From TV Comic #716-719
Published: 1965
A Review by Finn Clark 22/3/05
It's Neville Main's last Doctor Who story! (He also did stories for the 1965 TV Comic Holiday Special and the 1966 TV Comic Annual, one of which I've never seen and the other of which I've already reviewed, but this was the end of his tenure as the strip's regular artist.) He didn't create the world's most striking artwork, but he created some strikingly original stories that repay rereading even forty years later.
This is a modest little eight-pager, but a deceptive one. At first you think you know where it's going... it's a rocky wilderness inhabited by eighty-foot-tall lizard monsters in a story called Lizardworld. One of them steals the TARDIS and carries it away. "Jurassic Park!" thinks the reader, and in the hands of most writers your predictions would be fulfilled. (Certain TV Comic eras would have even given the Doctor a ray gun with which he could gleefully blast the dinosaurs.)
Uh-uh. Guess again.
The misdirection comes from the artwork, oddly enough. Just because Neville Main's line drawings are simplistic, that doesn't mean that his visual storytelling can't have sophistication. Episode one mostly keeps its lizards as gigantic scaly hands with claws the size of your arm, the rest of its monstrous body hidden offscreen or seen only from a distance. It's a classic horror technique if you think about it, except that no one over the age of six could really be frightened by Neville Main's jolly drawings. It's still misdirection, though - and deliberately so.
When I saw episode two, I laughed my head off.
"My, my, aren't we friendly!" says Dr Who, standing in the palm of a bug-eyed gecko thing as it scratches his head. They're so cute! Eighty feet tall, yes, but still cute. It's got this gormless expression that reminds me slightly of Kermit the Frog. Instead of dealing with monsters that want to rend their living flesh, the TARDIS crew find themselves dealing with monsters that want to put them on their mantelpiece and play with them! Offhand I can't remember that twist being done anywhere else, though it's funnier in hindsight than it actually is on the page. It's still a cool idea, though.
As a story, it's linear and somewhat dry. The dumb lizards wouldn't have much personality if it wasn't for Neville Main's comedy art, while the TARDIS crew can't do anything but run, jump, climb and (at one point) indulge in a little hypnotism. They have no one else to talk to. There aren't any other characters! This story might have worked better as a six-pager like Moon Landing (TV Comic 710-712) or Time in Reverse (TV Comic 713-715), which were so short that they didn't have to worry about being anything other than themselves. Lizardworld is basically a one-line gag that's been expanded into a story, like those two other tales I mentioned, but at four episodes it drags a little. Ah well. I like it anyway.
Lizardworld was reprinted in DWCC 23. It's the kind of apparent throwaway that you'll read in ten minutes and will probably forget a few hours later, but it's cleverer than it looks. Hell, I could say that about most of Neville Main's entire run on the Doctor Who strip. When I decided to review some TV Comic strips, my first thought was to review entire eras en bloc, e.g. Neville Main's year, Bill Mevin's half-year, etc. For Bill Mevin that wouldn't be unreasonable, but I now think it would have been criminal to lump together all of Neville Main's stories like that. Cleverness, subtlety, imagination and some genuine surprises can be found in his work, even if it sometimes looks a little silly.