Synopsis: Sean's been writing a Doctor Who story for twenty years, but can't seem to pull it together. Then help comes from an entirely unexpected source... Notes: This one-part strip was an emergency fill-in replacing Endgame, the eighth Doctor's DWM strip debut.

• A blur between fact and fiction by Tim Roll-Pickering

A blur between fact and fiction by Tim Roll-Pickering 22/4/00

Even today it is still extremely rare for the boundaries of fact and fiction to cross over in Doctor Who stories, with the result that the Doctor has generally only encountered parodies of fans, such as in the New Adventure Return of the Living Dad (which coincidentally hit the shelves the same month as this strip first saw print). However Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time is something very different. It comes across as one long sequence of though, with a natural mixture of flashback and fantasy competing with reality.

Throughout the strip we get to see many scenes from the childhood of a Doctor Who fan who grew up in the Seventies, such as Basil Brush being shown before it, the music, the fan-fiction, the notoriety at school and then a gradual disillusionment coming with age. Judging from a couple of references I'd say that Sean was born in about 1968 or 1969, making him about eleven years older than me. This could have potentially alienated me, since I belong to the comparatively small number of British fans who discovered the series in the 1980s but I can still enjoy this strip and identify with many of the situations, even though I am naturally more likely to think of Vervoids and Tetraps rather than Kraals and Vogans when listing some of the monsters from my childhood. And of course (nearly) all of us rate both Daleks and Cybermen quite highly.

But beneath all this nostalgia there's a series point too. For a long time Sean had been avoiding the series feeling he had grown up. But through writing his story he has realised just what the Doctor really means to us all. It is a very strong message and for me the ironic thing is that I should have remembered it. This is because DWM #243 was the last issue that I read before I entered the sixth form to study for A-Levels. Although I didn't realise it at the time, that was a major turning point in my life with many of the old traditions and interests suddenly becoming a lot less certain for me than they had previously been and I subsequently drifted away from several of my hobbies to the point where they became increasingly less and less a part of my life. But like Sean I eventually rediscovered the series and all its spin-offs. So today Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time has even more relevancy to me than it originally did.

The only part of the strip that I am not so keen on is the artwork which is decisively different from the styles of both Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon. But this is more than made up for that fact that both the pictures and words are provided by Sean, thus allowing him total control of his memories of the series and his vision of how his own story should look.

Oh and the Doctor's right. The 'end of Part One' really is a wonderful bit and it shows that his advice has been taken. All in all this is a wonderful look at an often neglected aspect of fandom that will remain relevant to fans of all generations for a long time to come. 9/10