Grand Finale

This week’s episode of Doctor Who brings the current year’s run to an end. It will be interesting to see what head writer and executive producer Russell T Davies does to try to match the emotional impact of Rose’s exile last year or the Doctor’s death and regeneration before that.

Ah, yes. That regeneration.

Over the last three years, several Doctor Who episodes have drawn on bits of ancillary fiction. This year, the two-part “Human Nature/The Family of Blood” was adapted from a novel, and “Blink” was expanded from a short story. In previous years, “Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel” and “Dalek” used elements of a couple of CD audio plays.

But there’s another that I’ve never seen acknowledged (though that could be my lack of observation): “The Parting of the Ways” and the Doctor’s regeneration.

Doctor Who Magazine’s final comic strip story about the eighth (Paul McGann) Doctor, “The Flood”, concerned an invasion of present-day Earth by vastly advanced Cybermen from the future. At the climax of the story, the Doctor merges with a fragment of the Time Vortex, which the Cybermen have been using to power their time machine, and ages the Cybermen to dust in seconds. The story ends with a postscript showing the Doctor and his comics-only travelling companion, Destrii, heading off in search of new adventures.


“The Flood” has recently been reprinted by Panini as part of their paperback collections of Doctor Who strips. The endnotes to that collection reveal that Russell T Davies had originally offered the Magazine the opportunity to show the regeneration of the eighth Doctor into the ninth (Christopher Eccleston) Doctor. Comics writer Scott Gray and editor Clayton Hickman eventually turned down this offer, as Davies also insisted that all ninth Doctor comic strips should feature Rose. Gray and Hickman thought that to jump straight from a regeneration, with Destrii still in the TARDIS, to a Doctor-and-Rose setup would have created too many unanswerable questions about what happened in between.

So, to summarise. The last eighth Doctor comic strip, which Russell T Davies discussed extensively with the Magazine staff, would have ended like this: the Doctor merges with the Time Vortex, ages his enemies to dust, but is destroyed by the Vortex energy and has to regenerate.

The last ninth Doctor TV episode, written by Russell T Davies, ended like this: Rose merges with the Time Vortex and ages her enemies to dust; the Doctor absorbs the Vortex energy from Rose, but is destroyed by it and has to regenerate.

Quite a coincidence. Davies has, generally speaking, been quite open about his borrowings, so I suspect this was an unconscious echo. But perhaps it’s for the best that Gray and Hickman backed off from showing the regeneration, after all.


It’s the end …

This is the last post (until next year, anyway) in a series improvising around the themes of upcoming Doctor Who episodes. So to conclude, I’d like to share with you my favourite Doctor Who comic strip ever, by Richard A Starkings, from the fanzine TARDIS.

(Click to enlarge)


Panels
Doctor Who “The Flood” part 8, by Scott Gray (story), Martin Geraghty (pencil art), David A Roach (inking), Adrian Salmon (colours), Roger Langridge (lettering), Clayton Hickman (editor), Doctor Who Magazine issue 353, 2005, reprinted in Doctor Who: The Flood, Panini Books, 2007

Doctor Who by Richard A Starkings, TARDIS: The Quarterly Magazine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society Volume 8 Number 4, January 1984

Blink, and You May Have Missed This

(Not Comics)

My, but Steven Moffat can write a good script. I may even have to watch his Jekyll, even if does star the ever-irritating James Nesbitt.

Anyhow, today’s episode of Doctor Who was the third in a row based on ancillary fiction. “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood” were adapted by Paul Cornell from his novel for Virgin Books’ Doctor Who: New Adventures series, Human Nature, while Moffat reworked parts of “Blink” from his short story “What I Did on My Christmas Holidays, by Sally Sparrow” from the Doctor Who Annual 2006, published by Panini Books. Sally was 12 in that version, which was illustrated by long-time Doctor Who comic strip artist Martin Geraghty, there were no Weeping Angels, and the Doctor was “a man with a leather jacket and enormous ears”, but it was still the best thing in the book.


Good results so far, but let’s hope they stop before adapting “Menace on Metalupiter”.

Doctor Who: The Comics of Doom

Doctor Who returns to BBC1 tonight, for the third series since the programme was revived, the twenty-ninth in total.

If that number impresses, so does the longevity of the official comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine (formerly Doctor Who Monthly, and before that Doctor Who Weekly), which will notch up 28 consecutive years of publication this October. That’s on top of the almost 15-year run of Doctor Who comic strips in various Polystyle Publications titles (TV Comic, Countdown and TV Action), starting in 1964, and the sporadic appearance over the last 40-odd years of comic strips in annuals published by World Distributors, Marvel, Panini and the BBC.

There are currently three official Doctor Who comic strips running – in Panini’s Doctor Who Magazine, in the BBC’s own Doctor Who Adventures and in GE Fabbri’s Doctor Who Battles In Time, a magazine tied-in to the collectable card game.

All three strips have responded to the exuberant tone of the new TV series by throwing in as much wackiness as possible. But they have tended to neglect the accompanying darkness and horror. Doctor Who is probably the most joyful programme on television, but it achieves that by starkly contrasting its embrace of life with what is possibly the highest body count of any TV series ever. And perhaps the merely dead are better off than those who have been possessed, chopped up to repair spaceships, or “upgraded” into Cybermen.

The strip in Doctor Who Magazine tends to have rather stolid artwork, usually by Mike Collins, but most recently by Martin Geraghty. This is perhaps unsurprising. The strip takes up only 10 pages in a 68 page magazine sold more to fans of Doctor Who than to fans of comic strips. They are likely to value fidelity to the surface appearance of the programme above any attempt to use expressive techniques to try to capture its tone.



Doctor Who Adventures is aimed at younger children. John Ross’s art, like that in many modern children’s comics, is clear, bright, uncluttered and unshaded. It is much more lively than the art in Doctor Who Magazine, but, like the scripts, it aims only to capture the light of Doctor Who, not the shade.



I haven’t seen much of Doctor Who Battles in Time. The short cartoon strips seem to aim at a similar tone to those in Doctor Who Adventures, but the ones I have seen are less accomplished. No penciller is credited for the current story.



There’s no reason why at least some of these strips shouldn’t continue for years to come. There’s no sign of a Torchwood strip, and we’ll have to see what happens to The Sarah Jane Adventures. In the meantime, a little more adventurousness in the Doctor Who comics wouldn’t come amiss.


Panels (from top):

Doctor Who “The Warkeeper’s Crown” Part Three, by Alan Barnes (story), Martin Geraghty (pencils), David A Roach (inks), James Offredi (colours), Roger Langridge (lettering), Hickman & Gray (editors), Doctor Who Magazine issue 380, Panini, 28 March 2007

Doctor Who “The Snag Finders” Part One, by Trevor Baxendale (script), John Ross (art), Alan Craddock (colours) and Paul Vyse (letters), Doctor Who Adventures issue 26, BBC, 29 March – 14 April 2007

Doctor Who “Beneath The Skin”, written by Steve Cole, inks by Lee Sullivan, colours by Alan Craddock (no penciller, letterer or editor credited), Doctor Who Battles In Time issue 12, GE Fabbri, 2007