From Doctor Who Magazine #215-217
A Review by Finn Clark 5/10/04
The Lunar Strangers wasn't Martin Geraghty's first Doctor Who comic strip, but it was his first for the regular magazine. Previously he'd drawn Bringer of Darkness in a Summer Special, starring the 2nd Doctor and the Daleks, but that was only seven pages. Martin would go on to draw many hundreds of pages for DWM, usually for the 8th Doctor, but to all intents and purposes he started here. It looks... not bad, actually. The faces are a bit unfortunate, Tegan being particularly unrecognisable, but Martin's clearly having fun drawing space cows and I like his use of black.
On the writing side, this was Gareth Roberts's first DWM strip. To date he's written seven and overall they've been... okay. At his worst he's churned out page-filler like Operation Proteus (DWM 231-233), Plastic Millennium (1994 Winter Special) or, worst of all, The Seventh Segment (1995 Key to Time Special). This is a step up from those, thank goodness. Admittedly it's hardly the most serious-minded story in the world, but what were you hoping for from Gareth Roberts? For some people this is the strip's nadir of silliness, which personally I'd say is something of a compliment for something spawned during DWM's two years of bland MA strips. At least The Lunar Strangers is remembered!
If you've never read this story, it's about space cows (the Dryrth). Evil space cows. Personally I don't see the problem. We've seen space horses in The Wreckers (TV Comic 1223-1231) and Perceptions (Radio Times 3805-3814), the latter being a direct piece of TV continuity. If horses are fine, why not cows? Of course Gareth Roberts is taking the piss something rotten, but at heart it's not a million miles from the central gag of The Star Beast. Adorable bovines gaze at you with their big brown eyes, only to transform into foaming psychopaths the moment your back is turned. Fortunately Gareth has two cows with distinct personalities: Vartex (the pathetic, excitable one) and Ravnok (the cow in charge).
I admit it. They're funny. Silly, yes, but hardly more so than something like Steve Parkhouse's Polly The Glot (DWM 95-97). Besides, if you can't enjoy a little silliness then why are you reading the DWM comic strip... or indeed being a fan of Doctor Who in the first place?
There's a dating oddity. The TARDIS arrives during "another ordinary working day on the moon". Moon Village One is a research and study base run by Commander Jackson (who's been in the service for forty years) and her assistant Jeffries, but it can't be the only lunar base out there. Jackson assumes that the Doctor and his friends are scientists who've arrived by buggy rather than space rocket.
So far, so 21st-century. However the date is given as 7 June 2015 and Freda Jackson's career must have started under NASA in the 1970s. Admittedly when this story was published 2015 was over twenty years away, but even so I can't believe Gareth Roberts believed we'd have multiple manned lunar bases in operation by that time. I guess we'll have to classify it alongside the UNIT-era British space programme (Ambassadors of Death, The Android Invasion, etc.) and leave it at that.
I rather like this story. It's a memorable tale from an unmemorable era, remembered to the point where there's even a Dryrth gag on p9 of The Tomorrow Windows. It's funny, it's light-hearted and it's attractively drawn if you can forgive a few dodgy faces. Recommended.