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Post by tingramretro on Nov 16, 2015 14:01:22 GMT -5
I don't know whether there are any other Doctor Who fans here (I've been pretty much obsessed by the good Doctor's adventures since I was about seven, when Tom Baker was still battling the forces of evil with a disarming smile and a bag of jelly babies) but it occurred to me, since he's currently something of an in-thing and is probably more high profile in the world of comics than he's ever been thanks to Titan (who actually have five Doctor Who titles out this month!) to take a look back at his comic strip career. I'll be moving through the doctor's comics life a bit at a time, starting at the very beginning, but not dwelling too much on the very earliest stuff (unless anybody actually wants me to) as the first six years (while very imaginative in places) were actually pretty primitive. Doctor Who is, obviously, the longest running science fiction series of all time on TV (52 years, so far) but the Doctor has actually been around in comics for almost as long. He first appeared in the pages of the long running British weekly anthology TV Comic (#674) (unsurprisingly, this was a comic for younger readers which featured strips based on popular BBC TV shows) on November 14th 1964, less than a year after his TV debut, his adventures illustrated by one Neville Main, but he bore very little resemblance to his TV incarnation: this Doctor, though superficially based on William Hartnell's grouchy schemer, was more of a wizard than a scientist, his name actually appeared to be 'Who', and he hung out with his two young grandkids, John and Gillian (who were noticeably absent from his adventures everywhere else), blithely taking them into danger on a weekly basis (what their parents thought of this, or indeed who they even were, was never addressed). All the same, the strip was very, very popular with an audience probably rather less discerning than today's youth...  Main left the strip to draw the rather less whimsical adventures of Steed & Mrs Peel in The Avengers before too long, replaced by Bill Mevin, but the strip continued in much the same vein as before. In 1966, meanwhile, the Doctor made his American comics debut in Dell's adaptation of the movie Doctor Who & the Daleks, but of course, this likewise had only a superficial resemblance to the TV show from which the movie was adapted. And even when the TV Comic strip (now frawn by John Canning) began to feature the second Doctor, as played by Patrick Troughton, John and Gillian were initially still making their unwelcome presence felt in stories that were at best charmingly simplistic, and at worst plain bloody silly. Even the eventual ditching of the kids (packed off to college on the planet Zebadee) and their replacement by TV companion Jamie McCrimmon didn't make a lot of difference, though some of the strips more bizarre excesses were gradually phased out, and the publishers even began to license a few of the TV show's villlains, notably the Cybermen, one-shot monsters the Quarks (who actually became a recurring menace in the strip) and finally even the Daleks (who had previously featured in their own beautifully painted strip on the back cover of rival publication TV Century 21).  However, with the arrival of the 1970s, and the third Doctor (as played by Jon Pertwee) the Doctor Who strips fortunes (and its overall quality) were about to get a serious boost, when in 1971 it found a new home in a brand new publication called Countdown...and this is where, for me, it begins to get interesting!  |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Nov 16, 2015 20:18:24 GMT -5
Primitive they may be, but that art looks great! Have these ever been collected?
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 17, 2015 3:01:16 GMT -5
Great idea for a thread, tingramretro. I'm not the biggest Dr. Who fan in the world, although, like you, I have fond memories of watching the Tom Baker and Peter Davison era shows as a nipper. These days, my interest in Dr. Who and associated merchandise (like these comic strips) is limited to the series' 1960s-1980s glory days and is almost purely a socio-historical interest. But I really enjoyed reading your first post and I like the way you write, so I'll definitely be following this thread with interest. I'm not sure how much I'll actually have to contribute, but I will be reading along.
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 3:10:55 GMT -5
Primitive they may be, but that art looks great! Have these ever been collected? The early TV Comic strips have, as far as I know, only ever been reprinted in various issues of Marvel UK's early 90s title Doctor Who Classic Comics. They have never been collected. |
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 3:24:47 GMT -5
Great idea for a thread, tingramretro. I'm not the biggest Dr. Who fan in the world, although, like you, I have fond memories of watching the Tom Baker and Peter Davison era shows as a nipper. These days, my interest in Dr. Who and associated merchandise (like these comic strips) is limited to the series' 1960s-1980s glory days is almost purely a socio-historical interest. But I really enjoyed reading your first post and I like the way you write, so I'll definitely be following this thread with interest. I'm not sure how much I'll actually have to contribute, but I will be reading along. Thanks. I'll hopefully be moving on to the Countdown/TV Action stuff when I get home from work later. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Nov 17, 2015 8:33:25 GMT -5
Primitive they may be, but that art looks great! Have these ever been collected? The early TV Comic strips have, as far as I know, only ever been reprinted in various issues of Marvel UK's early 90s title Doctor Who Classic Comics. They have never been collected. That's too bad, I'd love to see more. Perhaps Titan will reprint them in the future. |
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 10:44:20 GMT -5
Before I get back to the third Doctor's strip adventures post 1970, a little side trip: as I said before, TV Comic did not at first use the TV show's most famous villains, for the simple reason that by the time Dalekmania (which really was a thing) had started to take off in Britain, another title had already snapped them up. The Daleks, supposedly written by their creator Terry Nation, but actually (in the grand old comics tradition of people taking credit for the works of others) mostly written by the show's script editor David Whitaker, ran in the pages of TV Century 21 from its first weekly issue (dated 23rd January 1965) and ran until issue #104, initially drawn by Richard Jennings but later, for most of its run, by Ron Turner. The series was set on Skaro at the very beginning of the Daleks' development, long before their first encounter with the Doctor, and basically recounted their history from their origins up until their first forays into space on the road to becoming the would be universal conquerors we know and love. But the history shown in the strip, which began with their creation by the blue skinned scientist Yarvelling and Minister Zolfian, was totally at odds with any other account of their origins yet seen-even though Terry Nation himself had a hand in it! Then again, in 1975 Nation would go on to write yet another completely contradictory account of their beginnings in the TV story Genesis of the Daleks, so it's probably hardly surprising that he wasn't bothering to keep the details straight with their introductory TV story in a comic published more than a year after it had aired; after all, in 1965, it would have seemed unlikely that anyone would recall the precise details of a TV serial from 1963, or that anyone would ever be likely to see it again... The beginning of the saga, with art by Richard Jennings. Only one page appeared each week.   The Daleks was very much a strip with its own identity, separate from the TV show, but it has remained deservedly popular for decades, creations such as the Golden Emperor Dalek becoming somewhat iconic, and even influencing the makers of the TV show on occasion. Originally known only as The Daleks, successive reprints in various publications over the years eventually necessitated it being given an overarching series title (much the same thing, in fact, happened with the early TV episodes; you might now be able to buy a DVD of a story from 1964 called The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but that title never appeared on screen back then). As a result, these days this epic saga is known as The Dalek Chronicles, and it's well worth seeking out. Of course, once TV 21 (as it became) finally let them go, TV Comic lost no time in snapping the Daleks up, and their ongoing Who strip was even renamed Doctor Who & the Daleks for awhile during the second Doctor's run, regardless of whether they happened to be appearing in it that week or not... |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Nov 17, 2015 11:37:34 GMT -5
A very good friend of mine had the first Daleks' hardcover annual from 1964 as a kid. He's not as old as all that though, so I think he must've inherited it from an older uncle or something. This is the one I mean...  Apparently this was the first Dr. Who-related hardcover annual published...before there had even been a Dr. Who annual proper. My friend lent me this book in the mid-90s and I remember how amazing the painted artwork of Richard Jennings was. Pure eye candy. It's very much in the same vein as Frank Hampson's Dan Dare strip that ran in Eagle comics, in terms of the painted art style. |
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Post by chadwilliam on Nov 17, 2015 12:34:46 GMT -5
I'll be moving through the doctor's comics life a bit at a time, starting at the very beginning, but not dwelling too much on the very earliest stuff (unless anybody actually wants me to) as the first six years (while very imaginative in places) were actually pretty primitive.
As a huge Doctor Who fan, here's one vote to dwell as much as you'd like. I've seen bits and pieces of these strips and their primitive nature makes them feel as if they've bled into our reality from some weird parallel universe (Patrick Troughton shooting a giant spider while shouting "Die Hideous Creature Die!" for instance could never have been dreamed up by anyone who had actually seen the show). One image has stayed with me however out of all of the little glimpses I've gotten here and there - a pair of astronauts taking part in the first moon landing only to be left dumbstruck by the presence of a police box on the otherwise barren planet. Although published in 1965, the author of the strip predicted the date of the moon landing as July 20, 1970 - out by exactly one year.
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 13:14:22 GMT -5
A very good friend of mine had the first Daleks' hardcover annual from 1964 as a kid. He's not as old as all that though, so I think he must've inherited it from an older uncle or something. This is the one I mean... Apparently this was the first Dr. Who-related hardcover annual published...before there had even been a Dr. Who annual proper. My friend lent me this book in the mid-90s and I remember how amazing the painted artwork of Richard Jennings was. Pure eye candy. It's very much in the same vein as Frank Hampson's Dan Dare strip that ran in Eagle comics, in terms of the painted art style. Yep, one of the very earliest pieces of Who related merchandise, from 1964. The Dalek World followed in 1965, and The Dalek Outer Space Book in 1966. Later, four Dalek Annuals appeared between 1975 and 1978, but of course by then, the Doctor who Annual itself had been around for awhile (I'll get to those in a bit, as they're kind of a treasure house of forgotten Who comics material). And yes, that painted artwork was amazing, and there was a lot of stuff in that style in British comics back then. The Trigan Empire springs to mind as another good example. |
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 13:28:00 GMT -5
I'll be moving through the doctor's comics life a bit at a time, starting at the very beginning, but not dwelling too much on the very earliest stuff (unless anybody actually wants me to) as the first six years (while very imaginative in places) were actually pretty primitive.
As a huge Doctor Who fan, here's one vote to dwell as much as you'd like. I've seen bits and pieces of these strips and their primitive nature makes them feel as if they've bled into our reality from some weird parallel universe (Patrick Troughton shooting a giant spider while shouting "Die Hideous Creature Die!" for instance could never have been dreamed up by anyone who had actually seen the show). One image has stayed with me however out of all of the little glimpses I've gotten here and there - a pair of astronauts taking part in the first moon landing only to be left dumbstruck by the presence of a police box on the otherwise barren planet. Although published in 1965, the author of the strip predicted the date of the moon landing as July 20, 1970 - out by exactly one year.
That was a little spooky, I always thought. But you certainly couldn't accuse those early writers of lacking imagination. I particularly liked their solution to the problem of having to run the strip for several months after Patrick Troughton's departure on TV without actually knowing who the next Doctor was going to be: they just unilaterally decided that the sentence the Time Lords had passed on the Doctor at his trial would be administered in two parts, so for some months TV Comic's readers were treated to an unregenerated second Doctor, exiled to Earth and operating out of a hotel! When the show was about to return, in a truly bizarre twist, they had the Doctor captured by animated scarecrows which were actually Time Lord agents sent to forcibly regenerate him, in time for the new Doctor's debut. And the scary thing is, by the standards of the time, that wasn't anywhere close to being the most insane story you were likely to find in a lot of British comics... |
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 17, 2015 13:34:02 GMT -5
Speaking of the Doctor Who Annual, before I take a bit of a break, I just thought I'd share one of my favourite annual covers from the sixties. The Cybermen, incidentally, don't actually appear inside the book.  |
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Post by dupersuper on Nov 17, 2015 22:51:09 GMT -5
I love Doctor Who. I love comics. I unsurprisingly have several Doctor Who comics.
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Post by chadwilliam on Nov 17, 2015 23:41:19 GMT -5
for some months TV Comic's readers were treated to an unregenerated second Doctor, exiled to Earth and operating out of a hotel! When the show was about to return, in a truly bizarre twist, they had the Doctor captured by animated scarecrows which were actually Time Lord agents sent to forcibly regenerate him And this is the stuff you don't want to spend too much time on?!? Good Lord, man - read what you just wrote! |
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Post by tingramretro on Nov 18, 2015 2:27:54 GMT -5
for some months TV Comic's readers were treated to an unregenerated second Doctor, exiled to Earth and operating out of a hotel! When the show was about to return, in a truly bizarre twist, they had the Doctor captured by animated scarecrows which were actually Time Lord agents sent to forcibly regenerate him And this is the stuff you don't want to spend too much time on?!? Good Lord, man - read what you just wrote! A fair point.  |
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