“Now I'm in exile, seein' you out.”

On the 21st June 1969 Patrick Troughton made his final regular appearance as Doctor Who. For the first (and arguably only) time in the twentieth century series, the outgoing Doctor was not seen to change into their successor. Not least because Jon Pertwee had not been cast when the pre-filming for the final moments of Troughton’s finale, The War Games Episode Ten was done at the BBC’s Ealing Television Film studios on 3rd April1.

Instead, the Doctor disappeared into darkness, protesting at the sentence - exile to Earth and a “change of appearance” - which had been imposed upon him by the Time Lords. Pertwee’s first serial, which begins with the TARDIS arriving on Earth, and Pertwee’s semiconscious Doctor collapsing out of it in Troughton’s clothes, would not be shown until January 1970.

Before then Doctor Who would be off the air for six whole months, having never been away for more than a few consecutive weeks. This, it seems, provided an interesting problem for the people responsible for the Doctor Who comic strip. Long before Doctor Who Magazine (which didn’t debut until 1979), let alone IDW or Titan, the children’s anthology TV Comic ran at least two pages of Doctor Who comic strip each week, starting with TV Comic #674 in November 1964, almost exactly a year after the television series’ own debut.