From Doctor Who Monthly #88-89
A Review by Finn Clark 12/10/04
I have no idea why this story is traditionally included with the Voyager story arc. Okay, that's a lie. Yes, I do. It's the start of John Ridgway's magnificent run on the strip, it's a great story and it introduces the 6th Doctor and his new companion Frobisher. Who wouldn't want to reprint it? (And reprinted it most certainly has been: in graphic collections, the Voyager graphic novel and even a Golden Wonder mini-comic, given away free with packets of crisps. The coloured version by Gina Hart looks nice, infinitely better than the computer-coloured John Ridgway strips we saw in the 1990s.)
However as a story, The Shape Shifter has nothing to do with Astrolabus but instead is a sequel to The Moderator (DWM 84-87). I have a theory that Steve Parkhouse was planning to finish Dogbolter's story properly but then he saw John Ridgway's art, was blown away, changed his plans and switched back to fantasy territory as in The Tides of Time. You see, after his first half-year of 4th Doctor standalones, Steve Parkhouse tended to work in eight-month arcs. The Tides of Time, The Stockbridge Horror and 4-Dimensional Vistas all had short prequels which effectively turned them into eight-month stories. The Voyager story arc lasted ten months, but Steve Parkhouse was obviously having a ball writing that... and besides, it was his DWM swansong. After it ended, he left.
However The Moderator and The Shape Shifter only comprise five issues' worth of story, despite the fact that The Shape Shifter resolves nothing. The Doctor merely pisses off Dogbolter even more than before! In fact years later Steve Parkhouse ended up writing the issue of Death's Head in which Dogbolter hired Death's Head to kill the 7th Doctor, so arguably this story arc did get completed in his favoured eight-issue fashion after all. (Or near enough... Time Bomb! is 22 pages long instead of 24.) See also The Incomplete Death's Head.
More importantly, this story is a lot of fun! Given all the twists and turns of its plot, it's weird to think that it's only a two-parter. In a sense it's like the Doctor Who equivalent of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch, in which the Doctor has to deal with criminals, hired killers and the underworld before eventually doing over the galaxy's richest frog to the tune of a cool 250,000 mazumas. It feels odd to see the Doctor insisting on his share of the loot at the end, but it ended up being given to charity (specifically the Save the Zyglot trust in Polly the Glot) and one suspects that for the Doctor, the real fun was in the chase.
However the star of the show is Frobisher, albeit not yet under that name. As yet he's just Avan Tarklu, 45-year-old private investigator with a classical education and (in his default shape of a four-foot-tall plasticene man) only four digits on each hand. Oh, and he's a shapeshifter... but hey, you'd guessed that already. It's an unusual kind of morphing, too. He doesn't just change shape, but mass. When he turns into a pigeon or a buzzing fly, he's capable of flight despite the fact that a super-dense 25-lb fly would be more accurately known as a "walk".
Frobisher also tends to wear spectacles (whether he's a private investigator, a barfly or a TARDIS console). That trait soon disappeared once he became a penguin.
This is a great story. It's witty, it's surprising and it has a wonderful cliffhanger. You'll never see the TARDIS do that again! John Ridgway does a terrific job (especially bearing in mind how little he'd seen of Colin Baker's Doctor when drawing episode one) and brings a huge amount to the story. The TV show may have been entering a troubled period, but the comic strips were in their golden age. Awesome stuff.
Frobisher: Genesis by Noe Geric 9/6/21
The atmosphere of the DWM comic strip was radically different when the Sixth Doctor first appeared. While the Fifth Doctor strips were more adventurous and pretty close to the TV show, the C. Baker comic era turned into a festival of weirdness. With imagination as the only limit of the comic strip, it was possible for Steve Parkhouse to add a walking hamburger, a talking TARDIS console and a credible conglomerate on Venus in his script.
Of course, The Shape Shifter is well known as Frobisher the penguin's first appearance. Here, it's the only time where he doesn't wear the shape of a penguin. It's not until the first episode of Voyager that he chooses his new appearance and his nickname. I always thought his name ''Avan Tarklu'' was introduced in Mission: Impractical. But while re-reading this, I found it was written on the door of Frobisher's office. The character isn't properly named during the story, but I still think Frobisher is a better name for a companion. It's also one of the few stories where he shows the full extent of his shapeshifting capabilities.
The Doctor is put in the background for most of the story. He is a mix between the C. Baker TV and the Big Finish versions. He is here to fight Josiah Dogbolter after the events of the last comic strip, The Moderator. Of course, for the strip, it's natural to continue a storyline from the previous opus with the new Doctor, but it feels weird as some years must've passed for the Doctor between these two adventures.
The rest of the cast isn't interesting. Some weird aliens, a robot and a bunch of soldiers. Dogbolter come back briefly, and I think he would've made a very good recuring villain for a big story arc, instead of Astrolabus. The setting is also interesting: a futuristic city, Venus... All perfectly drawn by John Ridgway. But, having seen what the colourised version of this strip is, I rather prefer when Ridgway drawings are in B&W. His style doesn't work very well with colour.
And the story is incredibly funny. The Dr and Avan/Frobisher trying to trick Dogbolter is a funny piece. The TARDIS console talking is one of the most unexpected cliffhangers ever and the jokes are brilliant. Parkhouse delivered a simple story that manage to be incredibly weird but also incredibly funny. The Shape Shifter is one of these stories that can only work in comic form, because it's too visual for audio or novel and too expensive for TV.
Frobisher's debut begins the renaissance of the comic strip. The Sixth Doctor DWM era begin with a simple story that show us what the next two years will be made of. Just read it: 8.5/10