Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-188432-20130310185635/@comment-188432-20130725190851

Well, you kinda have to argue in terms of other comics companions. You're saying "because these two were previous televised companions" — or really "because these two are Barbara and Ian, for goodness sakes!" — they are necessarily companions. But they're merely guest stars here, in much the same way that we correctly identify Sarah Jane as a guest star on School Reunion, not a companion.

I mean, the Doctor doesn't land, pick them up, and go on travelling with them. He's travelling very much alone in this story and encounters them by others' design at the end of part one. This isn't his choice; he's forced to sort of protect them, more or less. And a lot of the travelling isn't by TARDIS at all.

It's a very traditional comic book set-up, which is found in dozens of other stories with characters so obscure that no one cares about them. The only difference here is that it's Ian and Barbara, characters we love and know.

But that's just not good enough. These templates will swell to the bursting point if we don't apply some sort of logic to them. And a "good enough" logic — given that we know there is no definition of companion — is that for comics there must be an implication of more than one adventure, even if there's only one story.

So that's why Jayne Kadett doesn't make the cut, but Andric and Ly-Chee do. The "single adventure" sub-section simply cannot mean what you imply. It's not enough to have a single adventure. Seriously, there would be dozens of people who fit that description. It must be that in that single adventure there is an implication of some kind of additional travels.

Now, television is a totally different beast, because there we have the advantage of end credits — or, nowadays, title sequences. Generally, it's preferable, where possible, to use an out-of-universe rationale for assigning the title "companion". So if Nick Briggs tells us that a person in an audio is a companion, or if the titles give us the name "Michelle Ryan", then they're companions. And that's fair enough because the term really came from the press, anyway.

But with comics we generally don't have the advantage of out-of-universe sources, so we have to come up with something that makes sense for that medium, and something that won't make the templates balloon out of control. There's clearly a need to draw a line between someone like Ly-Chee and someone like Death's Head or Abslom Daak — just to pick two of the more famous guest-stars-who-aren't-companions.