From Doctor Who Magazine #111-113
A Review by Finn Clark 12/11/04
Nature of the Beast works better as a complete 21-page story than it did in 1986 when coming out month by month. That made it look talky, slow and uneventful, probably because it is all of those things. Simon Furman didn't exactly write the world's most exciting script. On its own each episode is kinda dull, but the whole thing is... well, it's okay.
It's a gentle story, with an inverted Beauty and the Beast moral at the end. (I actually prefer this version, since I never liked the fact that Beauty learns to look past outward appearances... and then gets rewarded with a handsome prince! Yeah, right. That's really in tune with the story's moral. What's more, every film version of the story I've seen has made me prefer the Beast to the prince anyway.) There's a monster which isn't really a monster, versus a nasty piece of work in the form of Commander Hon of the Yl-Caan. (There's also a love story of sorts, but it's mostly told rather than shown and so doesn't have the impact that I suspect it was meant to have. It's vaguely sweet, though.)
John Ridgway gets to draw lots of lovely woodlands, landscapes, rock formations, etc. It's a good-looking story, as you'd expect, though the splash page at the end of the first episode doesn't quite work. John Ridgway ain't Jack Kirby. He's more of a painter with ink than an adrenaline junkie. Give him a splash page of natural beauty and he'll knock you silly, but "hey, the monster's attacking" isn't playing to his strengths.
There's a brief glimpse of Davison, for those who care about such things. (The 6th Doctor remembers his predecessor just before bowling a rock like a cricket ball.) It's also interesting to note that the Yl-Caan are a warrior race bred for combat who needed an alien alliance even to get decent space travel... but their identity cards are written in English. (See the seventh page of the second episode.) Either the Yl-Caan were bred from or by mankind, or at this point in history Earth's cultural influence had spread far beyond our own worlds. They look human, if that means anything.
Nature of the Beast isn't a great story, but it's pleasant enough if you're not forced to read it at the snail's pace of eight pages a month. It tries to be like TV Who (with continuity references, a TV-like 6th Doctor and an opening which is like a TARDIS scene but outdoors), which frankly isn't a sensible ambition for a comic strip but earns points for effort. Frobisher and Peri are good together, incidentally. They feel natural. Personally I'd say that this TARDIS crew works better than the more usual Doctor-Peri pairing as seen in the TV stories.
This isn't a memorable tale and I've never particularly rated it, but this reread made it look better than I remembered. Not much admittedly, certainly not enough to make me call it good, but enough that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading it. It's inoffensive, it looks pretty and its heart is in the right place... you could do worse.