Doctor Who Talk at the Auckland Central Library

I will be giving a talk about Doctor Who this Wednesday 12 November 2014, from 6 to 7pm, at the Auckland Central Library.

The talk is to mark the 51st anniversary of Doctor Who - although of course here in New Zealand it is actually the 50th anniversary!

I'm be talking about several aspects of Doctor Who, including its long history, how it has been viewed in New Zealand, my passion for the show, my work as a writer/researcher for the BBC DVDs, and my book, The Comic Strip Companion.

The talk will be along similar lines to the very well-received one I gave at the Takapuna Library in 2013, and also at the national science fiction convention earlier this year. I'll be showing a number of images and some short video clips to illustrate my talk.

I will have limited quantities of my book and the DVDs available to purchase and get signed afterwards.

Hope to see you there!

A Year Without Doctor Who

The Sixth Doctor arrived in March 1984, thirty years ago this month.

Just a couple of weeks ago I got to discuss this milestone with both Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor) and Nicola Bryant (his companion Peri) when I hosted a series of talks with them in Dunedin and Christchurch, at the Armageddon Expo events.

As I talked to these two actors about the anniversary of their first appearance in Doctor Who I couldn't help but think that the relevance was slightly lost on myself, and perhaps also on those members of the audience who were old enough to remember what it was like to be a fan thirty years ago in New Zealand.

1984, the year in which Peter Davison's third and last season aired and Colin Baker commenced playing the Doctor, was entirely devoid of any televised Doctor Who at all in this country. Not one of Colin Baker’s stories screened here until November 1988, several years later and indeed some time after Colin had departed the role.

The series had abruptly halted on TVNZ following ‘Mawdryn Undead’ in late November 1983. This was an unfortunate point at which to break the series as it left hanging the ongoing plot involving Turlough and the Black Guardian.

At first it appeared as though TVNZ were giving Doctor Who a brief respite over the summer months. I can remember being relaxed about this break at first, possibly even relieved. My family were in the habit of going away camping on a remote beach - without a television set - for two weeks in January. I’d have been most upset if the show had been on at the time.

I’m sure I would have been even more annoyed had I known that it would be a very long wait. That summer of 1983/84 came to an end without any sign of Doctor Who’s return. It became a weekly ritual to scan the New Zealand Listener’s television listings, eagerly searching out a billing for the next story, only to be deflated week after week, month after month. The series finally returned in April 1985, after a hiatus that lasted about 18 months. There was a bittersweet twist to this. The return was not the anticipated latter half of the Fifth Doctor’s era (which should have resumed with ‘Terminus’). Instead we were treated to older stories from the 1960s and 1970s. I was thrilled to get to see these vintage episodes, many which I’d never viewed and those I had seen were dim distant memories. It did mean however that it would be years before TVNZ got around to screening those much delayed new episodes.

The prolonged absence was made all the more agonising because for the first time ever I was well informed about what was screening in the UK. At the beginning of 1984 I discovered Doctor Who Magazine. My grandmother most generously set up a standing order with her local newsagent in East London, and started posting me a copy every month commencing with issue 84, which arrived in early January.

Doctor Who Magazine was a treasure-trove of previews, set reports, reviews, and photographs. I studied these issues in obsessive detail, scrutinising every word and picture, trying to imagine what thrilling-sounding stories such as  ‘Frontios’, ‘Planet of Fire’ and ‘The Caves of Androzani’ must be like.

I witnessed through the pages of the magazine the departure of the familiar TARDIS crew of the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and (for me, the newly arrived) Turlough, to be replaced by the Sixth Doctor and Peri. My impression of these two characters, played by unfamiliar actors, was entirely based on what I saw and read in the magazine.

A large part of my understanding of what the Sixth Doctor was like came from reading the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. Of course I knew from the photographs elsewhere in the issues that he had a tasteless and gaudily colourful costume but in the uniformly monochrome strip it actually looked quite stylish. The new Doctor seemed good-humoured with an easy-going personality.

The Sixth Doctor’s stories were extraordinarily imaginative, at least in comic strip form. Even without having seen ‘The Twin Dilemma’ I think I must have realised that the surreal mind-bending visuals of stories like ‘Voyager’ and ‘Once Upon a Time-Lord’ were nothing like what was happening in the television series, but these strip stories gave me a deep and enduring admiration of Doctor Who in the comic strip medium.

1984 and the arrival of the Sixth Doctor has been occupying my thoughts a lot lately, and not just because of the thirty-year anniversary or talking to Colin and Nicola. I’ve reached the point in the writing of the second volume of The Comic Strip Companion in which I’m covering the earliest strip exploits of the Sixth Doctor. Thirty years is a long time, but as I re-read the pages of ‘Voyager’, marvelling at the gloriously surreal twists and turns of Steve Parkhouse’s surreal script and John Ridgway’s absolutely stunning illustrations, I can’t help but be transported back to that time when this was the only new Doctor Who.

I turned sixteen in 1984. I wish I could tell myself at that age that one day I’d be the author of a series of books about the comic strips, that I’d write the production information text for DVDs of those 1984 stories that I used to speculate about, and that I’d be chatting to the actors who played the Sixth Doctor and Peri. I’m not sure which of these facts would impress my younger self more. I’m not even sure he’d even believe me.

Poll Result

The latest Doctor Who Magazine (#464) has the results of 'The Best of 2012!' Merchandise Poll.

The Books Non-Fiction category results from the 2012 Doctor Who Magazine Merchandise Poll

The Comic Strip Companion appears in fifth place. That's a good result, especially considering the high standard of the competition and the large number of titles my book was up against. 

Looking back at the poll form (in #455), this category listed eleven suggested titles (including my book), with readers also invited to vote for any of the many other non-fiction Doctor Who titles published last year. A couple of the titles that didn't receive enough votes to make it into the top five were well-publicised and widely-distributed official BBC books.

I'm delighted that my book about a frankly rather niche subject has been so well received.

It is also lovely to see Behind the Sofa in third place, as I had a piece published in that book.

Award Nomination

I'm delighted to report that The Comic Strip Companion has been shortlisted for an award.

My book has made it on to the final ballot for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, in the Best Professional Publication Category.

The Vogels are administered by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand.

Voting will take place at AuContraire, the national science fiction convention, to be held in Wellington from 12-14 July 2013. Members of SFFANZ or Au Contraire are eligible to vote.

I'd also like to congratulate my friend Adam Christopher who has received two nominations, for Best Novel and Best New Talent.

The full list of nominations can be found here.

Postscript
My book didn't win an award. Oh well, at least it was nominated. Better luck next time!

A Flawed History Lesson

Marking Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary is a monthly comic called Prisoners of Time, published by IDW, featuring a story for each of the eleven Doctors. At the back of each issue is a series of features on the history of Doctor Who in comics by various writers. 

Issue 4 (April 2013) has a two-page history of the comics from the beginning up to the present day, laid out as a series of panels with comic strip-style captions. The “history lesson on how it all came to be” (as it is headed) is presented by Dez Skinn, the man who devised Doctor Who Weekly in 1979. Skinn's own contribution to the history of the comic strip is immense; his legacy is still going strong today, as Panini's Doctor Who Magazine.

It is a shame therefore that certain aspects of this history are not particularly accurate. Some of the facts pertaining to the early years of the comic strip, prior to Dez Skinn’s involvement in 1979, are simply wrong - especially in relation to TV Comic, a publication that Skinn does not appear hold in high regard.

I want to be clear that my intention here is not to criticize Skinn, or to imply that he somehow deliberately set out to mislead. I'm simply keen to set the record straight on the subject. It does strike me as odd that no one seems to have fact-checked the piece (having written a book on this very subject, I'd have gladly offered my services).

The earliest error is to do with the television series rather than the comic strip. Discussing the beginnings of the series, Skinn states that An Unearthly Child, the opening story, was up against ITV’s The Buccaneers. In fact the first five episodes were screened against the ABC serial Emerald Soup. The Buccaneers appeared against Doctor Who on ATV London from 28 December 1963, one week into the second story.

The history then claims that The Dalek Book came out only five months after the Daleks made their television debut. This is a forgivable error, as many sources have wrongly stated that this book was published on 30 June 1964 (which is five months after the conclusion of The Daleks). It was only whilst researching The Comic Strip Companion that I learned that the book was in fact published later, on 30 September 1964. This long-standing misapprehension most likely originated because someone got one digit in the date wrong: ‘30/9/64’ became ‘30/6/64’.

This dating error has a knock-on effect when Skinn subsequently observes that the Doctor Who strip in TV Comic began "five months later". In fact The Dalek Book only preceded the TV Comic strip by about six weeks.

Perhaps the most egregious error in the whole feature is the suggestion that TV Comic did not mention the strip on the cover when it first appeared. This is plainly wrong. The first issue to feature the Doctor Who strip was #674, dated 14 November 1964. The cover of that issue clearly states: "Starts today! Doctor Who" (pictured here).

The history compounds the error by including the wrong TV Comic cover (the issue featured in the history is #709, dated 17 July 1965 - eight months later - which did not have a mention of Doctor Who).

Skinn offers the view that the strip wasn't mentioned on the cover "... maybe because they weren’t very good". That may be Skinn's opinion, but I have examined a great deal of correspondence between the BBC and the publishers of TV Comic from 1964, and there is no suggestion that the strip wasn't considered worthy of promotion. Four of the initial nine issues featuring Doctor Who have a reference to the strip on the front cover, so TV Comic could hardly be accused of failing to promote its new acquisition. Skinn makes no mention of the five month period in 1967 when the Doctor Who strip appeared in full colour on the front cover of every issue of TV Comic. 

The history goes on to mention The Daleks comic strip, which began in 1965. Skinn claims that the strip appeared in “TV 21”, but the comic was actually called TV Century 21. TV21 was the name given to a later relaunch of the comic in early 1968, two years after The Daleks strip ceased publication. This is an error that crops up in various places.

Another minor error involves the dating of the first World Distributors Doctor Who annual. It is claimed that it was launched for Christmas 1966, but the first annual came out a year earlier.

The history discusses the strip’s move to Countdown which later became TV Action, and states that the comic had "130 weekly issues". This is almost but not quite right: there were 132 issues.

Lastly, Skinn dismisses the later years of the TV Comic strip, claiming that with the arrival of the fourth Doctor the comic “simply ran reprints of Jon Pertwee strips with Tom Baker's face added!" There were indeed reprinted stories with Tom Baker’s features redrawn over Pertwee (and Patrick Troughton in one instance), but what Skinn doesn't mention is that this only happened in the weekly TV Comic issues for nine months from July 1978 through to the strip’s last appearance in March 1979. The history overlooks the three and a half years (a considerably longer period) prior to this when original, weekly Tom Baker strips were run in TV Comic.

I think it is clear that Skinn has a low opinion of the Doctor Who strip in TV Comic. He observes that TV Comic's license for “two reprint pages” prevented him from launching his own Doctor Who comic strip publication "for years". Presumably he is unaware that TV Comic only moved to running a reprinted Doctor Who comic strip in their weekly issues after the publishers had advised BBC Enterprises in May 1978 that they intended to quit the licence. The catalyst for this decision was probably the recent raising of the royalty rate for the strip that TV Comic was required to pay to the BBC. The timing of the strip’s last appearance in May 1979 suggests that it is likely that TV Comic may have been contractually required to give one year’s notice. If so, the very reprint strips that so irked Skinn were likely a portent that the licence was about to become available, paving the way for October 1979's triumphant launch of Doctor Who Weekly.

It is good to see that the long and fascinating history of the Doctor Who comic strip is receiving coverage with these features in the Prisoners of Time series. It is just a shame that in the case of this instalment the facts have not been accurately presented.

The Origin of The Vampire Plants

'The Vampire Plants' is a six-page Doctor Who comic strip featuring Patrick Troughton’s Doctor. It first appeared in The Dr Who Annual for 1970 (published in 1969), and was later reprinted in the omnibus collection Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space in 1981.

A synopsis for 'The Vampire Plants' follows:

The Doctor receives a message from his old friend Dr Vane and arrives on Venus, where Vane has experimental botanical gardens. The Doctor leaves Zoe behind in the TARDIS but takes Jamie with him to visit Vane. Vane is troubled by the recent mysterious disappearance of a newly-discovered plant, the galea tentipocus, found in the Galea galaxy. Vane’s assistant, Regan, is tasked with finding the thieves believed to have stolen the plant. Regan finds the tree in the wilderness but it grabs him and shoves him off a cliff. The injured Regan is looked after by Vane while the Doctor and Jamie go in search of the plant and discover that it has grown to an enormous size. It traps the pair in its branches. The Doctor has the idea of setting fire to the grass, and they escape from the plant’s clutches as it is engulfed in flames.

 When I reviewed this story in The Comic Strip Companion I observed that the comic strip was: “… a brazen recycling of the idea behind ‘Freedom by Fire’ from the previous year’s annual…” A few months after my book was published I became aware that 'The Vampire Plants' strip was actually an example of even more “brazen recycling” from an entirely different source.

Spaceman: Comic of the Future was a British science fiction comic that premiered around March 1953 and lasted for 15 issues. One of the ongoing strips in this short-lived comic was a series of stories featuring a character called Bill Merrill, who worked for the Scientific Investigation Bureau.

One of the Bill Merrill stories published in Spaceman was ‘Rockingham's Tree’. This was an eight-page, black and white comic strip.

A synopsis for 'Rockingham's Tree' follows: 

Bill Merrill and Velma, members of the Scientific Investigation Bureau, learn of the discovery by Professor Rockingham of a tree on Mercury. He has brought the Mercurian Tree, as it is called, it to Earth and puts it on public display in his botanical gardens in England. Over night however the gardens’ nightwatchman is killed and the tree goes missing. Merrill, Velma and Rockingham investigate the mystery. A butterfly collector, Colonel Butterworth, finds the tree in the countryside. The tree grabs the colonel and shoves him over a cliff. Butterworth survives the fall and relates his story to Merrill and his team. The Bureau begin a search of the countryside but a year passes before the tree is located in Epping Forest. Merrill, Velma and Rockingham race to the forest and discover that the tree has grown to an enormous size. It traps the trio in its branches. Merrill has the idea of setting fire to the grass, and they escape from the trees’ clutches as it is engulfed in flames.

The descriptions of these two comic strip stories share some remarkable points of similarity, but a comparison of the artwork removes any lingering doubt that the Bill Merrill story was indeed the source of the Doctor Who strip.

The similarities first start to emerge on the third page of the Bill Merrill strip (top) and the second of the Doctor Who story (bottom). The Nightwatchman, seen in the original is replaced by Dr. Vane, in the exact same pose, and the plant/tree gets a name-change, but other than that the artwork is very similar indeed.

The next page in both strips has three panels with features common to both strips. In the first of these panels, the body of the Nightwatchman is removed (no one dies in the Doctor Who version); Rockingham becomes Dr. Vane (complete with same hands-on-hips pose); lastly Bill Merrill is removed from the picture, and the Doctor is added.

This is the very next panel in both versions. Rockingham is removed and Merrill is replaced by the Doctor, situated on the opposite side of the panel.

Colonel Butterworth the butterfly hunter from the original strip becomes Vane’s assistant Regan in the later version, armed with a stick rather than a butterfly net. Note that the plant has added suckers in the Doctor Who version that are not present in the original.

Moving on to a new page in both versions, the sequence continues with the tree / plant breaking the butterfly net / stick.

Butterworth / Regan is then seized by the tree / plant…

… and falls off a cliff.

A jump ahead in both stories brings us to the beginning of the final confrontation with the tree / plant. In the original Bill Merrill, Velma and Rockingham discover the tree, whereas in the redrawn version Jamie and the Doctor are seen encountering the enormous plant.

The final page of both strips, showing just how closely the composition of the panels, as well as the artwork, was copied. Only the first and last panels on each version are entirely different.

There is no doubt that 'The Vampire Plants' story was adapted from the Bill Merrill strip. But how and why did this occur? 

Was this blatant plagiarism, or was the Doctor Who strip developed with the consent of the creator of the original story? Was the unidentified artist responsible for 'The Vampire Plants' perhaps the same person who drew the Bill Merrill strip and therefore was simply adapting his own work?

The Bill Merrill series was created by Ron Embleton very early in his career. Embleton later became established as a prolific and acclaimed British comic strip illustrator. The Doctor Who strip however looks nothing like the work Embleton was producing in the 1960s.  There is also some doubt over whether Embleton was responsible for drawing the 'Rockingham’s Tree' story. This might have been the work of another artist.

Unfortunately the revelation of the source of 'The Vampire Plants' strip alas brings us no closer to identifying the artist or indeed the writer of that story. 

If anyone can shed any further light on this, I'd love to hear from them.

With grateful thanks to Lee Moone for the 'Rockingham's Tree' strip and Shaqui Le Vesconte for additional input.

Artwork Auction

The limited edition hardcover of my book features a painting by 1960s TV Comic artist Bill Mevin that was especially commissioned for the book.

Now Mevin is selling the original artwork. The piece described as 'A4 in size and painted on thick, textured art paper', is listed on Ebay and is being sold on Mevin's behalf by Stephen James Walker of Telos Publishing. Here's the auction, which ends on Friday 5 October.

The Book has Arrived!

I collect Doctor Who books. I have hundreds of the things carefully arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelves around the walls of my study. I love receiving each new title, but the arrival of today's latest addition to the collection was far more exciting that usual. 

A box of author copies of my book, The Comic Strip Companion, including paperbacks and one hardback copy, arrived by courier this morning.

I was out at the time, enduring a uncomfortable hour-long session at the dentist. I arrived home with a numb mouth to be greeted by my wife Rochelle with the news that FedEx had called by to drop off a box for me.

Excitement overcame the drowsy after-effects of of dental surgery as I cut open the package and handled for the very first time actual, physical copies of my book. It really existed!

I'm in New Zealand; Telos, my publisher, is in the UK. I've spent the last week hearing from enthusiastic  overseas readers who've received the book, whilst all the time I've been eagerly awaiting my own as the books made their way around the globe. 

I knew that the book had been printed and distributed. It's just that until I held the finished published copies in my hands it didn't feel completely real to me. Just feeling the solid weight of the limited edition hardback with its glossy cover, or leafing through the only slightly more manageable paperback, is an indescribably satisfying feeling. 

Entirely coincidentally, the book has arrived in my hands almost exactly five years after signing the contract (on 26 September 2007), and one year after delivering the manuscript (on 21 September 2011).

(Author's expression in these photos due to numb upper lip...)

Out of the Box

The paperback edition of my book has just arrived at Telos Publishing.  

It is, as you can see, a rather chunky volume. I knew of course that it was 608 pages long, but it wasn't until I saw this photo that I fully appreciated what this meant in terms of the physical size of the book.

The hardback edition is apparently due tomorrow, and orders will be dispatched next week.

Thank you to Sam Stone for the photograph. That's made my day!  

The Comic Strip Companion Sampler

I'm delighted to offer a set of sample pages from The Comic Strip Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics: 1964–1979.

As someone who often buys books online, I'm a great believer in the value of offering a preview of the contents and I've frequently decided to purchase on the strength of reading sample pages.

The PDF sampler is downloadable from the link below. It includes the contents pages, the first story entry, and one of the 'interlude' articles.

This should provide a taste of what the book's about and how I've approached writing about the comic strips.

The Comic Strip Companion Sampler

Thank you to David J Howe at Telos Publishing Ltd for arranging the sample.

Limited Hardback Edition

The plan was that The Comic Strip Companion would only be available in paperback but, when it was first made available to pre-order in June this year, a number of fans expressed their preference for a hardback version. Telos do not always produce hardback editions for their titles but, in response to popular demand, one is now being produced for my book.

The limited hardback edition (I'm told that over half the allocation has already been pre-ordered), features a different cover design to the paperback version. David J Howe at Telos wanted something special for the cover so sought out an artist who worked on the original comic strips to create a new painting especially for the book. I'm simply delighted that Bill Mevin has painted the cover.

Bill Mevin's association with Doctor Who comics dates back to the mid-1960s. He was the second artist to work on the the Doctor Who strip in TV Comic, over a six-month period from October 1965 through to April 1966, and was the first to illustrate each of the strip's weekly instalments as full colour paintings (his predecessor, Neville Main, had drawn the weekly strip in black and white). Mevin's cover painting features William Hartnell's Doctor, which is appropriate as his Doctor was current at the time that Mevin was working on the strip.

Both editions of the book are 608 pages (yes, considerably longer than as originally advertised!) with an eight-pages in colour displaying a number of the comic covers from the 1960s and 1970s.

The book was sent off to the printers yesterday. Now there's a wait of around six weeks until it is due to be released at the end of September. Oh the anticipation!

One Last Read-Through

I've been sent a PDF of The Comic Strip Companion. The design and layout has been done, and I'm really pleased with how it looks.

It's now up to me to read the book from beginning to end. This is my last opportunity to find any minor errors and get them corrected before the book goes to print.

I find it a great deal easier to spot mistakes on the printed page than I do on a screen, so I've printed off a copy of the PDF. All 684 pages of it. The stack of paper you see here is one copy of the book. Although I've printed copies of individual sections while I was writing the book, this is the first time I've had a physical copy of the entire thing. It somehow feels more 'real' to me now than ever before.


Time to get to work on those corrections...

Countdown to The Comic Strip Companion

The Comic Strip Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics: 1964 - 1979 will be published later this year.

The expected release date of 30 September 2012 has recently been posted on the Telos Publishing website, along with the reveal of the cover and blurb. Judging by the comments posted online in reaction to this announcement, it appears that there are many readers eagerly awaiting the book’s publication. I count myself among them. I may have spent countless hundreds of hours researching, writing and revising over the past five years, and I’m very keen to see the finished product.

The Comic Strip Companion is a guide to an aspect of Doctor Who that may be unfamiliar to many fans, as all the comic strips published in the years covered by this book are long out of print. The book does not reprint the actual strips. For rights reasons this is not possible. The book does feature an 8-page colour section featuring a selection of relevant comic strip covers.

Each individual episode has a plot synopsis, so anyone who has not read some, or perhaps even all, of the comic strips under discussion should still find the book entirely accessible. It also provides a lot of information that even readers who do have the strips to hand will not have known about before, sourced from original correspondence, synopses, scripts and interviews with some of the writers and artists.  

The fifteen year period covered in this book details every Doctor Who story, produced by Polystyle Publications (formerly TV Publications), that appeared in TV Comic, Countdown and TV Action. 

The Doctor’s comic strip adventures began in November 1964; one year after the television series was first broadcast. For the following fifteen years, Doctor Who appeared in comic strip form almost every week, amassing many more individual stories than the television series. In May 1979 the strip was discontinued. After a five-month hiatus the strip was re-launched as a regular feature in Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine, where the strip continues to this day). This break and subsequent change of publisher marks the conclusion of the book’s comic strip coverage. I am writing a follow-up volume that will pick up the story of the comic strips from October 1979 onwards.

Most of the book is taken up with a year-by-year, story-by-story coverage of the weekly strip, but there are sections included for the comic strip adventures in The Dr Who Annual, the Dalek books and annuals, and The Daleks, a weekly strip that appeared in TV Century 21. The book also has appendices that detail all of the reprints, adaptations, humorous strips and even a handful of associated text stories.

The book is an A5-format paperback, around 500 pages in length, and is now available to order from Telos.

A Comic Conundrum

I'm taking advantage of a short delay before the publishers are ready to begin work on preparing my book, The Comic Strip Companion 1964-1979, for publication to test it out on a small group of readers.

These enthusiastic volunteers have delivered invaluable feedback on the manuscript, enabling me to identify areas that need slight tweaks, additions or corrections. My readers, working in isolation to each other, have delivered quite different sets of notes - but they have almost all queried the same one specific point in the book.

The third story, latterly known as ‘The Hijackers of Thrax’ (the original title, if one existed, is unknown), appeared in TV Comic #690 (6 March 1965) to #692 (20 March 1965). The strip was later reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics #13 (10 November 1993).

TV Comic was required to routinely submit a synopsis for each of their proposed strip stories to BBC Enterprises for approval. This was so that if something was considered to be too similar to an aspect of a planned television serial, or deemed inappropriate, it could be sent back to TV Comic with a request for changes before it was developed as a full script or an illustrated strip.

The storyline for the ‘The Hijackers of Thrax’ was submitted in January 1965. Donald Wilson (Head of Serials, Drama Television) asked Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert for her comments. Lambert wrote back, “It’s quite obvious what this is based on!! But it’s OK by me if it’s OK by you.”

Is it “quite obvious” though? What did Verity think it was based on? This question has puzzled myself and my proofreaders.

Although the correspondence between Lambert and Wilson has survived, the copy of the synopsis which would have once been attached to this memo has not. It is reasonable to assume however, considering that the story was approved without changes, that the synopsis bore a strong resemblance to the strip as it appeared in print.

So what’s the story about? Here’s my summary:

A spaceship delivering food and supplies from Earth to a colony on Venus in the year 2075 goes missing soon after leaving Earth. This is the seventh supply ship to disappear without trace. The TARDIS lands on a space station where the crew of the missing supply ships are imprisoned. The station is run by Captain Anastas Thrax and his pirates. The station is hidden from Earth in a cloud of mist, and the hijacked cargo is sold on the black market. Thrax locks up the Doctor and his companions John and Gillian, but John overpowers their guard and frees the rest of the prisoners. Some of the prisoners leave in a supply ship to warn Earth about the space pirates. Led by the Doctor, the remaining prisoners overpower Thrax’s men. Thrax is captured and forced to show the Doctor the mist-generating machine. The machine is destroyed and the mist clears, revealing the location of the station to Earth’s space police, who arrive to apprehend Thrax and his pirate crew.

So what was it that Verity recognised as so familiar and obvious in this story?

Please let me know if you have any ideas, because I’m stumped!

Delivering the Book

Today I composed a short email, attached a Word document, and hit 'Send'. In doing so, I delivered the manuscript of my book to my publishers.

The Comic Strip Companion: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics 1964 – 1979 (to give the full title), has been four long years in the making. I was contracted to write it in late September 2007.

At that time I had not yet been approached to write DVD Production Information subtitles. I was still working full-time. My mum was still alive.

I finished writing the first draft back in June 2009. Since then I've been editing and revising, a process that has proved to be just as time-consuming as getting that first draft written.

I haven't kept a watch on the word count during editing, as I cut far more than I added during this phase - there's few things quite as disheartening as watching the word count plunge - so I was surprised to discover that the manuscript I delivered today was 185,676 words. That is remarkably close to what I predicted nearly three years ago: in December 2008, six months before I finished the first draft, I estimated it would come in at 185,000 words!

I've delivered the book, but it remains to be seen what my publishers make of it. I'm certain that there will be tweaks to be made based on their feedback. After four long years, it's in their hands.

Very soon I'm going to start work on the follow-up volume covering the later years of the comic strip. Hopefully this next book won't take quite so long to write!

Dalek artwork origins uncovered

I'm currently making corrections and changes to The Comic Strip Companion 1964-1979, working from notes made on the manuscript by my good friend Jon Preddle, who is the book's very first reader.

Jon's notes on the chapter covering The Daleks strip from TV Century 21 alerted me to something I'd overlooked in the manuscript. Jon writes, "I might be wrong on this, but didn’t Chris Achilleos base his Target book cover Daleks on Turner’s style?"

This sent me scurrying over to my bookshelves to check, and sure enough Jon is correct - Target novelisation cover artist Chris Achilleos didn't just base his Daleks on Ron Turner's strip illustrations - he directly copied them, and here's the evidence:

Postscript...

And it doesn't stop there. As Jon has since pointed out, Achilleos clearly again turned to Ron Turner's artwork for the TV Century 21 strip when he illustrated the cover for the novelisation Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks. This time, Achilleos reversed the images and altered the designs very slightly, but they are unmistakably based on Turner's artwork.

I've reversed the relevant sections of Achilleos's cover on the right for a direct comparison.

Resurrection Revisited

I've delivered my fourth set of Production Notes subtitles.

This latest set is for the Resurrection of the Daleks Special Edition DVD. Normally I have to wait some months after I’ve written subtitles for a story before I can discuss it openly, but on this occasion there is no such impediment to disclosure, since the title has already been announced by 2|entertain as forming part of the Revisitations 2 box set, which is due out (I think) around the middle of next year.

I was offered the commission for this story, along with the of The Caves of Androzani Special Edition two years ago, just after I delivered the Production Notes for Planet of Fire. I had demonstrated with that first job that I could do the work to the required standard and as these two stories book-end Planet of Fire, I was the obvious choice to tackle both.

While I was very keen to do The Caves of Androzani, being as it is a very highly regarded story which regularly tops polls of favourite stories (even beating out Blink in last year’s Doctor Who Magazine survey), I was less enthusiastic about Resurrection of the Daleks. It is not so much that I dislike the story, though it pales in comparison to Androzani, but rather that I had a feeling of ‘been there, done that’ about this one.

I had written a fan novelisation of Resurrection as a not-for-profit book a decade ago (ebook available here). In order to write that book I had scrutinised the story in great detail. I knew every character, every scene, every line, intimately. The prospect of going back over old ground did not thrill me but I did not want to pass up the opportunity of more work. The idea that I could have a sequential ‘run’ of stories on DVD was appealing, and my past familiarity with the story could also work to my advantage by speeding up the writing process. So I agreed, in September 2008, to do both stories.

For the next two years, Resurrection sat on the back-burner while I tackled other projects. My third set of subtitles (for a story which for the moment must remain nameless since it has yet to be announced), was completed in September. Following this delivery, I had just two months to produce the Resurrection subtitles from start to finish. I knew this was achievable but there was little margin for error.

As soon as I started work on Resurrection I discovered that the time-coded DVD I had been supplied refused to play. The time-codes are an essential part of the subtitles script, defining the precise placement of each block of text on screen. I usually like to get the time-codes worked out early on, but this time I had to rethink my process so that I wasn’t unduly delayed whilst I waited on a replacement time-coded disc to arrive from the UK.

The penultimate week before the delivery date was already booked up with helping Rochelle run the Retrospace stands at Armageddon, during which I would be unable to work on the subtitles so I had to work around this. Then, directly after Armageddon, I came down with a severe cold which I almost certainly caught at the expo. This meant that I was sick throughout the last week I had in which to finish the subtitles, so as much as I just wanted to crawl into bed, I soldiered on and managed to deliver the complete set of subtitles on schedule.

I'm relieved that, despite the haste with which these were written and the obstacles I encountered along the way, this latest set of subtitles was approved with relatively few changes.

I’ve now resumed working on revisions to my much-delayed Comic Strip Companion book, something I had to put aside while working on the subtitles. Although I'm still writing about Doctor Who, it is still a big change to move from short, pithy blocks of informational text to long-form prose critiques and analysis; from grim Dalek massacres on DVD to the Doctor's slightly bonkers but ever-so-charming exploits in the pages of TV Comic.

Vworp Vworp!

I received my copy of Vworp Vworp! Volume One today.

This is a publication of particular interest to me as it focuses on the history of Doctor Who Magazine, with a particular emphasis on the comic strips. Naturally, some of Vworp Vworp!’s material will be referenced and footnoted in volume two of my book, The Comic Strip Companion.

Vworp Vworp! is currently - and very deservedly - receiving many positive comments online. The A4, perfect bound full colour glossy publication is produced to such a professional standard that it could easily pass for a DWM special issue. It. What is most remarkable is that it is a fanzine, produced not for profit but as a labour of love by editors Grant Kavanagh and Colin Brockhurst.

The content includes an impressive line-up of articles and interviews with such familiar (to long-time DWM readers) names as Dez Skinn, David Lloyd, Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills, David J Howe, Andrew Pixley, Jeremy Bentham, Scott Gray, Clayton Hickman, Ade Salmon, Alan Barnes, Martin Geraghty and more.

Even though the written material is impressive it is just about eclipsed by the visual feast of colour and imagery throughout. If this were a professional publication I would still think it superb. That this quality has been lavished on a non-profit fanzine is, quite frankly, simply astounding.

All this aside, I must declare my own vested interest. My name appears in the “with thanks to” list, but that’s my one and only appearance in the issue. It wasn't always going to be this way, and in fact my involvement in its gestation stretches back over one and a half years.

I first got involved in October 2008 when I discovered online that a one-day event was shortly due to take place dedicated specifically to Doctor Who comics. I greeted this news with mixed feelings of delight and dismay; delight because it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to attend since I was (and indeed still am) involved in writing a book on this very subject; and dismay because it was due to take place in a pub in Manchester, on the far side of the world. Frustratingly, had this taken place a few scant months earlier when I was still in London, you couldn’t have kept me away.

Had I been able to go, I would most certainly have volunteered as a guest speaker to talk about my book. Instead I did the next best thing. Gareth Kavangh, the organiser, was preparing a Doctor Who comics-themed fanzine called Vworp Vworp! to launch it at the convention. I emailed Gareth and offered to write an article for his zine, and he gladly accepted. I also provided him with some research material for a panel he was running at the event. So, in lieu of being there and giving a talk, I wrote down what I would have said instead. My article discussed my particular interest in Doctor Who comic strips and my book. I knew a number of like-minded comic strip writers, artists and fans would be in attendance and it was an opportunity not to be missed to let them know who I was and what I was doing.

Good plan - in theory. Trouble was, the convention came and went. Gareth ran out of time to get his fanzine together so it wasn’t published in time for the event. These things happen. Not to worry, he was still determined to produce the publication, and still wanted to use my article. In February 2009, Vworp Vworp! writer Matt Badham interviewed me by email about my book. The plan was for this interview to appear alongside my article.

Months passed. Gareth was busy with his Masters degree and the zine understandably had to get placed on the back-burner. By July, Colin Brockhurst had joined Gareth on the project. At this time I pitched a second article idea for the zine, this time a look at how Scott Gray got himself established as a comic strip writer. I interviewed a number of usual suspects, including, crucially, the elusive Scott himself. Before I could deliver the piece I learned that there was no room left in the issue and that the piece was instead under consideration for a planned second volume.

By December I learned that my earlier article and accompanying interview about my book had also been dropped from the issue. This wasn’t too much of a disappointment; during my years as a fanzine editor I was frequently faced with the agonising decision to drop a piece from an issue. That never gets any easier, and I could certainly appreciate that my article and interview were no longer a good fit for the issue's repositioning as a celebration of all things DWM. Besides which, my book still wasn’t finished, let alone scheduled for publication, so it made sense to hold the article over to a later date when it would be more timely.

Still very much eager to help out, I offered Gareth and Colin my services as a proof-reader and fact-checker. This was accepted, and shortly before Christmas last year, I pored through eighty pages of PDFs looking for errors. I came up with a list of sixty corrections, most but not all of which made it into the issue (if you see a few typos on page 79, rest assured that I did point them out!)

Gareth very kindly has sent me a complimentary copy of the issue, which I received in the mail today. I cannot recommend this publication highly enough. Although I saw it all on my computer screen when I was proof-reading, I cannot help but marvel at the final, printed product. It is a thing of beauty; Gareth, Colin and their team of contributors deserve to be very proud indeed of what they have achieved.

Go to www.vworpvworp.co.uk to order, but be quick - they're selling fast!

My only hope is that at least something of mine gets published in volume two...

How I got Stripped for Action

The Doctor Who: Dalek War DVD box set (recently released in the UK), contains two 1973 Jon Pertwee stories: Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks. The set has been eagerly anticipated by fans due to the extraordinarily successful colour restoration of episode three of the latter story which for the past three decades has only existed as a monochrome recording.

The DVD has personal significance as I crop up in the extras. I’m in two separate features, both instalments in the ongoing ‘Stripped for Action’ series which examines the history of Doctor Who in comics. It’s the second time I’ve appeared on a Doctor Who DVD. The first was on Lost in Time some years earlier where I talked about finding a lost episode in an interview that was shot in my living room.

The invitation to appear in the documentaries came about at relatively short notice while I was in the UK last year on a month-long holiday. I had emailed Marcus Hearn, the director of the ‘Stripped for Action’ series, back in April 2008 to let him know that I was writing a book about Doctor Who comic strips and suggested meeting up while I was in London to compare notes since our two projects covered the same ground.

Several weeks passed. Then, on 20 May, midway through my stay in London, I received a reply from Marcus. He had just seen my email having recently returned from a month-long overseas trip. Marcus asked if I was still in London and if so would I like to be interviewed on camera for ‘Stripped for Action’? I replied that I had two weeks left before I had to fly home and if he could arrange something in time I’d be happy to participate.

Marcus pulled out all the stops to arrange contracts and book studio time at short notice to accommodate my limited availability. We met up in a coffee house in Soho to work out what we should cover in the interview and using these notes Marcus came up with sets of questions. I received these a few days in advance of the recording so I that had time to consider my answers. Marcus had already delivered most of the instalments in the Stripped for Action series, two of which had already been released on DVD. There were just three left to complete the series and Marcus wanted to interview me for all of these in a single studio session. Two of the three were The Third Doctor and The Daleks which both appear on Dalek War. The third documentary has yet to be announced, so I won’t disclose the subject of that one. It shouldn’t be hard to guess what it is, though.

My contributions to ‘Stripped for Action’ were recorded at a studio in Wapping, London on Tuesday 3 June 2008. This was just a couple of days before I was due to fly home to New Zealand.

To make good use of the studio booking, Marcus arranged two regular commentators, Jeremy Bentham and Alan Barnes, for the same studio session. Jeremy is a highly-respected ‘elder statesman’ of Doctor Who fandom who had written some influential articles about Doctor Who comics back in the early 1980s. I met up with Jeremy in London earlier in my trip to interview him for my book, and he and his delightful wife Paula treated me to a very nice dinner at an upmarket London restaurant. It was a delight to meet him once more at the studio recording.


The recording session took place in a small concrete-walled studio. I sat on a chair against a green screen backdrop. In the finished documentary, the green has been keyed out and replaced with an assortment of panels from the comic strips. I was advised not to wear anything green as this would interfere with the process. The screen was illuminated by a ring of exceedingly bright green lights placed around the camera lens which I found very distracting at the edge of my vision.

Marcus sat some distance away from the camera and fed me the questions and directions. So that my comments would make sense in the documentary I had to phrase my answers as self-contained statements. For example, when I was asked to describe the style of comic artist Ron Turner, my answer needed to begin something like “Ron Turner’s illustration style was...”

Going into the recording I felt prepared and confident but once it got underway I was surprised to find the experience more of a challenge than I’d expected. I was put off by the intense lights and to my horror I started muddling my words and speaking too fast. Fortunately Marcus is a patient and understanding director, and we did a few retakes of the initial question until I had relaxed into the process. As we began recording I was directed by one of the crew to keep still and to keep my hands out of shot. When I’m speaking, like most people, I tend to move about a bit and gesticulate, so having to sit still and not use my hands felt unnatural and disconcerting. I’m still not entirely sure why I was given this direction. On the documentaries a number of my fellow commentators can be seen waving their hands around which I think in contrast makes me look stiff and uncomfortable.

Following my session I got to sit and watch as Jeremy (who had arrived during my recording) took my place in front of the camera. I could sit and listen to Jeremy talk all day; he knows his subject very well indeed and is also clearly a confident and accomplished speaker. I had kept my answers fairly brief and to the point, whereas Jeremy expounded at great length, impressively covering the answers to a whole range of questions in a single informative and detailed monologue.

Alan Barnes turned up after Jeremy and I had finished our contributions. After a short break Alan went into studio to record his segments and Jeremy and I left to catch the train home. The walk to the station gave me the opportunity to chat some more to Jeremy about my book and he was very supportive of the project and subsequently sent copies of some early articles he’d written about the comics.

I received my complementary copy of the DVD box set from 2|entertain earlier this week, so one and a half years after the recording I've finally seen the finished results for the first time. I'm never comfortable with seeing myself on screen, and this combined with recalling just how uncomfortable I'd felt during the recording itself, meant that it was with some trepidation that I watched these features. Just a handful of my responses have made it on to the documentaries - but I consider that a good thing; my limited appearance makes them slightly easier to watch, and I'm relieved that my discomfort isn't as evident on screen as I'd feared.

Alas, the credit’s not quite right (as seen in the screen shot). I’m billed as the author of The Comics Companion which should be The Comic Strip Companion. I’ve already had people who have seen the documentaries contact me to ask where and when the book’s available. The answer is that it’s not finished yet. I’m hopeful that it will be out sometime next year, and it is being published by Telos.

Chopping and Changing

During the weeks since my last post announcing the completion of the first draft of my book, The Comic Strip Companion, I've been editing the manuscript. I was looking forward to this part of the process, but it is proving to be a bit of a challenge.

Having spent the best part of two decades as the editor of a fanzine, I've had a fair bit of experience of proofing and editing the work of other writers, and I think I've become fairly adept at this.

What I've discovered is that I'm not nearly so good at editing my own work. I can stare at something I've written and struggle to see the faults. The problem is simply that when I read over my own work I know in my head what it's supposed to say, which gets in the way of recognising what I've actually written.

Ultimately the book will need a fresh eye to read it over and pick up the bits I've missed, but before then I need to do an edit and a rewrite to pull it into shape, and that's what's keeping me busy at present.

It's not just about tidying up the words; I've also been rearranging the structure. The book follows the format of an episode guide and, as part of each entry, I've written about each story's various reprints. Reading back over the finished book I could see that the entries for stories without any reprints seemed a lot more readable. These entries didn't interrupt the narrative flow with diversions to discuss a reprinting that had occurred twenty or thirty years later.

Another problem I had with the reprint sections was that some of the observations I was making were common to a number of the reprints, such as (for example) the removal of artist credits, or the colouring of black & white strips. This resulted in a large amount of frankly rather awkward repetition.

The solution came to me as I embarked on the editing process: remove all of the individual reprint sections and group them all together in an Appendix at the back of the book. All of that unnecessary repetition was dispensed with as I discussed features relevant to a whole swag of reprinted stories within a few concise paragraphs. As a consequence, my word count plunged. I think I lost in the region of six thousand words in just one day, which sounds alarming, but they we re words I really didn't need and, much more importantly, the book has significantly improved.

Right, back to the editing.