Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-28743561-20190914124052

Free-Fall Warriors was a four-story back-up comic in the pages of Captain Britain vol. 2 (1985), basically in the same spirit as the DWM backup comic stories. (Side Note: Abslom Daak... Dalek Killer and Star Tigers were reprinted in Captain Britain, but this was the first publication of Free-Fall Warriors.)

Free-Fall Warriors tells the origins of the four members of the Freefall Warriors, who first appeared in Doctor Who and the Free-Fall Warriors (1981), a valid Fourth Doctor comic. (The Freefall Warriors would later appear in A Ship Called Sudden Death, Party Animals and A Life of Matter and Death.)

While these four stories are currently considered invald by this wiki, I believe there is overwhelming evidence for them being part of the DWU. Let's go over the four little rules:

They are stories.

They were licensed by relevant copyright holders, namely Marvel UK.

They were officially released in 1985.

The four stories:


 * 1) Warworld: Cool Breeze and Big Cat are introduced on the planet Warworld.
 * 2) A Cat Out of Hell: Machine Head attacks Big Cat, only to end up at the end of Cool Breeze's gun.
 * 3) Recruitment...: Cool Breeze spares Machine Head and are saved by Bruce. Together they rescue Big Cat after he was attacked by Shaman Kahn.
 * 4) Mission: Improbable!: The Ambassador unites the four of them against the Intra-Venus space station.



Now, this is where we get to the debate; are the four Free-Fall Warriors stories set in the DWU? Unlike contentious Marvel UK debates (e.g. the Sleeze Brothers miniseries, despite their origins in the DWU), in my view, Freefall Warriors is a cut and dry spin-off of in DWU. The first page of the first opens with: "Warworld: The origin of THE FREE-FALL WARRIORS..."

If they are not meant to be the same Freefall Warriors as the DWU, how can this be an origin story? What would it be an origin story for? (In fact, no character utters the term "Freefall Warriors" in these stories.) The writer clearly intended these to be the same Freefall Warriors from Doctor Who Magazine. Furthermore, Steve Parkhouse was the creator of the Freefall Warriors and the writer of these four stories, showing authorial intent.

The Freefall Warriors should join the ranks of Bernice Summerfield, K9, Erimem, etc. as one of the many valid spin-offs not licensed by the BBC.

Unlike, say, the invalid Sleeze Brothers miniseries, there are explicit connections to the wider DWU (namely Doctor Who Magazine comics):


 * Obviously, the four members of the Freefall Warriors are featured. Continuity is maintained, such as Big Cat's ship called Tigerfire, Cool Breeze being an android, etc.
 * Intra-Venus, Inc. from The Moderator (et al.) is heavily featured. Their space station above Warworld and the weapons they are demonstrating is the main source of conflict. Cool Breeze was a parachute android of Intra-Venus' Trailblazer and Machine Head was part of Intra-Venus' High-Flying Dive Fighters before joining the Freefall Warriors.
 * Warworld mentioned in The Moderator (1984) is the primary location of these stories.
 * Recruitment... is also the origin story of Shaman Kahn before he was disfigured. He first appeared in A Ship Called Sudden Death, a Freefall Warriors comic from DWMS Summer 1982. (So there is already a precedent for Freefall Warrior spin-off stories without the Doctor.)

This should be ample evidence that Free-Fall Warriors is intended to be part of the DWU.

(Full disclosure: I made Free-Fall Warriors (comic series) about a year ago but it was deleted months later because no inclusion debate had taken place. I apologize for believing they were "obvious cases" not needing one. When I opened Thread:246568 months ago, it was closed because I had not read the stories. Now that I have read them, let's have a proper inclusion debate. And if the community rules them valid, is it possible for an admin to restore my initial page for the sake of simplicity?) 