I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a TARDIS

Since its revival, Doctor Who has become as much of a part of Christmas broadcasting as the Morecambe and Wise Show, celebrity guests and all.

It was not always so. Discounting spin-offs (the wretched K-9 and Company saw K-9 singing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”), Doctor Who had just one Christmas episode in its original 26-year run. “The Feast of Steven” (named after one of the Doctor’s travelling companions at the time) was broadcast on Christmas Day 1965. Famously, it concluded with the Doctor turning to the camera, raising a glass, and saying, “Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home.”



That same year, TV Comic also treated us to a Doctor Who Christmas story. I think that it is fair to say that anyone who was old enough to watch the TV show would have found this comic strip too juvenile. The TARDIS lands the Doctor and his grand-children, John and Gillian (fixtures of the comic strip until well into Patrick Troughton’s time), in a snow-covered land. These are non-consecutive panels.




Actually, the children all wanted Daleks, but TV21 had the rights to those, so TARDISes it is.

Fortunately, the Doctor has brought a magic box with him, which can magically replicate toys. Yes, a magic box. Well, two of them, luckily enough.


Because while Santa is replicating toy TARDISes, the Doctor and his grand-children run into the wicked Demon Magician of the Forest.


They have to use the magic box to shrink polar bears …


… enlarge squirrels …


… and melt killer snowmen.




Silly, isn’t it? I mean, even a five-year old is going to have difficulty accepting a story in which the Doctor carries round a single, unexplained tool which just happens to be able to do whatever the plot needs at any given moment.


Oh. Right.

Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home.


Panels and pictures

Doctor Who “A Klytode Christmas” Part 1 by Trevor Baxendale (script), John Ross (art), Alan Craddock (colours), Paul Vyse (letters), Doctor Who Adventures Issue 44, BBC Magazines, 6 December – 12 December 2007

Off-screen photographs from “The Feast of Steven” (BBC TV, 25 December 1965) taken from The Doctor Who Missing Episode Nexus

Doctor Who, art by Bill Mevin, TV Comic issues 732-735, 25 December 1965 to 15 January 1966, reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 15, 15 January 1994

Illustration by Mike Collins and David A Roach to Doctor Who “The Hopes and Fears of All the Years” by Paul Cornell, Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2007

The Other Cyd Child

One of the tidbits of information in the extras included in Titan’s series of Modesty Blaise reprints is that original artist Jim Holdaway had a set of reference photos taken to help him with the fight scenes, modelled by European women’s judo champion Cyd Child.

Child also worked as a stunt artist, and often doubled for Diana Rigg in The Avengers. So, stretching a point, you could say that she played both Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, which is quite an achievement.

The history of The Avengers in comics was covered in an article by Ian Wheeler, John Freeman and Dez Skinn in Comic International issue 201, and is the subject of a fine web-site, The Avengers Illustrated.

Among my pitifully small collection of issues of TV Comic is issue 720, from October 1965, which marked the start of a seven-year run of The Avengers, off and on.


(Is it just me, or should those dialogue balloons be read manga-style?)

Some of the TV Comic strips were reprinted for the American market by Gold Key. Although the indicia name the single issue they produced as The Avengers, the cover carries the title John Steed, Emma Peel, presumably to avoid confusion and trademark conflicts with Marvel’s super-hero team. The Avengers Illustrated shows the photographic covers, but here is how the newly-coloured interior art appears.


By far the best comic strip version of The Avengers ever put into print was the mini-series Steed and Mrs Peel (which also features Tara King), published by Eclipse Comics and Acme Press between 1990 and 1992, and written and drawn by Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson, perhaps the most perfect combination of creators and subject that I can think of. Confusingly, the back-up strip, about Mrs Peel’s reunion with her husband, was also drawn by Gibson, though it was written by Anne Caulfield. The back-up is quite amusing, but not a patch on the main feature, “The Golden Game”.

Again, The Avengers Illustrated only shows the covers, so here is a sample of the interior.


“The Golden Game” is a clever and witty story, and deserves a trade paperback if anyone can get the reprinting rights.


Panels
The Avengers, first instalment, art probably by Pat Williams, TV Comic issue 720, 2 October 1965

John Steed, Emma Peel “The Roman Invasion”, art probably by Pat Williams, from The Avengers issue 1, Gold Key, 1968, reprinted from TV Comic

Steed and Mrs Peel book 1, “The Golden Game” part 1 “Crown and Anchor” by Grant Morrison (writer), Ian Gibson (artist), Ellie de Ville (letterer) and Dick Hansom (editor), Eclipse Comics and Acme Press, 1990

Absent Friends

Captain Jack Harkness returns to Doctor Who in Saturday’s episode on BBC1. The picture above was drawn by Roger Langridge for a book review, and I’m posting it here instead of a panel from a comic because Jack has never appeared in a Doctor Who comic strip.

He’s hardly alone in that. Of the dozens of characters who have formed the regular supporting cast of Doctor Who, TV Comic only featured Jamie, Liz, the Brigadier, Sarah and Leela, while Marvel only gave us K9, Peri and Ace while they were appearing on TV.


Some of the others appeared in annuals, or in the “past Doctor” strips that Marvel/Panini ran after they had given up on Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor and before Paul McGann’s version appeared. Jo Grant had the unique distinction of appearing in a comic strip in the Radio Times. But it is still the case that the Doctor’s TV companions were more commonly absent from than present in the comics.

It doesn’t seem to have done much harm. Some of the most memorable of the Doctor Who comic strips, including all of the Countdown, TV Action and Doctor Who Weekly runs, have omitted the TV companions. Perhaps it even helps the writers and artists to find a space and tone of their own by freeing them, just a little, from the TV template.


Pictures and panels

Illustration by Roger Langridge for a review of Gareth Roberts’s Doctor Who novel for BBC Books, Only Human, from Doctor Who Magazine issue 362, 9 November 2005, Panini Comics

Doctor Who “The Orb”, art by John Canning, Mighty TV Comic issue 1338, 23 July 1977

Of Scarecrows and Schoolboys

The upcoming two-part Doctor Who story on BBC TV, based on Paul Cornell’s novel Human Nature, features spooky walking scarecrows, sinister schoolboys and the Doctor turned into a human being.

By a curious coincidence, the final TV Comic story about the second Doctor featured spooky walking scarecrows …


… while TV Comic’s first story about the third Doctor featured sinister schoolboys.



And did the Doctor turn human? Not exactly, but it was at this point that the Doctor turned into a Time Lord, gaining a specific world and culture after seven years as an undefined, mysterious traveller in time and space.

And before that, he had sometimes been human too. More about that next week.


Panels
Doctor Who by Roger Noel Cook (writer – attributed) and John Canning (artist), TV Comic issue 936, 22 November 1969, this panel reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 20, 25 May 1994

Doctor Who by Roger Noel Cook (writer – attributed) and John Canning (artist), TV Comic issue 947, 7 February 1970, reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 4, 3 March 1993. Colour added by Louise Cassell for the reprint.

Bing-Bang-a-Bong-Woooo-Hooooo

There’s no new Doctor Who on BBC1 this week, because the Eurovision Song Contest is on, and to make room for it the BBC would rather postpone Doctor Who than their musical talent contest show Any Dream Will Do.

Doctor Who’s relationship with popular music has not always been so unhappy. In the TV Comic Annual 1969 (published, in the manner of British comic annuals, in 1968), the Doctor became the manager of a pop group called the Electrodes. After using his trusty rocket pack to save them from an assassination attempt by their former manager, the Doctor and his grand-children, John and Gillian, accompanied the Electrodes on their world tour. Yes, really.

(Art by John Canning)

I’m not sure which was stranger: the stories TV Comic told about the Doctor, or the fact that every single one of them was approved by the Doctor Who production office at the BBC.