With the 60th Anniversary of Doctor Who arriving in just a few weeks, I thought it’d be a great idea to travel back in time to 2013 – and check out what IDW did for the Doctor’s 50th Anniversary.

Their year long celebration was a pretty clever idea: a 12 issue storyline featuring all of the numbered Doctors that had appeared until that point.

That meant getting an issue a month, each of which focused on a different Doctor – from the First to the Eleventh, in order – with a final issue tying up the storyline.

So the first issue is a First Doctor (played in the TV series by William Hartnell) story, briefly introducing a shadowy figure – whose plan to take down the Doctor concentrates on removing his companions to make him vulnerable – before we set off on a classic Doctor Who adventure.

Heading back to the past to visit biologist/anthropologist Thomas Huxley – a famously staunch supporter of Darwin and advocate of his theory of evolution – the Doctor and his three companions cross paths with a familiar enemy, who they assumed to have been destroyed in their previous encounter.

Yet as the introductory sequence alludes to, there may be a bit more to this encounter than meets the eye.

It’s a fun little story that apes the rather simplistic nature of the First Doctor’s episodes quite nicely. It also has the First Doctor repeatedly getting companion Ian Chesterton’s name wrong, which felt like a bit of a reference to poor old William Hartnell’s declining health and tendency to flub lines at points during the recording of the show.

There’s a bit of an odd, out of nowhere resolution to the story (which also seems to go against the pacifistic nature of the Doctor – though that’s hardly a hard and fast rule that the series completely adheres to) – but the cliffhanger is nicely done.

Having recently rewatched a number of First Doctor episodes, it’s pretty impressive how well the tone and nature of the show at the time is captured here too.

It’s a clever conceit, then – though a single issue per Doctor, meaning a twelve issue series, may turn out to be a bit of a slog given how thin the connective tissue seems to be at this point, it’s certainly off to a nice, fairly gentle start that feels a lot like classic Who in all the best ways.

You can buy the full collected edition of Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time from Amazon here.