Dead on Arrival

"Jo looks inside... and sees with a ghastly shock that it is her own body lying in the coffin."

Writer: Edgar Hodges

Format: Comic Strip

Released: September 1974

Printed in: Doctor Who Annual 1975

Featuring: Third Doctor, Jo

Synopsis 

Jo Grant thinks she is dead, after she is transported to an alternate Earth due to cosmic dust reacting with a molecular adjuster...

Verdict 

Hurrah! Dead on Arrival has managed to pull off something that is very rare to me when it comes to Doctor Who Annual stories - it genuinely impressed me! This was certainly one of my favourite Annual comic strips ever as it was just magnificent from start to finish! You can get a lovely taste of what the story was all about from my picture and quote above - that really was the highlight of the story! Job thought she had died! Not for the first time either! This actually surprisingly bore a couple of similarities to the acclaimed Companion Chronicle The Many Deaths of Jo Grant. Of course, she only thought she'd died once in this comic strip story but the idea was similar which is interesting to crop up amongst the same TARDIS pairing over the years and across the different formats of stories. But repetition can sometimes be a good thing! I loved the way Jo got molecularly shifted to the Breelian plane! The Doctor was attempting something that didn't seem all that convincing, which seems to ring bells for whatever reason, and it went wrong thanks to the cosmic dust encountered by the TARDIS at precisely the wrong time! The Doctor attending Jo's funeral was a shocking scene! There he was, in flesh and bone, at the funeral of his companion. Of course, this couldn't be right unless things changed drastically following the events of The Green Death. So we knew Jo was going to survive some way or another! I loved her determination, despite accepting that she was dead, to somehow make contact with the Doctor and warn him of the Breelian invasion plans on Earth. They wanted to wipe out the "flabby" creatures and take over. It seemed like the Doctor was going to let them through but he managed to save Jo and prevent the materialiser coming through, which was in turn destroyed, and prevent the invasion for billions of years. The Brigadier was pretty useless despite appearing which was comical, but overall a really good comic story told over a small amount of pages. A job really well done! 

Rating: 9/10