Gad, Sir! Comics!

When the BBC decided to order a special Christmas episode of Doctor Who every year, it created a problem for the production team, as there was no extra time in their schedule. Their answer was to film two episodes back-to-back, but since David Tennant can’t be in two places at once, that effectively means that one episode a year has to get by without the Doctor for most of its running time. This year’s almost-Doctorless Doctor Who episode, Blink, airs on BBC1 on Saturday.

Completely Doctorless stories set in the worlds of Doctor Who have been around in comic strips for a while. Mostly, they have been about the Daleks, as you might expect. The first appeared in The Dalek Book of 1964, which told of the Daleks’ assault on our solar system in preparation for their invasion of Earth. The Dalek Book was in the hard-backed Annual format, and credited as written by David Whitaker and Terry Nation, though it is likely that Whitaker, Doctor Who’s first script editor and author of much of its early ancillary fiction, did most of the work.


Together with one of the artists on The Dalek Book, Richard Jennings, Whitaker went on to produce The Daleks comic strip in TV Century 21, the only feature in that comic not based on a Gerry Anderson TV series. The TV21 strip, later drawn by Eric Eden and most memorably by Ron Turner, took the Daleks from their creation to their discovery of the Earth. You can see a sample here.

The success of The Dalek Book led to two sequels over the next two years. During that time, Terry Nation tried to pitch a Dalek TV series, without the Doctor, to US networks. Among the human heroes he intended to feature was a character from the Doctor Who story now commonly known as “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, Special Space Security (or Space Security Service – it varied) Agent Sara Kingdom, even though she had actually been killed at the end of that story. The TV series pitch came to nothing, but it was used as the background for The Dalek Outer Space Book of 1966. As a result, Sara Kingdom became the first Doctor Who supporting character to feature in her own solo comic strip, in which even the Daleks did not appear.


After a long lull, four more Dalek annuals appeared in the 1970s, though only two of them featured new comic strips, none very notable. But at the end of that decade, Marvel UK launched Doctor Who Weekly. At first, the new comic magazine was strip-heavy, featuring a new Doctor Who strip, a reprint of old Marvel Comics stories that the editors felt were a reasonable fit (starting with an adaptation of The War of the Worlds), and a second new strip at the back, which featured elements of Doctor Who other than the Doctor himself.

Naturally, the Daleks kicked this series off. But they were soon followed by Cybermen, Sontarans, Ice Warriors, K9, UNIT and many others. The stories drew on a range of British talents yet to be poached by US comics, including Steve Dillon, David Lloyd and Paul Neary. At first, the stories were all written by Steve Moore, but later others took a hand. Alan Moore wrote a sequence of stories about the Time Lords, fighting a war that had yet to break out, in which he introduced his super-team, the Special Executive. Since they later turned up in Captain Britain, that may mean that there’s a Gallifrey in the Marvel Universe.


One story written by John Peel (not the famous DJ), about the Celestial Toymaker, featured some particularly memorable art by Mick McMahon.


These back-up strips continued after the Weekly went monthly, but became less frequent, and in 1982 they stopped altogether: the magazine’s budget was under pressure, comics pages were more expensive than prose, and the lead Doctor Who strip was the priority.

In the 1990s, there were a couple of notable Doctorless strips in Doctor Who Magazine. In 1995, they ran a continuation of the Daleks strip from TV21, written by John Lawrence with art once again by Ron Turner. Sadly, Turner’s death brought that to an end. A Cybermen strip written by Alan Barnes and drawn by Adrian Salmon also ran for a short while, and then the magazine reverted once again to the single lead strip.

As I type this, there is more Doctorless Doctor Who spin-off fiction around than ever before. There are two TV series, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. There are Torchwood novels. BBC Children’s Books has put out a series of slim hardbacks about various elements of Doctor Who - one on Rose, one on Cybermen, one on the Sycorax and so on – and each features an appropriate short story. Big Finish produces authorised audio plays about the Daleks, and Sarah Jane, and Romana and Leela’s political adventures on Gallifrey, among others.

There are also more authorised Doctor Who comic strips than ever, in Doctor Who Magazine and Doctor Who Adventures and Doctor Who: Battles in Time. But there are no Doctorless Doctor Who spin-off strips. Which is as much a pity as it is a paradox.


Panels
The Daleks “Invasion of the Daleks”, written by David Whitaker, art by Richard Jennings, The Dalek Book, Panther Books/Souvenir Press, 1964

Sara Kingdom, Space Security Agent, written by Brad Ashton ,art by one of John Woods, Leslie Waller or Art Sansom, from The Dalek Outer Space Book, Souvenir Press/Panther Books, 1966

“4-D War”, written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly issue 51, April 1981

“The Greatest Gamble”, written by John Peel, art by Mike McMahon, Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly issue 56, September 1981

See also Part One: Background and Periodicals

The simplest way to run through the various reprints, trade paperbacks, manga, annuals and other books of comics available in the UK is to take you through an imaginary bookshop. So, imagine that you have just entered a large branch of a major chain like Waterstone’s.

As before, I’d welcome corrections, expansions, and different opinions.

Manga
A big comics section may be given over to manga. Almost without exception, these will simply be the US editions from Viz Media, Tokyopop and Dark Horse, whether the originators are from Japan, the US or Germany (though a few US translations are licensed to British publishers like Gollancz and Harper-Collins).

The “almost” allows room for The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, a 540 page anthology of mostly new (or previously only web-published) material from a large number of creators, mostly, but not exclusively, based in the UK. A volume came out in 2006, edited by Ilya, who I remember as a small-press cartoonist back in the 1980s, and was published by Robinson, who are responsible for a stable of Mammoth Books of Best New prose stories (eg one for SF, one for horror) which are published annually. The hope seems to be that the manga volume will be too.

Incidentally, the term “manga” is being used here very loosely: some of these cartoonists have only microscopic traces of Japanese influence in their bloodstreams.



Graphic Novels
This will probably have a section of a similar size to that for manga, and will contain a mixed bag of material.

There will be a range of US titles from DC, Vertigo, Image and Marvel. But in addition to the US Marvel trade paperbacks, there will also be titles by Panini, who handle Marvel’s European business. These include some unique editions of US material (paperback editions of the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man run in colour, Runaways in full-sized paperbacks), as well as reprints of material originated by Panini and its predecessor Marvel UK.

The latter include Death’s Head, the original Chris Claremont/Herb Trimpe version of Captain Britain from the 1970s, and lots of Doctor Who. My pick of the Doctor Who series would be Dragon’s Claw, featuring Tom Baker’s Doctor. This not only contains page after page of prime Dave Gibbons artwork, but also Mick McMahon’s splendidly quirky “Junkyard Demon”.


US art comics will often be well-represented in this section, sometimes in UK editions by respected mainstream book publisher Jonathan Cape. For example, we got a paperback edition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun House last year (but never did get a hardback edition, that I saw). Cape also publishes work by UK literary comics authors like Bryan Talbot (such as Alice in Sunderland) and Posy Simmonds, as well as Ethel & Ernest, a moving memoir of his parents by Raymond Briggs, best known for his nuclear tragedy When the Wind Blows and his albums for children, such as Fungus the Bogeyman.


But on the whole, the literary or consciously artistic approach is a field in which British comics are lacking, possibly because of the absence of any UK equivalent of Fantagraphics, Top Shelf or Drawn and Quarterly.

If you are lucky, you might also find some of the humorous literary adaptations and collected comics of Hunt Emerson, published by Knockabout Books, on these shelves too. See here for my views on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.


There is also likely to be a fair selection of Rebellion’s 2000AD books. These are either slim albums of recent material, such as Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s seaborne horror strip Leviathan, or big fat volumes of classic series from the 1970s and 1980s, including Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and the peerless satire on religious and racial bigotry, Nemesis the Warlock.


Possibly even fatter are the volumes from Carlton Books reprinting war stories from Commando Picture Library.


Titan Books’ various reprint series are available wherever Diamond distributors spreads its tentacles, but are also to be found in bookshops. A highlight is Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s heavily researched and moving series about the Great War, Charley’s War. The best-looking are the reprints of the 1950s SF series Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Other reprints from boys’ comics have stalled after one volume each of The Spider (retitled King of Crooks to avoid infringing the copyright of the US pulp character) and The Steel Claw. But an anthology volume called Albion Origins is apparently in the works.


Titan is also compiling two classic newspaper strip adventure series, the adaptations of the James Bond novels, and Peter O’Donnell’s great female adventurer, Modesty Blaise. The latter is now well into Enric Badia Romero’s run as artist, but see if you can track down some of the earlier volumes featuring the strikingly stylish artwork of Jim Holdaway.



Humour
The humour section of the bookshop will be where you can find reprints of British newspaper strips as, apart from one or two series based around football (soccer, if you must), they now all embody both meanings of the word “comic”. Humour is too individual for me to lay down the law, so you are best off browsing, but two I’d recommend you take a look at are Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor’s Alex about an amoral, selfish merchant banker, and, above all, Steve Bell’s biting political strip If…,with its brutal, powerful artwork.


The humour section seems also to be where bookshop staff shelve things they don’t know where else to place. Over the last year, I have noticed here a big reprint volume selected from the 1950s girls’ comic Girl (imaginative title, eh?) and a set of imaginary biographies of characters from boys’ sports comic strips.



Children’s books
This is where you will probably find the English language editions of the great Franco-Belgian comics series Asterix and Tintin. These are the only European comics you are likely to find in a British bookshop, unless the graphic novels section has some NBM or First Second translations for the American market. Cinebook has been translating some other classic European comic albums, including the Lucky Luke and Blake and Mortimer series, but I have yet to see these in an ordinary bookshop.

In the autumn, the annuals will start to appear. Most of these are hard-back, extra-long editions of the regular comic periodicals, though there will also be editions devoted solely to popular characters (such as The Bash Street Kids from The Beano), and annuals devoted to currently popular films and TV series that do not necessarily have their own regular comics. Some comics – including 2000AD - do not have associated annuals any more. Look before you buy: not all of these have much, if anything, by way of comic strip content these days. Annuals are aimed at the Christmas market; after Christmas, they can generally be found for a couple of months at greatly reduced prices, and are then taken off sale.


This year, I have noticed for the first time some large format paperbacks labelled as “summer annuals”, but these all seem to be activity books with no comics content.

I’m guessing, but the children’s section may be where the Bumper Book of Look and Learn will turn up. See Steve Holland’s post about it. Look and Learn was a children’s educational magazine, but for our purposes it was also the home of The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, a magnificent planetary romance painted by Don Lawrence. The one or two collections published years ago now go for a bomb on eBay, and the only current editions are lavish Dutch ones that require a second mortgage to buy. Apparently, the Bumper Book will include a complete Trigan Empire story.


There will also be a wide range of illustrated children’s books, some with comic strip content. Take a look at Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series, discussed here. Beyond that, I’m not well informed about children’s books. It might be worth having a browse through the “picture books” section, if your preferred definition of “comics” is broad enough.


Art
Finally, don’t leave the bookshop before looking in the art section. You never know what will be shelved there. I’ve seen Robert Crumb and Little Nemo in Slumberland here recently. And you can always buy a book about Hogarth and wallow in his sequential print series.



Comics shops
Comics shop may have some or all of the above, though they tend to be light on children’s books and rarely stock annuals.


Update, 8 June: added a mention of Raymond Briggs and Ethel & Ernest.

Pictures and panels
The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, edited by Ilya, cover by Neill Cameron, published by Robinson Books, 2006; interior panels from Bulldog: Empire by Jason Cobley and Neill Cameron, and Princess at Midnight by Andi Watson

Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw, cover by Dave Gibbons, published by Panini Books, 2004; interior panels from Doctor Who “Junkyard Demon” by Steve Parkhouse (writer and letterer), Mike McMahon (pencils), Adolfo Buylla (inks) and Alan McKenzie (editor)

Ethel & Ernest: A True Story by Raymond Briggs, published by Jonathan Cape, 1998 (paperback 2002)

Aliens Ate My Trousers! by Hunt Emerson, published by Knockabout Books, 1998

Leviathan by Ian Edginton (script), D'Israeli (art) and Tom Frame (letters), published by Rebellion, 2006

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock volume 1, cover by Kevin O’Neill, published by Rebellion; interior panels from Nemesis the Warlock Book Three by Pat Mills (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist) and Steve Potter (letters)

Commando: True Brit, published by Carlton Books, 2006. Cover image downloaded from Carlton Books

Charley's War by Pat Mills (writer) and Joe Colquhoun (artist), published by Titan Books. Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future: The Man from Nowhere, cover and interior panels by Frank Hampson, published by Titan Books, 2007. Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

The Steel Claw: The Vanishing Man, cover by Brian Bolland, published by Titan Books, 2005; interior panels by Ken Bulmer (writer) and Jesús Blasco (artist). Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

Modesty Blaise: The Black Pearl, cover by Jim Holdaway, published by Titan Books, 2004; interior panels from Modesty Blaise “The Killing Ground” by Peter O’Donnell (writer) and Jim Holdaway (artist)Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

If … Marches On by Steve Bell published by Methuen, 2006

The Best of Girl, published by Prion Books, 2006; interior panels from Wendy and Jinx “The New Headmistress”, written by Stephen James, drawn by Peter Kay, and Vicky and the Vengeance of the Incas, written by Betty Roland and drawn by Dudley Pout. Cover image downloaded from Carlton Books

Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2007, published by BBC Books, 2006

The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, art by Don Lawrence, scanned from The Trigan Empire, published by Hamlyn Books, 1978. This panel is probably not from the story to be featured in the Bumper Book of Look and Learn

A Harlot’s Progress plate 2, by William Hogarth, 1732, scanned from Mark Hallett Hogarth, published by Phaidon Books, 2000

The Ride: Die Valkyrie issue 1 “Act 1: Dogs of War” by Doug Wagner (writer and editor) and Brian Stelfreeze (writer and artist), cover by Jason Pearson, Image Comics, June 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

I wonder how a writer called Wagner feels about putting his name to a story called “Die Valkyrie”? Anyway, in this thriller, three girls, Becca, Cleo and Ting, who call themseves “valkyries”, take a car from Becca’s father’s workshop to track down Cleo’s cheating boyfriend. But the car belongs to some nasty men in suits with guns, who want it back in a hurry. In a parallel thread, Laci, the teenage assassin from the previous series of The Ride is travelling with a group of nuns and running into trouble.

The word that springs to mind is “efficient”. Wagner and Stelfreeze get their plot lines off to a quick start and build up the tension. Stelfreeze’s makes fluid art from clear, straight lines. The opening of the story involves the girls rejecting a Mercedes in favour of a 1968 Camaro, but, really, the comic resembles the Merc more closely.


One question-mark over the whole project is the character of Laci, who remains a gift for the one-handed reader with a taste for jailbait. Here she scares off a couple of thugs who are molesting the nuns by simultaneously flashing her boobs and a gun. Yet the three girls who are clearly intended to be the reader’s identification figures are not presented in an exploitative way at all.


2000AD prog 1539, Rebellion, 30 May 2007, 27 pages of strip, £1.75
Features: Judge Dredd “Shaggy’s Big Shoot” by Robbie Morrison (script), Mick McMahon (art) and Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Terror Tales! “Bad Blood” by Arthur Wyatt (script), Lee Carter (art) and Ellie De Ville (letters)
Detonator X Part 6 by Ian Edginton (script), Steve Yeowell (art), Chris Blythe (colours) and Simon Bowland (letters)
Sinister Dexter “Normal Service” by Dan Abnett (script), Anthony Williams (art) and Ellie De Ville (letters)
Nikolai Dante “Thieves’ World” Part 2 by Robbie Morrison (script), Simon Fraser (art), Gary Caldwell (colours) and Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Cover by Richard Elson

The big news with this Prog is the return of Mick McMahon to Judge Dredd, the strip whose look he defined in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His current style – full of figures made of rubbersised tubes, spilling from panel to panel – flatters Robbie Morrison’s thin story of a drug-addicted paparazzo who gets a photo of Dredd’s unmasked face, making it seem both more interesting and funnier than it perhaps deserves.


Elsewhere, almost nothing happens in Sinister Dexter: our heroes pick up their car and that’s all. There’s not much dialogue, either. The Nikolai Dante episode is mostly set-up, as the Tsar sends Dante to clean up the New Moscow mafia. But at least it is a set-up that provides scope for Dante in “romp” rather than “war is hell” mode. The one-off Terror Tale is a dull little vampire story; and whatever fun there might have been in Detonator X’s premise – giant mecha versus primordial monsters – is dissipated by the choice of Steve Yeowell as artist. It’s a very odd assignment, his sketchy, minimalist drawing being as inappropriate as Eddie Campbell would be on Devil Dinosaur.