Futurama Comics (UK) #49: Doctor What

Scripts: Ian Boothby
Pencils: Mike Kazaleh

Futurama is one awesome TV show.

Forget relevance, learning and sacrificing everything for ratings, this is SF comedy, for SF fans. If you’re not a serious fan of Star Trek then the episode Where No Fan Has Gone Before probably won’t contain a single joke for you.

Futurama Comics #49 here in the UK, is barely a patch on the intense inspired insanity of the TV show. And yet, Futurama is so thick with cleverness, that even a bare patch of it is wonderful.

So now that someone has published an entire Futurama parody of Doctor Who, well, my £2.60 never stood a chance.


The sparse panels mean that there are nowhere near as many gags packed-in as in the TV show, yet pop-culture references abound, and it’s easy to hear the original actors’ voices delivering these desperate lines.


Generally, time-travel writers have an annoying tendency to prove themselves incapable of their subject matter, but for me this one falls apart only in the last three pages.

This is probably because whoever wrote this displays a broad appreciation of the original Doctor Who show’s history, too. For example, one of the villains who Fry and friends have to defeat is called the Candyman...


...who bears a scary resemblance to Doctor Who’s Kandyman...


The Daleks show up too, though they’re obviously not named as such, and it’s a terrible shame that, upon getting blinded, none of them comes out with their lesser-known catchphrase “My vision is impaired, I cannot see.” I suspect they said it in an earlier draft – probably why the script has them getting blinded in the first place – but maybe cut out by someone who didn’t know the subject so well.


But the second half of the strip is when things really kick into gear. Our heroes travel into their own future, and discover a truth so shocking that it elicits this response from them:


Quite what they’ve just been told I won’t tell you. But if you like Futurama enough to want to know, then you should really seek out a copy of this for yourself.