue opens the five-part 'Voyager' story arc (DWM #90–94), written by Steve Parkhouse with art by John Ridgway and letters by Annie Halfacree, under editor Alan McKenzie.
• Two new antagonists debut in this issue: Astrolabus, a renegade Time Lord who stole 'The Book of the Old Time' from Gallifrey before the Doctor was born, and Voyager, a mysterious death-like cosmic entity whose ship first appears (in a dream sequence) here.
• The Sixth Doctor's formal DWM comic era had only just begun; Frobisher was conceived as his dedicated strip companion from the outset, giving the comics a companion original to the page at a time when image rights for TV companion Peri Brown had not yet been secured.
• Frobisher's character arc across the DWM strip ran from #88 through #133, spanning both the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, making him one of the longest-running original companions in the publication's history.
• The 'Voyager' material was collected and reprinted multiple times: in a 1989 Marvel UK graphic novel, in IDW's colourised 'Doctor Who Classics' series (Volume 6 and Omnibus Volume 2), and in a Panini Books trade paperback that restored the original episodic black-and-white format.
• Frobisher later crossed into audio drama, voiced by Robert Jezek in two Big Finish Productions plays—'The Holy Terror' (2000) and 'The Maltese Penguin' (2002)—and appeared in IDW's 50th Anniversary miniseries 'Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time' (2013), illustrating the reach of a character whose definitive identity was fixed in this issue.

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