The mob of 10 year-olds rules: The Arkwood Experiments

For my previous Doctor Who marathons, I used the chronology at the Doctor Who Reference Guide. Since I had a good thing going, I returned to it in preparation for the Third Doctor only to discover that it had gone offline. Thankfully the Wayback Machine has it archived. But, in my panic to find a replacement, I ran across Andrew Kearley's site, The Complete Adventures. This site has the advantage of not only being online but also of being more current. There are newer Big Finish adventures, which I am not listening to in my marathon, in Kearley's timeline that were never added to the Reference Guide but also newer comics, which I will endeavor to read.

I noticed some differences in ordering between the two sites and so I've opted to throw a little Reference Guide in here and some Complete Adventures there for my marathon. Whatever discrepancies they have, they both list "The Arkwood Experiments" as the story that follows "Spearhead From Space".

"The Arkwood Experiments" is a TV comic from early 1970. I've run into these comics before during my earlier marathons and like pretty much every First and Second Doctor comic from their eras, they were almost uniformly bad. It was apparent that their creators had never watched the show and instead were given a paragraph long synopsis of it along with some publicity stills and told to go off and make comics. Would that be the same here?

Pertwee's elongated face in the first panel has a slightly caricaturish feel to it plus he's got a big grin so we've got a whole new feel already.

The Brigadier calls the Doctor to ask for help with a bit of bother down at the local zoo. It seems that either the animals have jointly declared Opposite Day or something is quite amiss. While a panther and lion are both meek as a pussy, the birds attack anyone who dares enter the aviary while the penguins are the most murderous since the giant electric one that Scott ran into in the Sahara.

It turns out a 10 year-old boy named Cedric Mathews used the zoo animals as, er, guinea pigs, to test a new drug he has concocted that he hopes will turn boys his own age into "raging hooligans". One wouldn't think a wonder drug would be needed to accomplish this.

Aside from using the exclamation, "Great powers!"(?!), the Third Doctor here is not wholly un-Third Doctorish.

Reflecting the TV show at the time, I think this may be the first Doctor Who comic set on Earth. Contemporary Earth, at least. A slight story to be sure but it was funny to see our hero flee from a waddle of savage penguins.