Invasion of the Daleks (comic story)

Invasion of the Daleks was the first original story in the history of Doctor Who merchandising tie-ins. As the lead story in The Dalek Book it was the first time the public saw any characters from Doctor Who outside the television series. It established the basic premise of the entire book — often considered to be the first Dalek annual — and introduced readers to the three main protagonists of the volume: Jeff, Andy and Mary Stone.

It proposed the notion of the very well-inhabited Solar System falling prey to a massive Dalek invasion at an unspecified date — but presumably one in the very far future.

Summary
Through a series of circumstances, the peoples of the Solar System fail to understand the warning signs their various outposts are picking up. From the planet Skaro, a threat is emerging across all the worlds of the system. The entire Solar System is subdued swiftly, largely because the peoples of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars fail to put up any resistance.

The Daleks come to Venus where they take the idyllic city of New Paris without great difficulty. But the Stone siblings aren't in New Paris. They're on a scientific expedition close to the Churchill Mountains. Jeff and Mary are captured soon after the Daleks begin their march into the outer fringes of the planet. Andy eludes capture but manages to hear his siblings through a nearby Dalek's communicator. They're deliberately talking loudly enough for their capturing Dalek's communicator to pick up their speech. Thinking there might be a way that Jeff can hear him, Jeff muses that he hopes Andy will "remember the mountains". It's a code that Andy swiftly recognises. His brother is telling him to remember Winston Churchill's defiance in the face of impossible odds. Andy vows to find his siblings and to rid his planet of this terrible new Dalek menace.

Characters

 * Jeff Stone
 * Andy Stone
 * Mary Stone
 * Dalek Emperor

Invading the Solar System
Because this story sets up the entire book, it's important to understand the fundamentals of the Daleks' plan. Yet David Whitaker's writing style is so minimalistic that you can easily pass by certain details — and they certainly won't be repeated for you later in the text. So it's important to thoroughly inspect this highly unusual invasion strategy.

Because the illustrations soon fill with images of huge fleets of individual Daleks, you could easily miss the point that they're all operating from Skaro. Skaro has been physically moved into orbit of the Sun. Its orbit is at an odd angle to the rest of the planets in the Solar System. It's behind the asteroid belt, but variously between Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. It's pretty clear that the Daleks are able to pilot Skaro like a ship. This idea of Daleks being able to move whole planets is seen later in DW: The Dalek Invasion of Earth and Journey's End.

The Daleks have what can only be described as an odd pattern for taking over the Solar System. They tackle the moons of Jupiter first, then the moons of Saturn, then Mars, and then to Venus. In other words, it's not done in terms of a logical progression from furthest planet from the sun to nearest. They're just skipping around the Solar System, deliberately saving Earth for last. Indeed, the Dalek Emperor says early in the story that they won't go to Earth until they subdue Venus. Why? We don't know. But this is the reason that the Stone siblings are so important — though they likely don't know it. Their resistance on Venus is pivotal to whether Earth falls. Whitaker is telling us that the Stone family are Earth's last chance, because no one on Earth has yet picked up on the fact that the Solar System is under attack.

What's even more unusual about this Dalek invasion plan is that they go so close to Earth that they have to mask their signature so they won't be detected. A whole page of the comic is devoted to explaining how they avoided detection by humans on Earth — when there's no reason for them to cross Earth's orbit at all en route to Venus.

Continuity

 * The Skarosian museum seen later in this volume in City of the Daleks indicates the Daleks penetrated the Solar System before. They have on display an artefact from humanity's early exploration of the Moon, which directly states that they took humans from the surface of the moon in 1971. At some point, the Daleks also went to Mercury, based on exhibits in the museum.

Timeline
This is narratively the first story in The Dalek Book. Unlike most stories in annuals, it actually matters to the reader that this story be read first.

How this story — and therefore the entire Dalek Book —fits into the wider body of Doctor Who fiction is less clear. Andy Stone has never heard of Daleks before, which suggests that either this is meant to be set before the Dalek invasion in the 2260s (DW: The Dalek Invasion of Earth), or so long after the second Dalek invasion of that century (BFA: Lucie Miller) that humanity no longer remembers the Daleks. In any event, the Solar System is a vastly different to what we would recognise today. Virtually every planet is hospitable to some degree to human life. The moons of Jupiter are well-inhabited, too — suggesting this might be roughly contemporaneous with BFA: Valhalla.