User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-28743561-20190914124052/@comment-26845762-20190914222211

I think it's fair to say Steve Parkhouse was influential in establishing the strand of the Doctor Who Universe that's featured in the pages of the Doctor Who Magazine for many decades now. Stockbridge, Frobisher, and (more relevantly) Josiah W. Dogbolter and his Intra-Venus, Inc. have well-outlived the panels from whence they sprang. So too, even if they aren't quite as remembered these days, the Freefall Warriors.

The Free-Fall Warriors comic series is a clear continuation of the universe of Steve Parkhouse's Doctor Who comics. We already rightfully cover stories "spun-off" from the "universe" of a single DWM strip, but the series we talk about today is much more than that because it ties together elements from multiple Doctor Who stories and makes connections that weren't there in Doctor Who. It says that characters featured in a Fourth Doctor story came together to oppose ongoing antagonists from Fifth and Sixth Doctor stories.

Unlike some other stories once proposed for coverage on the wiki, I see the Free-Fall Warriors less as a spin-off, less as a diverting branch of narrative that splits away into its own thing, and more a sort of yo-yo. Even in the four '85 months that the Free-Fall Warriors was published, that string existed tying it back to Doctor Who: Intra-Venus were mentioned by name in the third part of Polly the Glot, concurrently with Intra-Venus high-ups appearing in the flesh/casing/shell in A Cat Out of Hell. The string's still there in the months after the yo-yo has gone as far as it will: IntraVenus is mentioned again in Abel's Story, a background detail of the DWU on the same level as Davros. Then the yo-yo journeys back to the hand: Intra-Venus appears in Time Bomb!, where it is clearly meant as an aspect of the Seventh Doctor's world crossing into Death's Head's world; the Freefall Warriors cameo in Doctor Who again in Party Animals, alongside not just characters from Dr Who's past but also a bunch of Marvel Heroes (including Captain Britain); then A Life of Matter and Death celebrates the 250th issue of DWM and the Freefall Warriors cameo unambiguously in the context of being part of the Doctor Who universe, of the Eighth Doctor's universe. And the yo-yo has stayed in the hand ever since: IntraVenus cameoing in the novel Prime Time, then featuring in the Twelfth Doctor comic The Stockbridge Showdown, a story which the Thirteenth Doctor dealt with after-effects of earlier this year.

Thus, Yasmin Khan has two degrees of separation with the fictional events depicted in the 1985 Free-Fall Warriors. And Izzy Sinclair has one. Like it or not, these Captain Britain back-ups are part of the mismatched quilt of the Dr Who Universe; not some frayed edge, but somewhere deep (and forgotten) in the middle.