Stars of page and screen

Last month saw the anniversaries of the first appearances of two major characters from twentieth-century pop culture: 100 years of Billy Bunter, and 75 years of Doc Savage.

There is sometimes a sharp intake of breath from offended comics fans when they catch the likes of Marvel describing its core business as managing trademarked characters and other intellectual properties, rather than publishing comics. But, really, appearing in different media is a mark of cultural success, and always has been. Herakles and Theseus cropped up in poems and plays, as statues and on friezes, on vases and on coins. And, sometimes, versions from other media have swamped the original. Mary Shelly lived to see her philosophical, vengeful creature replaced by an incoherent rampaging monster in stage versions of Frankenstein.

Billy Bunter and Doc Savage first appeared in prose fiction magazines; a species that is now almost extinct (though the death of the magazines did not mean the end of prose fiction, any more that the possible death of periodical comics will mean the end of comics as a form). But I first met Bunter in the comic strip which ran in Valiant from 1963 to 1976, and Doc in George Pal’s 1975 movie version . Although I did later read reprints of some of the original stories from both series, that wasn’t until after I had encountered DC’s 1980s Doc Savage comics.

As well as prose fiction, comics and movies, Doc appeared on the radio; and Bunter on both radio and television. The time for both is probably passed. Doc Savage is altogether too simplistic a hero for modern tastes – Superman without the thrill of flight or the bizarre love triangle. J K Rowling’s Hogwarts revived children’s fantasy, but does not seem to have spawned more stories about mundane boarding schools. Both remain strong images, but are probably fated to remain suitable mostly as knowing references in the likes of Planetary and The Black Dossier.


Pictures and panels

“Billy Bunter”, art by Reg Parlett, from Valiant, IPC Magazines, 3 June 1967

Doc Savage issue 1, cover by Adam and Andy Kubert, DC Comics, November 1987, image taken from the Grand Comics Database

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist), Ben Dimagmilaw (colourist), Bill Oakley and Todd Klein (letterers) and Scott Dunbier (editor), America’s Best Comics/Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2007

Manhattan on Mars

Crater on Mars, photograph reproduced from The Daily Telegraph web-site, 2008:


Crater on Mars, panels reproduced from Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, 1987:


It’s either a coincidence or a quite remarkable marketing effort for the upcoming movie …

Update, 5 February Oops. It seems that I have been misled by the Telegraph running that story a little late. Over 20 years late, in fact. (See the comments section.)

Next on Gad, Sir! Comics!, the startling news that it looks like there is a man in the Moon. And, hey, don't those stars form a line that's a bit like a plough?

Who Plunders the Pirates?

As they were no doubt supposed to do, the teaser photographs from the upcoming film of Watchmen have wafted a warm breeze of reassurance over comics fans. “Look,” they say, “We are being faithful to the comic. Why, there’s even that boy reading Tales of the Black Freighter.”

And yes, that is a detail faithful to the disembodied story. But in the move from one medium to another, much of its meaning has washed away.

You’ll recall that, in Watchmen, two changes from our world have a myriad of consequences, large and small. Because some oddballs actually did become costumed vigilantes in the 1940s, and because one genuine super-powered being appeared in 1960, geopolitics are different, the economics of energy are different – and so are matters of taste in styles of clothes and methods of smoking tobacco.

One consequential change is in comics. In an America with real superheroes, no-one wants to read about them in comic books. So, instead, the dominant genre is the pirate story. This is a particularly effective move on the part of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, because it brings home directly to the reader that the very comic he or she is reading is the product of contingency; that the fact that Watchmen is a superhero comic is itself a product of the odd chances of history; that chance is everywhere in this garden of forking paths.

On film, this direct address must be lost. If cinema had a single dominant genre, then something similar could be done by having characters watch films from a wholly different genre instead. But the first condition simply does not apply, and that news-stand photo suggests that the film-makers have not attempted to find such a parallel.

In addition, time has undermined the choice that Moore and Gibbons made. In the mid-1980s, pirate stories were a moribund genre that never really had been that popular (how many issues did EC’s Piracy last?). A pirate story with overtones of supernatural horror, like Tales of the Black Freighter, was a real oddity that paralleled the strangeness of the superhero story which comics readers so took for granted. But now a mix of pirates and supernatural horror doesn’t seem strange at all. Even the most goldfish-memoried movie-goer will be reminded of Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley fighting CGI’d monsters on the Black Pearl. The oddity is lost.

So, in the end, Tales of the Black Freighter becomes a minor piece of set dressing, the equivalent of a poster advertising an unfamiliar perfume. The mere whiff of Nostalgia.

Picture
Photograph of Watchmen, taken from Warner Brothers, found via the Forbidden Planet International Blog

“Bang!” Goes Another Fifth of November

As the whizzes, pops and bangs scare the seagulls on another Bonfire night, either celebrating or lamenting Guy Fawkes’ failure to blow up the King and Parliament*, here are some panels that have probably popped up on more than one blog today. I’m sorry to break up the layout, but they are, at least, in gloriously stark black and white, as artist David Lloyd intended.









That the clock tower apparently blows up in silence, and that the fireworks are accompanied by no whizzes, pops or bangs, is a reminder of another of Lloyd’s intentions. As he put it when interviewed for the Comics Britannia TV series:

”The idea of getting rid of thought balloons and sound effects was motivated by me wanting to get people to read comics who didn’t normally read comics, because one of the things that often puts people off is the “Bam! Pow! Zap!’ stuff. Everybody knows that when a gun goes off it goes ‘Bang!’, so you don’t actually need to tell them, not if they’re intelligent adults. And thought balloons were a kind of artificiality that you don’t get in any other kind of entertainment.”

We’ll leave aside for the moment the question of whether people who don’t normally read comics were ever likely to pick up Warrior issue 1, with its gaudy cartoon cover. In the longer run, many such people probably have read the collected paperback V for Vendetta.


We’ll also leave aside the dismissal of thought balloons, save to note that novels also frequently recount their characters’ thoughts, and that many a dramatist or screenwriter who has had to resort to soliloquy or voiceover must have envied comics having so neat a device to let readers into their protagonists’ heads.

For the moment. let’s stick with sound effects. Lloyd’s collaborator on V for Vendetta, Alan Moore, carried the aesthetic of omitting thought balloons and sound effects forward into Watchmen, one of the two comics most influential on subsequent anglophone adventure stories. The abolition of thought balloons proved to be a very successful meme, partly because Moore, and Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns, simultaneously provided an alternative: the first-person narrative caption box. But sound effects have proved harder to eradicate, even though, as Lloyd notes, they are at the heart of the easy mockery sub-editors pour into every mainstream headline about comics. Why?

In part, it is because Lloyd is surely wrong about sound effects being unnecessary. What if that gun went off in the next room or was hidden inside a bag? What if the point the cartoonist wanted to convey was how loud (or how soft) it sounded to the characters? What if what is being shown in the pictures is not a familiar action? Nothing is as simple and effective as writing down the sound, and it is, on the face of it, no more artificial than writing down in a word balloon the sounds the humans are making.

And yet, sound effects often do seem silly. We tend to blame memories of the 1960s Batman TV series for the derision heaped on “the ‘Bam! Pow! Zap!’ stuff”. Yet there was a reason why the TV producers singled out sound effects for the on-screen treatment. After all, they didn’t put up intertitles to display Adam West’s dialogue in word balloons. The reason, I think, is that onomatopoeia is naturally funny. Consider how much less amusing it would be if Thurber’s references to Walter Mitty’s “ta-poketta-poketta” were all replacing by descriptions of a jerky, rhythmic sound instead.

So we seem to be at an impasse. Sound effects are often needed, but may be inherently risible. I wonder, though, if some clues to a way out could be presented by manga?

Manga, as presented in the USA, are often published in a half-translated form. The aspect of this most remarked upon is that they generally retain an orientation that requires reading the page from right to left. But it is also common practice to leave sound effects in situ but untranslated.



The effect, at least to a non-reader of Japanese, is that the panel alerts the reader to the fact that a sound is being made, but leaves us to decide for ourselves what that sound is. This can be remarkably effective (your idea of how the sound of a zipper or an approaching train should best be rendered probably differs from mine – here we can each interpolate our ideal), and though it lacks specificity, it avoids the onomatopoeia trap. I’m not suggesting that anglophone cartoonists should letter their sound effects in Japanese, but perhaps some literally non-literal approaches might be suggested by the manga effect.

Anyway, the whizzes, pops and bangs have now died down outside my window, so I’ll take advantage of lack of sound effects to get some sleep.

* For a reminder of what Robert Catesby and his stooge, the real Guy Fawkes, were trying to do to the Palace of Westminster, click here.


Panels
V for Vendetta Chapter 1 “The Villain” by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, Warrior Issue 1, Quality Communications, March 1982 (Cover: Laser Eraser and Pressbutton drawn by Steve Dillon)

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Volume 3 by Eiji Otsuka (story) and Housui Yamazaki (art), English-language edition published by Dark Horse Comics, 2007

Hallowe’en

From ghosties


and ghoulies


and long-leggedy beasties


and things that go bump in the night


good Lord protect us.

(First published by Walter de la Mare as an old Scottish prayer in Come Hither, 1923)

Panels
My Dead Girlfriend Volume 1 “A Tryst of Fate” by Eric Wight, Tokyopop, 2006

Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles, art by Simon Donald, I think, reprinted in Viz: The Sausage Sandwich, John Brown Publishing, 1991

Daredevil “Stilts” by Frank Miller (scripter/storyteller), Klaus Janson (penciller/inker/colourist), Sam Rosen (letterer) and Dennis O’Neil (editor), Daredevil issue 186, September 1982, reprinted in Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume 3, Marvel Comics, 2001

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2 by Alan Moore (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist), Ben Dimagmaliw (colourist), Todd Klein (letterer) and Scott Dunbier (editor), America’s Best Comics, 2002-2003

Nearly Men

As usual, I was way too late to contribute anything to Tom Spurgeon’s call to "Name Five Near-Versions of a Character You Like, At Least a Little Bit" for his “Five for Friday” feature at The Comics Reporter. His original list (Wonder Tot, Bizarro, Calvin’s Clones, Gaard and Captain Marvel’s Squadron of Justice – Fat Marvel, Tall Marvel and Hill(billy) Marvel) is here, and responses of nimbler folk in the Blogosphere are here.

Some comics creators love this sort of stuff. Consider Grant Morrison, who gave us Acid Archie, the loved-up version of Lion comic’s stalwart Robot Archie, a mundane set of New Gods (subsequently ignored by DC Comics like the rest of his work on Seven Soldiers except, curiously, his new version of Klarion the witch-boy), and these guys, who featured in just a few panels of Animal Man, but who have always stuck in my mind.


Who needs a Justice League when you can have a Love Syndicate?

Then there’s Alan Moore, with his multiple versions of Tom Strong and Supreme, and a whole multi-verse full of analogues of Captain Britain. One of those even got his own spin-off strip in Mad Dog, a special issue of the 1980s ‘zine Dogma. Meet the hero of Oceania, Captain Airstrip One, in a story largely written in Newspeak.


Paul Grist is another serial offender. It seems that every other character in Jack Staff has an analogue in old British comics or TV. Or, in this case, a comics writer with a fondness for creating multiple near-versions of his characters.


Did it just get recursive in here?

(Yes, I know that’s only three. I missed the train, so why worry about the terms of the ticket?)

Panels
Animal Man “Crisis” by Grant Morrison (writer), Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood (artists), John Constanza (letterer), Tatjana Wood (colourist) and Karen Berger (editor), Animal Man issue 23, DC Comics, May 1990

Captain Airstrip One by Alan Moore (writer), Chris Brasted (pencils), SMS (inks), SMS, Quill and Simon Meacock (letters), Dogma 10: Mad Dog, Oddmags, 1985

Jack Staff volume 2 issue 10 by Paul Grist (writer/artist) and Craig Conlan (colours), Image Comics, May 2006

Burning Down the Houses

It isn’t comics, but I couldn’t let mention of the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834 go by without bringing in JMW Turner. Probably the greatest of all English artists (admittedly not a crowded field, unless you adopt Wildstorm’s definition of “fine art”), Turner watched the fire from a boat in the Thames, and made four paintings of it.







Pictures
JMW Turner The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, oils, 1835, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Scan from Webmuseum Paris

JMW Turner Burning of the Houses of Parliament, oils, 1835, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Scan from Magellan’s Log

JMW Turner Burning of the Houses of Parliament, watercolour, 1834 or 1835, scan taken from In Defence of Marxism

JMW Turner The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, watercolour, 1834 or 1835, now in the Tate Museum, whence this scan

V for Vendetta Chapter 1, “The Villain" by Alan Moore (script) and David Lloyd (art), Warrior issue 1, Quality Communications, March 1982

Five Superheroes since 1950

Over at the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon asked on Friday for nominations for five good superheroes created since 1950 and not published by DC, Marvel or Image. Unfortunately, he wanted replies the same day, so I’m going to treat this as a meme instead.

1. Marvelman
Created by Mick Anglo for L Miller and Sons, 1954
Created anew by Alan Moore and Garry Leach for Warrior, Quality Communications, 1982

I admit to having only an historical interest in Mick Anglo’s original (if we can call a knock-off of Captain Marvel “original”). It was crude and ugly stuff even by the standards of its day, and even when drawn by future great Don Lawrence. Moore’s version was something else again, taking Nietzchean claims of transcending morality seriously, examining the social and political consequences of the übermensch, and doing it with meticulous story construction and genuinely literate, if still mannered, words. It didn’t hurt that Garry Leach’s artwork, at once penumbral and crackling with energy, mimetically realistic and convincingly other, made my teenage eyes pop. His successors – even John Totleben – never quite lived up to the start Leach gave the series. If you’ve only ever seen Eclipse’s crayoned-in colour reprint under the name Miracleman, you owe it to yourself to track down the black and white originals in Warrior. Copies are still available cheaply, I think.

Marvelman and its pseudonymous continuation by Eclipse spawned swarms of inferior imitators, who borrowed only the darkness and brutality. It also helped convince the comic industry that “superhero comics for adults” was not an oxymoron, leading to the current climate of rape and dismemberment at DC and clumsily obvious political allegory at Marvel. But to blame Marvelman for Penance, Tony Stark and Superboy-Prime would be unfair. Taken by itself, it is still one of the most interesting works in the genre.

2. Zenith
Created by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell for 2000AD, Fleetway Publications, 1987

In part, this was Morrison’s riposte to Marvelman. Here, the morally serious superhumans who want to reshape the world are the source of danger and disaster. It is Zenith, who just wants to be famous and get laid, and, above all, hippy-turned-Thatcherite Peter St John, who wants to accumulate conventional political power for himself, who emerge as the heroes, alongside brain-damaged robot Acid Archie.


Steve Yeowell has a following, but I'm not part of it, so the pleasure for me here is in Morrison’s writing. It is refreshing to find him treating sympathetically views about the benefits of self-interest more commonly associated with Samuel Johnson or Adam Smith, and indulging in nostalgia for old British comics rather than Silver Age americana, while already throwing out catherine-wheel sparks of mad science and narrative bravura.

3. Jack Staff
Created by Paul Grist for Dancing Elephant Press, 2000

And speaking of British comics nostalgia … In truth, I find Jack Staff the character one of the least interesting in Jack Staff the comic, but that is because it is overflowing with charming, compelling characters like Becky Burdock (Vampire Reporter), the staff of Q, Alfred Chinard and Bramble and Son. Grist draws his cast’s natures with the same deceptively simple elegance that he draws his pictures. Above all, his storytelling, integrating layout and narrative in complex, experimental ways that seem simple and natural when read, makes this not just one of the best superhero comics around, but one of the best comics, full stop. The frequent, smoothly integrated, appearance of characters drawn from 1960s and 1970s British comics and TV is just a particularly pleasing garnish for the ageing Brits among the readership.

Jack Staff is now published by Image, but wasn't created for them.

4. Fighting American
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Prize Group, 1954

Enough with these black-and-white Britons! It’s time for the superhero genre to return to the country of its origin and to its lifelong master and his principal accomplice. Again, Fighting American is a comic in which its lead character is the least interesting, overshadowed by the gallery of grotesques brought to life by Simon and Kirby, like Doubleheader, Hotski Trotsky, Poison Ivan and Rhode-Island Red. As political satire, this is little more than name-calling, but the stories burst with an energetic silliness. I have a very soft spot for the 1950s artwork of Kirby and his studio, which retains the smooth, heavy shading of the 1940s, but in service to more disciplined compositions. I gather that there were several Fighting American revivals by other hands in 1990s, but really, what’s the point of that? The value of the original is in the work of its creators and its response to the times.



5. The Incredibles
Created by Pixar Studios under the direction of Brad Bird for Disney, 2004

This entry is a cheat in two senses: it isn’t a comic, and it covers five superheroes, not one. But Pixar here demonstrated that animation could create cinematic superheroes who suffered from neither the ponderousness nor the camp foolishness that tend to afflict their live-action counterparts. The characters are charming, the story is funny, and you can amuse yourself with the paradox that an argument in favour of meritocratic elitism is being presented in the most lowbrow and populist of genres and media.


Pictures and panels
Marvelman “… A Dream of Flying” by Alan Moore (script) and Garry Leach (art), Warrior, Quality Communications, March 1982

Zenith “1. Dropping In” by Grant Morrison (script), Steve Yeowell (art) and Mark King (lettering), 2000AD prog 536, Fleetway Publications, 22 August 1987

Endpiece from Jack Staff: Yesterday’s Heroes by Paul Grist, Dancing Elephant Press, 2002

Fighting American issue 4 “Operation Wolf” by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Prize Group, October-November 1954, reprinted in Fighting American, Marvel Comics, 1989

The Incredibles DVD sleeve by Pixar Studios, Disney, 2005

Mary Marvelman Makes Me Feel Old

So, to recap: 1954 saw the end of L Miller and Sons’ supply of Captain Marvel and Marvel Family comics to reprint for the British market. They turned to Mick Anglo to come up with a substitute, the Marvelman Family.


Anglo replaced Captain Marvel with Marvelman, and Captain Marvel Jr with Young Marvelman. His biggest change was to replace Mary Marvel with a boy, Johnny Bates, Kid Marvelman.


So perhaps it is only appropriate that Mary Marvel is now recapitulating the character development Alan Moore devised for Johnny Bates when he revived the Marvelman strip.


The thing is, Marvelman came back in 1982 – a quarter of a century ago. Countdown and the Mary Marvel plotline are drawing not just on that, but on other developments in superhero comics that all date back to the 1980s: structurally (the company-encompassing crossover, pioneered with Crisis on Infinite Earths; weekly publication, as attempted with Action Comics), thematically (darker and gloomier plotting and characterisation supposed to appeal to older readers) and even technically (the page as a stanza, the replacement of thought balloons and third-person narration by first person caption boxes).

Go back another 25 years from 1982 and you’re in 1957. Even the journeyman superhero comic book writers of the 1980s had ambitions beyond merely emulating the work of Gardner Fox or, for that matter, Mick Anglo. They had absorbed the developments made by Lee and Kirby, Denny O’Neil and Steve Englehart, among others, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Alan Moore said that the purpose of his America’s Best Comics imprint was to reassemble superhero adventure comics, after deconstructing them in Marvelman and Watchmen. Grant Morrison seems to share that project, especially in All-Star Superman, and I’d guess that it was also the intention behind DC’s One Year Later plan. But too many writers seem to have gone back to taking inspiration from their well-thumbed copies of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and – if they’re lucky enough to have them - Marvelman.

That’s the rationalised version. The original, stream-of-thought version of this post ran, “Christ, Moore's Marvelman started twenty-five years ago? Where did the time go? God, I feel old. And everything was better when I was young. Bah!” So my ramblings may be a little skewed by self-pity and nostalgia today.


Pictures and Panels

Marvel Family issue 3, cover by CC Beck and Pete Constanza, Fawcett Comics, July 1946, taken from the Grand Comics Database

Marvelman Family issue 1, L Miller and Sons, October 1956, cover taken from Superbrits

Mary Marvel issue 9, cover by Jack Binder, Fawcett Comics, February 1947, taken from the Grand Comics Database

Marvelman Family “Marvelman Family and the Invaders from the future” by Mick Anglo (script) and Don Lawrence (art), Marvelman Family issue 1, L Miller and Sons, October 1956, reprinted in Marvelman Special issue 1, Quality Communications, 1984

Marvelman “When Johnny Comes Marching Home …” by Alan Moore (writer) and Garry Leach (artist), Warrior issue 3, July 1982

Countdown issue 47, cover by Ed Benes, DC Comics, June 2007, taken from the DC Comics website

Doctorless Who

When the BBC decided to order a special Christmas episode of Doctor Who every year, it created a problem for the production team, as there was no extra time in their schedule. Their answer was to film two episodes back-to-back, but since David Tennant can’t be in two places at once, that effectively means that one episode a year has to get by without the Doctor for most of its running time. This year’s almost-Doctorless Doctor Who episode, Blink, airs on BBC1 on Saturday.

Completely Doctorless stories set in the worlds of Doctor Who have been around in comic strips for a while. Mostly, they have been about the Daleks, as you might expect. The first appeared in The Dalek Book of 1964, which told of the Daleks’ assault on our solar system in preparation for their invasion of Earth. The Dalek Book was in the hard-backed Annual format, and credited as written by David Whitaker and Terry Nation, though it is likely that Whitaker, Doctor Who’s first script editor and author of much of its early ancillary fiction, did most of the work.


Together with one of the artists on The Dalek Book, Richard Jennings, Whitaker went on to produce The Daleks comic strip in TV Century 21, the only feature in that comic not based on a Gerry Anderson TV series. The TV21 strip, later drawn by Eric Eden and most memorably by Ron Turner, took the Daleks from their creation to their discovery of the Earth. You can see a sample here.

The success of The Dalek Book led to two sequels over the next two years. During that time, Terry Nation tried to pitch a Dalek TV series, without the Doctor, to US networks. Among the human heroes he intended to feature was a character from the Doctor Who story now commonly known as “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, Special Space Security (or Space Security Service – it varied) Agent Sara Kingdom, even though she had actually been killed at the end of that story. The TV series pitch came to nothing, but it was used as the background for The Dalek Outer Space Book of 1966. As a result, Sara Kingdom became the first Doctor Who supporting character to feature in her own solo comic strip, in which even the Daleks did not appear.


After a long lull, four more Dalek annuals appeared in the 1970s, though only two of them featured new comic strips, none very notable. But at the end of that decade, Marvel UK launched Doctor Who Weekly. At first, the new comic magazine was strip-heavy, featuring a new Doctor Who strip, a reprint of old Marvel Comics stories that the editors felt were a reasonable fit (starting with an adaptation of The War of the Worlds), and a second new strip at the back, which featured elements of Doctor Who other than the Doctor himself.

Naturally, the Daleks kicked this series off. But they were soon followed by Cybermen, Sontarans, Ice Warriors, K9, UNIT and many others. The stories drew on a range of British talents yet to be poached by US comics, including Steve Dillon, David Lloyd and Paul Neary. At first, the stories were all written by Steve Moore, but later others took a hand. Alan Moore wrote a sequence of stories about the Time Lords, fighting a war that had yet to break out, in which he introduced his super-team, the Special Executive. Since they later turned up in Captain Britain, that may mean that there’s a Gallifrey in the Marvel Universe.


One story written by John Peel (not the famous DJ), about the Celestial Toymaker, featured some particularly memorable art by Mick McMahon.


These back-up strips continued after the Weekly went monthly, but became less frequent, and in 1982 they stopped altogether: the magazine’s budget was under pressure, comics pages were more expensive than prose, and the lead Doctor Who strip was the priority.

In the 1990s, there were a couple of notable Doctorless strips in Doctor Who Magazine. In 1995, they ran a continuation of the Daleks strip from TV21, written by John Lawrence with art once again by Ron Turner. Sadly, Turner’s death brought that to an end. A Cybermen strip written by Alan Barnes and drawn by Adrian Salmon also ran for a short while, and then the magazine reverted once again to the single lead strip.

As I type this, there is more Doctorless Doctor Who spin-off fiction around than ever before. There are two TV series, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. There are Torchwood novels. BBC Children’s Books has put out a series of slim hardbacks about various elements of Doctor Who - one on Rose, one on Cybermen, one on the Sycorax and so on – and each features an appropriate short story. Big Finish produces authorised audio plays about the Daleks, and Sarah Jane, and Romana and Leela’s political adventures on Gallifrey, among others.

There are also more authorised Doctor Who comic strips than ever, in Doctor Who Magazine and Doctor Who Adventures and Doctor Who: Battles in Time. But there are no Doctorless Doctor Who spin-off strips. Which is as much a pity as it is a paradox.


Panels
The Daleks “Invasion of the Daleks”, written by David Whitaker, art by Richard Jennings, The Dalek Book, Panther Books/Souvenir Press, 1964

Sara Kingdom, Space Security Agent, written by Brad Ashton ,art by one of John Woods, Leslie Waller or Art Sansom, from The Dalek Outer Space Book, Souvenir Press/Panther Books, 1966

“4-D War”, written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly issue 51, April 1981

“The Greatest Gamble”, written by John Peel, art by Mike McMahon, Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly issue 56, September 1981

Review: Alice in Sunderland - Part 2: Antecedents

Click here for Part 1: Introduction












Click here for Part 3: Style

Panels contain images from the book under review, plus
Lights Out For The Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London by Iain Sinclair, Granta Books, 1997
Asterix at the Olympic Games, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, 1968, translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, Brockhampton Press, 1972
Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge by Iain Sinclair, 1975 and 1979, omnibus edition published by Vintage, 1995
From Hell Volume 2 by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Mad Love Publishing, June 1993
Shadowplay – The Secret Team by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, in Brought To Light: A Graphic Docudrama, Titan Books, 1989
The Mirror of Love by Alan Moore (writer), SR Bissette and Rick Veitch (artists) in AARGH!, Mad Love Publishing, 1989
From Homogenous to Honey by Neil Gaiman (script), Bryan Talbot (pencils), Mark Buckingham (inks), Steve Craddock (letters) in AARGH!, Mad Love Publishing, 1989