Gad, Sir! Comics!

I’m not sure why there is so much fuss over Marvel’s Civil War issue 1 winning the Harvey Award for Best Single Issue or Story.

After all, it may have been a pretty rotten comic, but it was the one that owed most to Harvey Kurtzman’s own work.


Wait, what do you mean, Civil War wasn’t supposed to be a joke?

Panels
“Superduperman!” by Harvey Kurtzman (story) and Wallace Wood (art), Mad issue 4, EC Comics, 1953, reprinted in The Complete First Six Issues of Mad, Russ Cochrane, c 1985

So, last week and this, the Doctor is a human being. That’s providing for some interesting drama. Unfortunately, he has turned himself into a human as a disguise because, confronted with an alien threat, he has decided to run and hide and leave others in danger rather than face his enemies. Several innocent people have died already. That seems a poor take on the character to me, but there you are.

Mind you, there is one version of the Doctor who has every excuse for being human, because he has never been anything else: Doctor Who, the Eagle comic fan, who knocked together his amazing machine TARDIS in the back garden, and travelled in it with his granddaughters Barbara and Susie and his niece Louise.

Doctor Who, played by Peter Cushing, was the lead character in the 1960s movies Dr Who and the Daleks and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD.


He first appeared in comics in America, surprisingly enough, when Dell published Dr Who and the Daleks as a “Movie Classic” in 1966, a year after the film came out. I don’t know who adapted the script, but the art was by Dick Giordano and Sal Trapani. Don’t go expecting something of the standard of “There is No Hope in Crime Alley”. This is crude and rushed stuff.




It is little surprise that there was no comics adaptation of Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD. That film also underperformed at the box office, so producer Milton Subotsky never took up his option for a third film. That’s a shame, as the third Dalek serial on TV, now commonly known as “The Chase”, had the Doctor and the Daleks meet robot versions of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. Cushing would have been right at home.

So far as I know, this version of Doctor Who has only appeared in comics once more, if we set aside his brief role in Mad Magazine’s Doctor Ooh spoof.


Yes, do let’s set that aside, shall we?

Cushing’s Doctor Who reappeared in the 1995 Doctor Who Spring Special, which was mostly given over to articles about the movies. The comic strip, “Daleks versus the Martians”, by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan, is up to the standards of the regular Doctor Who strip of the time. But it has its own disappointments.



Grey aliens? The Face on Mars (at the time still awaiting its thorough debunking) really a Japanese-style giant stompy robot? Surely this is the wrong Mars. I wanted hoverbouts versus tripods, exterminator guns versus heat rays, mushy blobs with tentacles versus … erm, mushy blobs with tentacles. But, of course, the works of H G Wells were still in copyright (and remain so, in the EU, until 2016).

In the end, the Daleks did conquer Mars. But that’s another story. From The Dalek Book, to be precise. More about that next week.




Pictures and panels
Photograph of Peter Cushing as Dr Who scanned from DVD pack for The Dr Who Movie Collection, Studio Canal+, 2002

Movie Classic issue 12-190-612, “Dr Who and the Daleks”, art by Dick Giordano (pencils) and Sal Trapani (inks), edited by Don Arneson, Dell Publishing, December 1966. Cover scan taken from the Grand Comics Database, interior reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 9, Marvel Comics UK, 21 July 1993

Doctor Ooh by Geoff Rowley (writer) and Steve Parkhouse (artist), Mad British Edition issue 161, General Book Distributors Ltd, 1975

Doctor Who “Daleks versus the Martians” by Alan Barnes (writer), Lee Sullivan (art), Elitta Fell (letters), Gary Gillatt and Scott Gray (editors), Doctor Who Magazine Spring Special, Marvel Comics/Panini UK, 1995

The Daleks “Invasion of the Daleks” by David Whitaker (story) and Richard Jennings (art), The Dalek Book, Panther Books/Souvenir Press, 1964

Back in the 1970s, even blockbuster films took six months to cross the Atlantic. So by the time Star Wars opened here in Britain, the publicists knew how well it had done at the US box-office, and made a big effort (by the standards of the day) to hype it in advance.

One part of this was a big, fat magazine with the Hildrebrandt poster art on the cover, which went on sale a couple of months before the film opened outside London. In some ways, this made a bigger impact on me than Star Wars itself, because it included a lavishly-illustrated potted history of science fiction in the cinema, putting the 1950s movies and Flash Gordon serials I already knew from TV into context, and introducing me for the first time to the likes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.



I liked the film Star Wars well enough, but I never really got sucked into the phenomenon. I lost interest in the sequels about half-way through The Empire Strike Back, and I never bought the toys or the comics.

Which presents a bit of a problem when writing about Star Wars in a comics blog. What I do have to hand, however, is “Star Roars”, Mad magazine’s parody (or first parody – I imagine that others have followed over the years).



“Star Roars” used the first Mad art I remember seeing from Harry North. North was a British cartoonist who had been drawing sitcom adaptations (such as On the Buses) for Look-In. Just as Star Wars started the trend of filming American movies in Britain, its parody was an early instance of British talent working on American comics.

Fittingly, the British publication of “Star Roars” ended up with a transatlantic flavour.


Notice that, although the speech balloons have been adapted for British readers – “Electricity Board” (as we had before privatisation), “£4 million” – the bill in George Lucas’s hand remains American – “$4,000,000”.

Such attempts to pretend that comic strip reprints were really British always baffled me as a child. I remember a reprint of a Casper the Friendly Ghost story in which Casper visits what is clearly drawn as New York, but which is referred to in the captions as “London City” (the phrase itself is an oddity – it’s just “London”, “London Town” if you want to be twee, or “City of London” if you are referring to the financial district, but never “London City”.)

To this day, children are told by the English-language editions of the Tintin books that Captain Haddock’s home at Marlinspike is somewhere in England, even though the local police look like this:



Similarly, when the British free newspaper Metro reprints Nemi by the Norwegian cartoonist Lise Myhre, the references are Anglicised.



It all seems rather pointless. Our sympathies are surely not so narrow that we only want to follow stories set in our own countries – as the international ubiquity of Star Wars itself demonstrates.


Panels

Superman’s Metropolis by Randy Lofficier, Jean-Marc Lofficier and Roy Thomas (script), Ted McKeever (art) and Bill Oakley (letters), DC Comics, 1996

“Star Roars” by Larry Siegel and Dick de Bartolo (writers) and Harry North, in Mad British edition issue 191, Top Sellers Ltd, 1977

The Seven Crystal Balls by Hergé, 1948, English-language edition translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner, Methuen Children’s Books, 1962

Nemi by Lise Myhre, Metro newspaper, 2006