City of the Daleks (comic story)


 * You may be looking for the video game of the same name.

City of the Daleks was a full-colour, painted comic story that detailed Jeff Stone's reconnaissance mission to Skaro. Though short on plot, it afforded an incredibly rich view of Dalek society, culture and technology. Written when The Daleks was the only televised story of which the public were aware, it offered the first in-depth exploration of the Dalek capital city.

Despite the fact that almost every panel contained new information about the Daleks, few of those innovations were carried forward in the Dalek mythos. This does, however, feature the debut of the Dalek lie detector, which would eventually plague Romana II in Destiny of the Daleks.

Summary
Jeff Stone covertly lands on Skaro near an extinct volcano. He pops down inside and finds access to the lower levels of a Dalek city. He explores the city fully, and is detected only by a single Dalek. Nevertheless, he is able to rush out of the city and return to Earth to report his findings to his colleagues.

Characters

 * Jeff Stone
 * Dalek Emperor
 * Daleks

Continuity

 * The Second Doctor would later encounter the Dalek Emperor on Skaro. (DW: The Evil of the Daleks)

Timeline
Precise dating is awfully difficult with this one, but there are a few clues. It must be after 1971, because Stone encounters a museum placard with that year on it. This Dalek city runs on electricity, not static electricity, so it's different from what the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan encountered. The Daleks, by this point, have thoroughly infested our Solar System, so that suggests a time period of at least the 2260s, the date of the first Dalek invasion of Earth by the original, pre-Time War Dalek Empire. (DW: The Dalek Invasion of Earth) One could arbitrarily assign it a chronological placement between the stories in this book –so between The Secret of the Mountain and The Humanoids –but its placement in the larger body of Doctor Who fiction is much harder. One can only guess at a point sometime after the 2290s when the Daleks return to Earth. (BFA: Lucie Miller) The story Break-through! dates the Dalek invasions of The Dalek Book to the year 4000.