Tear Jerker / Doctor Who Magazine

• There was once an absolutely heartbreaking DWM strip with the Doctor landing on a planet with his grandchildren John and Gillian and discovering all creativity had faded. Following the traces, he finds a tyrant obsessed with being the single holder of the beings that provide the planet's inhabitants with imagination and creativity. Defeating him easily, he releases all of the tiny beings and leaves a hero having reformed the bad guy and returned happiness with no blood, no darkness, no evil. Then it's revealed that the entire story was a dream of the Eighth Doctor, who briefly laments that not all stories can end like that, and hoping for the day he'll be able to live in a universe where such endings are possible.
  • And then you recall that he still has yet to go into the Time War...
• "The World Shapers," written by Grant Morrison for DWM: The Sixth Doctor, Peri, and Frobisher need the assistance of the Doctor's former companion Jamie, so they travel back to Scotland to get him. Except the TARDIS overshoots their destination by forty years, and in the interim Jamie has become an old man and the village crank. The Doctor takes him on board the TARDIS anyway, and later on in the story Jamie sacrifices himself in order to stop the Cybermen from ever existing. And then we find out that Jamie's sacrifice was in vain, as some Time Lords show up and refuse to stop the Cybermen—you see, the Time Lords don't mind the Cybermen killing innocents over millions of years, since (unlike the Daleks) the Cybermen will apparently one day Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Given what we later find out about the Time Lords in "The End of Time", you get both a Harsher in Hindsight moment and a Shoot the Shaggy Dog moment all rolled into one.
• The 50th anniversary comic "Hunters of the Burning Stone" has a particularly sad moment when after rescuing Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the first human companions The Doctor met. The Eleventh Doctor tries to explain that he's the same man they met, but since they never learned of his regenerations, they don't believe him. When he takes them to the TARDIS, they recognize it and knock on the door expecting their Doctor to come out. It's only for one panel, but the sad look on The Doctor's face as they call to him while he's standing right next to them is heartbreaking.
  • Later, when The Doctor and Ian Chesterton are stuck in an illusionary recreation of their first adventure together. The Doctor gives his original self a look of utter contempt and disgust, calling his younger self a liar, coward and a selfish idiot. Talk about a bad case of I Hate Past Me.
• The infamous strip in which Ace dies, Ground Zero, has a massive, massive Tear Jerker in the fourth part. Ace blows up the bad guy, badly injuring herself in the process, and the Doctor dashes over, horrified. The next bit needs to be submitted here for viewing.

  Ace: Is... is there... a Doctor... handy?

  (The Doctor holds her tightly.)

  Ace: Like you said... gotta work on those timers.

  Doctor: Don't talk. Let me look at you. I think... I think...

  (He looks so incredibly sad and lonely.)

  Ace: 's getting cold... Professor...

  Doctor: Time of the year. We'll... we'll go somewhere warmer next time.

  Ace: Yeah... Professor... we did good, didn't we?

  (And she looks so sad and broken there...)

  Doctor: Yes, Ace. We did good.

  She dies.

  • And the next freaking page... ◊
• Issue 500's "The Stockbridge Showdown" reunites the Twelfth Doctor with several of the DWM-specific companions up to that point, from Sharon to Izzy to Frobisher to Majenta to Maxwell Edison. This is the first DWM comic set post-Series 9, meaning the Doctor is traveling alone, which makes all of these friends — who all got to know earlier incarnations, and some have significantly aged since their travels with him — helping him that much more heartwarming. In the falling action, after Josiah W. Dogbolter has been defeated for good, the Doctor and the lonesome, picked-on-by-fellow-townsfolk Maxwell have the following conversation:

  The Doctor: You know, I tell myself I'm the man who's always moving on — but the truth is, it's everyone else who does the moving. They get older, they get married, they get children and jobs and homes...I stay right where I am.

  Maxwell: So do I.

  The Doctor: And what's so bad about that? How exactly are guys like us supposed to improve on perfection? You're the protector of Stockbridge, Max. You saved my neck back there, just like I knew you would. No one holds parades for the likes of us. We're the misfits, the troublemakers, the overlooked. But so what? Applause is just noise. We don't need it!

  • This is all leading to The Reveal that poor, picked-on Maxwell's Forgotten Birthday wasn't forgotten at all, as everybody goes to Cornucopia to celebrate.