Doctor, Doctor

On Friday night, BBC1 will broadcast “Time Crash”, a seven-minute Doctor Who episode, as part of the annual Children in Need charity telethon. The rest of the evening will no doubt be given over to the usual mix of showbiz backslapping and maudlin handwringing. But the Doctor Who episode is likely to be worth a watch and a donation: it is by Steven Moffat, who has written some of the very best episodes of the revived series: “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances”, “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Blink”. The hook is that Peter Davison will be reappearing as the fifth Doctor, alongside David Tennant’s tenth Doctor.


There’s something about charity appeals that brings multiple Doctors running. True, the last Doctor Who contribution to Children in Need, two years ago, was Tennant’s first solo outing. But back in 1983, “The Five Doctors” was broadcast as part of the appeal, and in 1993, the then-dead series was brought out of retirement for the night of Children in Need with the bizarre runaround “Dimensions in Time”, which was sunk under the weight of its gimmicks. Not only did every surviving Doctor appear (plus truly tasteless waxwork busts of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton), but so did as many of the old supporting cast as could be found, and every monster suit that could be dredged up. And it was a crossover with the popular soap opera EastEnders. And it was filmed in a new 3-D technique that required constant horizontal motion across the scene. Little wonder it was rubbish. But it probably raised some money.

The BBC’s other regular telethon is Red Nose Day, held every two years for the charity Comic Relief. Doctor Who cropped up in 1999 with “The Curse of Fatal Death”, an extended spoof which achieved the rare double of being both funny and faithful to the original, largely because it, too, was written by Steven Moffat. And this one, agin, featured multiple Doctors – all-new ones, this time, played by Rowan Atkinson, Jim Broadbent, Richard E Grant, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley.

Appropriately enough, Comic Relief has occasionally spawned comics. In 1993, Fleetway published The Comic Relief Comic. This too featured multiple Doctors, in a two-page crossover with Dan Dare, drawn by John Ridgway, a long-term artist on the comic strip for Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Magazine.



But more than that, the amount of crossover and collaboration on this comic beggars belief. The next few paragraphs are simply lists, because I can think of no better way of getting across the scale and scope of the thing. Remember, this was all in sixty pages, including covers.

The plot was by Richard Curtis (of Four Weddings and a Funeral), Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. The editors were Richard Curtis, Neil Gaiman and Peter Hogan.

The script was by (deep breath) Dan Abnett, Mike Collins, Richard Curtis, “the Dandy and Beano team”, Al Davison, Jamie Delano, Garth Ennis, Dick Foreman, John Freeman, Neil Gaiman, Melinda Gebbie, Bambos Georgiou, Dave Gibbons, Igor Goldkind, Lenny Henry. Peter K Hogan, Alan Martin, Mark Millar, Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison, Paul Neary, John Smith, Si Spencer and “the Viz team.

And then there were the artists: Jeff Anderson, Jim Baikie, Simon Bisley, Philip Bond, Robin Boutell, Dougie Braithwaite, Mark Buckingham, Dondi Cox, Steve Dillon, D’Israeli, Hunt Emerson, Phil Gascoigne, Melinda Gebbie, Dave Gibbons, Martin Griffiths, Jamie Hewlett, Graham Higgins, David Hine, Bernie Jay, Paul Johnson, Nigel Kitching, Barry Kitson, David Lloyd, Mike McKone, Steve Parkhouse, Edmund Perryman, Sean Phillips, Warren Pleece, Arthur Ranson, John Ridgway, Will Simpson, Bryan Talbot, “the Viz team”, Phil Winslade and Steve Yeowell.

Had enough yet? Tough, ‘cause here’s a list of the celebrities and characters featured (at least the ones I recognise): Roger Mellie, the Man on the Telly, Lenny Henry (as himself and as Theophilus P Wildebeeste), Jonathan Ross, Griff Rhys-Jones, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Drake, Edmund Blackadder, Judge Dredd, Dan Dare, Captain Britain, Desperate Dan, Bruce Forsyth, the Teenage Mutant “Something” Turtles, Michael Caine, Dawn French, Ben Elton, Cliff Richard (the singer, not the Buffy artist), Alf Garnett, Anneke Rice, Thunderbirds, Digby, the Mekon, Treens, the first seven Doctors, Ace, Leela, Susan, K9, Ice Warriors, Cybermen, Draconians, the “Rover’s Return” pub from Coronation Street, Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, the Bash Street Kids, Esther Rantzen, Noel Edmonds, Terry Fuckwitt, the Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist, Johnny Fartpants, Biffa Bacon and family, Spoilt Bastard, Buster Gonad, Billy the Fish, the Pathetic Sharks, Superman, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner), Thor, Daredevil, Swamp Thing, Captain America, Blue Beetle, Fire, Iron Man, Batman, the Silver Surfer, Wolverine, the Young Ones, the Spanish Inquisition (Monty Python version), Tommy Cooper, Benny Hill, Lurcio from Up Pompeii!, Sid James and Barbara Windsor, Mr Humphries, the cast of On the Buses (God help us!), Tony Hancock, Vic and Bob, Norman Wisdom, Morecambe and Wise, Basil Fawlty, Sybil Fawlty and Manuel, Dick Emery, Buster Keaton and WC Fields.

So, with all that, was it any good? Well … no, not really. Too many cooks, and too many ingredients make for an indigestible mess.


But, hey, like it says on the cover, “all proceeds to Comic Relief.” And it is certainly a curiosity.

There’s no statement about where the proceeds were to go from sales of this year’s Comic Relief tie-in, Beano Max Issue 1, and it’s tempting to conclude that publishers DC Thomson had cynically bought a license as an exercise in promoting the launch of their new comic, a monthly spin-off from the Beano. Notably, there is no collaboration with other comics publishers here. Jonathan Ross and various other BBC presenters appear, but the only fictional characters to be seen who are not owned by DC Thomson are Wallace and Gromit, who share a poster with Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, and, yet again, Doctor Who. In “The Invasion of Bash Street”, Class 2B is menaced by a Dalek teaching assistant. The Dalek is overcome when the kids force-feed it school dinners (bringing it out in red nose-shaped boils), and the Doctor drops by to pick it up.


Despite my suspicious grumbles, this is a much more enjoyable read than the Comic Relief Comic. It’s a good, solid, straightforward children’s humour comic with a few guest stars.

The lesson of all this? Even if it is for charity, keep it simple. Don’t go overboard on the crossovers.

Unless you’ve got Steven Moffat writing.

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

Doctor Human

So, last week and this, the Doctor is a human being. That’s providing for some interesting drama. Unfortunately, he has turned himself into a human as a disguise because, confronted with an alien threat, he has decided to run and hide and leave others in danger rather than face his enemies. Several innocent people have died already. That seems a poor take on the character to me, but there you are.

Mind you, there is one version of the Doctor who has every excuse for being human, because he has never been anything else: Doctor Who, the Eagle comic fan, who knocked together his amazing machine TARDIS in the back garden, and travelled in it with his granddaughters Barbara and Susie and his niece Louise.

Doctor Who, played by Peter Cushing, was the lead character in the 1960s movies Dr Who and the Daleks and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD.


He first appeared in comics in America, surprisingly enough, when Dell published Dr Who and the Daleks as a “Movie Classic” in 1966, a year after the film came out. I don’t know who adapted the script, but the art was by Dick Giordano and Sal Trapani. Don’t go expecting something of the standard of “There is No Hope in Crime Alley”. This is crude and rushed stuff.




It is little surprise that there was no comics adaptation of Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD. That film also underperformed at the box office, so producer Milton Subotsky never took up his option for a third film. That’s a shame, as the third Dalek serial on TV, now commonly known as “The Chase”, had the Doctor and the Daleks meet robot versions of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. Cushing would have been right at home.

So far as I know, this version of Doctor Who has only appeared in comics once more, if we set aside his brief role in Mad Magazine’s Doctor Ooh spoof.


Yes, do let’s set that aside, shall we?

Cushing’s Doctor Who reappeared in the 1995 Doctor Who Spring Special, which was mostly given over to articles about the movies. The comic strip, “Daleks versus the Martians”, by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan, is up to the standards of the regular Doctor Who strip of the time. But it has its own disappointments.



Grey aliens? The Face on Mars (at the time still awaiting its thorough debunking) really a Japanese-style giant stompy robot? Surely this is the wrong Mars. I wanted hoverbouts versus tripods, exterminator guns versus heat rays, mushy blobs with tentacles versus … erm, mushy blobs with tentacles. But, of course, the works of H G Wells were still in copyright (and remain so, in the EU, until 2016).

In the end, the Daleks did conquer Mars. But that’s another story. From The Dalek Book, to be precise. More about that next week.




Pictures and panels
Photograph of Peter Cushing as Dr Who scanned from DVD pack for The Dr Who Movie Collection, Studio Canal+, 2002

Movie Classic issue 12-190-612, “Dr Who and the Daleks”, art by Dick Giordano (pencils) and Sal Trapani (inks), edited by Don Arneson, Dell Publishing, December 1966. Cover scan taken from the Grand Comics Database, interior reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 9, Marvel Comics UK, 21 July 1993

Doctor Ooh by Geoff Rowley (writer) and Steve Parkhouse (artist), Mad British Edition issue 161, General Book Distributors Ltd, 1975

Doctor Who “Daleks versus the Martians” by Alan Barnes (writer), Lee Sullivan (art), Elitta Fell (letters), Gary Gillatt and Scott Gray (editors), Doctor Who Magazine Spring Special, Marvel Comics/Panini UK, 1995

The Daleks “Invasion of the Daleks” by David Whitaker (story) and Richard Jennings (art), The Dalek Book, Panther Books/Souvenir Press, 1964

Tune In! Turn On! Exterminate!

For this week’s Doctor Who-related post, I had planned to bodge together a brief history of the Daleks in comics. But the fine fellows at Altered Vistas have already done that – and a much more thorough job than I could have managed, too. They also have a history of Cybermen in comics.

The greatest of all these comic strips was, without a doubt, The Daleks from TV21. The strip was written by David Whitaker, who was the first script editor for the Doctor Who TV series – a much more important post then than now. As a freelance, he wrote two of the best Dalek TV serials ever for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, and a whole wodge of ancillary fiction, including the novelisations Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Crusaders, the stage play Curse of the Daleks and The Dalek Book.

In the comic strip, Whitaker and his artistic collaborators, Richard Jennings, Eric Eden and Ron Turner, traced the history of the Daleks from their original war with the Thals, which mutated them from small blue smurf-like humanoids into nasty green blobs in armour, through to their discovery of the Earth. Along the way, they delineated a richer and more detailed Dalek society than anything we ever saw on screen – and they did it in just a page a week.

As a boy, I preferred Richard Jennings’ artwork, because his Daleks were more faithful to the appearance of those on TV, and such things mattered a lot to me then. Now I am swept away by Ron Turner’s dynamic layouts, lush colours and smooth chromed finish.

Turner was a veteran comic strip and cover artist. There is a splendid gallery of his book and magazine covers here.

By the mid-1960s, Whitaker and Turner were both middle-aged, and must have been as bemused as any by developments in popular culture. But they did the sensible thing and built it into their comic strip. Obviously, Daleks couldn’t grow their hair, smoke dope or listen to rock music. But flower power? Now, that was a possibility.

One day, the Dalek Emperor is giving orders for a new construction project when the unthinkable happens – a Dalek questions him.



Unsure of which Dalek questioned the order, the Emperor has their “rest-compartments” searched (and I just love the idea that Daleks have bedrooms, don’t you?).



But the rogue Dalek has been gathering followers as well as flowers.



He tries to stage a coup.



But his support literally wilts away.



So there you have it: a culturally relevant political thriller, all done in four pages. And it carries a point that is relevant to the 2007 TV series of Doctor Who. At the end of last week’s episode, we saw the Daleks apparently abandon their age-old mission of racial domination. But as Whitaker and Turner remind us, it doesn’t matter what Daleks are trying to achieve, if they remain devious, murderous conformists. If the means are bad enough, the ends are irrelevant.


Panels
The Daleks by David Whitaker (story) and Ron Turner (art), TV Century 21, 1966, reprinted in The Dalek Chronicles, Marvel Comics UK, 1994

The Bellamy of the Daleks

The Daleks are back again on Doctor Who on Saturday. Their appearances are now so frequent that they are in danger of overexposure.

They hadn’t been on screen for the best part of six years when “Day of the Daleks” aired in 1972. The Radio Times marked the event by putting this Frank Bellamy drawing on the front cover. It is, perhaps, my favourite piece of Doctor Who artwork ever.


(In case you're wondering, the band around the Doctor’s head is part of the mind probe the Daleks used to establish that this Doctor was the same person as the others they had met.)

I wasn’t the only one to be impressed. A year later, Target Books acquired the rights to reprint three Doctor Who novelisations written in the 1960s, and they chose to copy Bellamy’s design for their covers. They couldn’t get Bellamy himself to do the work, so they hired the younger Greek artist, Christos Achilleos, to impersonate him. The reprints were a hit, and Achilleos went on to draw a couple of dozen more covers in the same style, as Target started commissioning new novelisations. But here is that first cover.



Frank Bellamy wasn’t Achilleos’s only inspiration. He must have lacked photo-reference, because those two Daleks are swiped from Ron Turner’s 1966 artwork for The Daleks comic strip in TV Century 21.



The Radio Times commissioned a good deal of Doctor Who art from Frank Bellamy in the 1970s. The listing for each Saturday’s episode was accompanied by a small, postage-stamp sized, illustration, like these from the six-part “Planet of the Daleks”.



The most striking of Radio Times’s commissions from Bellamy was a four-page comic strip adaptation of the opening of part 1 of “Colony in Space”. The page layouts were startling even by Bellamy’s standards.



After Jon Pertwee left the part, Radio Times cooled on Doctor Who, and the show was only given the cover once in the last fifteen years of its original run. So this terrific illustration for “Terror of the Zygons” appeared on an inside page.



By the time of the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann, attitudes had changed again. Not only did it make the cover, but Radio Times commissioned a half-page comic strip, written by Gary Russell and drawn by Lee Sullivan, which ran for the best part of a year. The strips can be found at the Doctor Who Cuttings Archive.

Today, Doctor Who can count on being on the RT cover several times each series. But it’s all photographs nowadays, inside and out.


Pictures and Panels:
Doctor Who illustrations by Frank Bellamy, Radio Times, 1971-1975, reprinted in Timeview: The Complete Doctor Who Illustrations of Frank Bellamy, Who Dares Publishing, 1985

Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, 1964, cover illustration by Christos Achilleos, Target Books edition, 1973

The Daleks by David Whitaker (script) and Ron Turner (art), TV Century 21, 1966, reprinted in The Dalek Chronicles, Marvel Comics UK, 1994