Doctor Who: the comic strip that never was

Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

Back in the late 1980s when I was studying for my A-level exams in English and Theatre, before I went on to study for my Recreational Arts for the Community diploma and subsequent degree, I wrote a six-part comic strip which I submitted to Doctor Who Magazine. I was doing some digging through old files yesterday looking for something which I never found and instead rediscovered not only the script but some artwork which was commissioned for it.

At the time, Doctor Who Magazine was only running comic strips for one or two months tops, so the chances of a six-part strip being commissioned were, I thought, remote. I wrote my story as an exercise, thinking it unlikely it would be taken on even if the then editor, John Freeman, liked it because that would mean an entire six months of the magazine comic strip being taken up by a newcomer. But he did like it, and not only gave me valuable input into a redraft – for which I have always been grateful – but also commissioned several artists to produce pages of the story in their different styles. The aim was to then make a decision on which style suited the story best and go for it.

Entitled either Kenosis or Resurrection of the Cybermen or Resurrection of Evil (it was never finalised but …Evil was the likeliest candidate), the story featured the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and his companion Ace (sophie Aldred) arriving on a desolate planet which appears dead but is anything but as the Cybermen begin to make their presence known and the Doctor races against time to prevent the Cybermen from doing… Ah, I can’t give away too much. You never know, I may repurpose the story in some other form.

This is a multi-page entry: page 1 page 2 page 3

categories: film & video, telly