In the 1950s, obviously comics or kids' comics had been around for quite some time, but with
the rise of television, there was obviously a bit of competition there.
Kids were watching kids' programs, so the obvious solution there to the comics publishers
was to actually start publishing stories or comics based around TV characters.
And with that in mind, that's where TV comic came around.
The News of the World set up a separate company which was called TV Publications and later
became PolyStyle, and they published TV Comic, and that was launched in 1951, and it included
some of the early Gerry Anderson puppet series like Fourth Ever Falls, Space Patrol by Roberta
Lee was in there, and Doctor Who came along in 1964.
The first Doctor strips in TV comic, we have to remember that they're fun.
You know, the Doctor Who legend isn't set in stone at this point.
We don't know his origin.
The stories differed a lot from what was on television, I guess because they had to worry
about a younger readership.
TV comic was still considered a child's comic for people who were under possibly the age
of 10, which suited me at the time.
But you were conscious that you were never getting the older companions like Ian and
Barbara or even someone like Susan or Vicky.
I guess they needed to have someone for the Doctor to talk to, and in lieu of being able
to pay perhaps the rights to use characters from a television series, of course they invented
the infamous John and Gillian, who stayed with the Doctor right through until his second
incarnation in TV comic.
They were very much the young feeds.
You almost got the impression they were something like six or seven, certainly sub the famous
five type characters, very brave, very supportive of the Doctor, but they were there really
to be the characters that would either run off, get into trouble, or do the traditional
Doctor Who thing of being the line feeds to the Doctor.
John and Gillian being children is very important because they're the audience for TV comic,
and Doctor Who is literally taking a boy and a girl of TV comic's age around the entire
cosmos.
A kid watches Doctor Who and wants to see in the comic strip Ian, Susan and Barbara.
They don't really want to see John and Gillian, who are utterly useless.
The Doctor is an inventor fundamentally, with his grandchildren John and Gillian.
This isn't something that's challenged because there's no origin for the Doctor at all.
He is an inventor with a police box that travels through time and space.
He has a black Gladstone bag full of gadgets and tricks and things, and he invents stuff.
The first Doctor Who strip in TV comic was the Klepton Parasites, which did sort of introduce
the concept, slightly borrowing ideas from the TV series, but without actually duplicating
them.
So we do see the TARDIS in a junkyard at the beginning, and the Doctor does have grandchildren,
which was obviously sorted based on Susan.
There's something about comic strip Doctor Who monsters that is so brilliant because
they're so utterly unique to the strip.
And my favourite really, I think the entire history of Doctor Who comics right up to date,
my favourite monsters are actually the ones from the very first Neville Mane strip, which
are the Kleptons, which are these amazing, silly and slightly cute little reptilian things
with their little snub noses and big ears.
The first TV comic artist, Neville Mane, had a very, very basic style, you know, quite
static, panels of all roughly the same size and dimensions.
There wouldn't be an awful lot of variety in the storytelling.
Neville Mane's stuff was more simplistic.
He was a simple line drawer, but he captured a much greater sense of continuity to the
strips.
You always felt as though you were on this kind of voyage journey with his Doctor character
because he'd usually show the TARDIS whirling away at the end of one story and whirling
back in at the other one.
One of the most significant moments in the history of the Hartnell TV comics is the Web
Planet story because for the first time it brings into strip form something you've seen
on television, a monster.
It is quite an interesting story because it's quite early on in the run.
It's explicitly a sequel to the Web Planet, the Zarbi story, which had just finished on
television.
You know, the Doctor says, you know, to John and Gillian, I have been here before.
When they first came out, the Zarbi were billed as the next big thing and they certainly captured
the imagination of people who were sort of, you know, roughly about ten years old or nine
years old at the time.
The Doctor lands on the Web Planet and discovers that the Zarbi can now fly and they can shoot
venom out of their sting guns.
And you know, they're oppressing the Monoptera again.
And what's happened?
And of course, it's revealed that the Zarbi they can see flying are actually hollowed
out robot Zarbi controlled by some aliens called the Skirkons.
There were some ingenious stories along the way.
The Pied Piper story, if you ever see that one, it's uncannily close to the style and
feel of the Celestial Toymaker.
The Doctor lands in Germany in the Dark Ages, you know, wherever the Pied Piper story is
supposed to be set.
Discovers that all the children are missing and goes in search of this...
You see, he's a wizard, basically, you know, the Pied Piper from Hamelin, who tells them,
the Doctor, that look, you know, the villagers didn't want to pay me to get rid of the rats,
so I've taken their children.
And if you want to get them back, you have to defeat my magic.
So you do get that sort of sense of the fundamental Doctor Who ethos of science versus magic with
science winning out and solving the mystery.
The story which was incredibly brave and possibly something you could only do in the comics
was a story which time ran in reverse.
They landed at the end of the story, everything went backwards to the point when they were
reunited in the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, having figured out that they had
to do everything in reverse to achieve getting back to the point of origin of the story.
There's quite a mystery surrounding who actually wrote the scripts for the early Hartnell Doctor
Who strips, or indeed all the Hartnell Doctor Who strips.
It was thought that the artists wrote them, but after talking to at least, well, one of
the artists, Bill Mevin, he knows, he doesn't know who wrote them, but he knows he did actually
work from scripts that someone else provided.
TV Coming was just a production line of every television, children's television programme
that was issued.
And we worked just on a conveyor belt.
I would get a script and I'd draw it.
Doctor Who was just another script, and a very odd one.
I did Santa Claus.
Doctor Who had to help Santa Claus enlarge his workshop, his floor space, so he sent
him to another planet, as you do.
And I think now, if I were doing it now, Santa Claus would be saving the planet by controlling
the emissions on his reindeer.
Unfortunately, it was one of those which sort of acknowledged the fictional aspect of the
series.
So we have the Doctor and John Gennon landing in the TARDIS at the North Pole to find Father
Christmas is having to work very hard to manufacture lots of toy TARDISes so that they can be sent
to all the children all over the world.
And unfortunately, an evil gnome tries to stop him.
I would defend the Christmas story because, rather as Russell T Davies has defined, Christmas
stories have that little bit slightly different sense of style to them than the regular ones.
Doctor Who was a very difficult strip to draw.
It would take days.
I look at it now and I think to do one of those a week, and I even managed to do Doctor
Who and other small strips at the same time, it was a lot of work.
And as I say, it was one of the most difficult strips I've drawn.
It was quite different than Neville Manning's style.
I mean, it was in colour and he used that quite well.
It was quite sort of bold colour.
More of a realistic representation of the characters.
I think the Doctor started to actually look like William Hartnell a lot more.
And he did clever things where he sort of almost like pulled focus on the characters.
The backgrounds would be slightly sort of blurry to give a slightly 3D look.
The BBC were very, very helpful with reference.
Every time I wanted anything I would get a stack of photographs, especially on Doctor
Who.
I used photographic inks.
I found that the ink used in photography, touching up and colouring, worked beautifully
on the strip.
And I did a lot, I used a lot of that apart from a bit of watercolour.
But it was a very primitive, it was very good for us.
It was straightforward.
It was called lithograph, I think.
Bill Mevin had a more, almost like a birthday card style of illustrating, which made the
Doctor seem a little bit more of a jolly character.
There was a little bit of the sort of Charlie Drake look about him, which, yes, got you
the grandfatherly side of the Doctor, but not the sort of sternness that people kind
of remember the first Doctor as also possessing.
I wasn't working as well then on Doctor Who as I did later, you know.
I wasn't given the chance to develop Doctor Who.
Six months is not long enough to develop a strip.
I had agoraphobia.
I couldn't leave the bungalow for some time.
And I think John Canning moved in then.
He was a very, well, he was a back-slapping gentleman, John.
Every time you say John Canning, you have to do that.
Every character, particularly the Doctors, will always at some point go with that finger.
John Canning's style of art for the strip was quite energetic, very dynamic.
He'd always put his characters halfway through action poses, so they looked quite like they
were moving rather than static.
And his male characters tend to be very jowly.
They would always have these quite sort of thick, jowly necks, including the Doctor.
Very sketchy line art.
Not enormously detailed, very two-dimensional, whereas both Neville Maine and particularly
Bill Mevin had tried to make everything quite three-dimensional because they'd used very
thick and round circular shapes to everything.
Canning was a very straight sketch artist.
I wasn't mad about John Canning's style.
He was a flamboyant gentleman and his drawings were flamboyant, but he didn't get the likeness
to William Hartner that I saw, the early ones that I saw.
It wasn't like William Hartner.
Undoubtedly the most bizarre and most interesting opponent that the first Doctor faced in the
comic strip were the Trods.
And the reason the Trods were there is because the Daleks weren't in TV comic, at least not
at that time.
They presumably hadn't been able to negotiate the rights with either the BBC or Termination.
So rather than spend money, they thought, we'll create our own monsters that maybe are
just a little bit like the Daleks.
They're a robotic race.
You know, no obvious legs, just like the Daleks.
They've got tentacles with sort of lashing rays, you know, just like the Daleks.
They can sort of attack people remotely.
They're a machine intelligence.
That's all we know about what controls them.
They just sit in their city on Trodos and are quite nasty actually to their captives.
There's quite a nasty sequence of a human slave being lashed, which is quite vivid for
the time actually.
Sadly, for the latter William Hartner comic strips and TV comic, they moved back into
the black and white pages, still with John Canning as the illustrator.
In 1994, I was approached by the editor of Marvel Comics to do a cover that would tie
up with my strips that I drew 30 years before, that they were running inside.
They ran inside the comic.
And I did a drawing of William Hartner.
The editor liked the cover so much, he asked me to do the Christmas number cover.
And I thought up this idea.
I did a rough version of it of two Daleks with tubes leading into a barrel of whiskey.
And they're shouting, inebriate, inebriate.
And the fellow who created it, I think his name was Terry Nation, the fellow who created
the Daleks wouldn't wear that at all.
So I'm afraid I wasn't able to do it.
I did a different, a much milder version.
It is surprising that there's so much interest in the Doctor Who strip now, 40 years later.
And there are fanatics.
I mean, I've had people writing to me.
I was sent a questionnaire.
What inks did I use?
What brush did I use?
I kept, I said to one of them, I was a workshop artist.
And he wanted to know where the workshop was in the studio.
But it's, they're fanatics, some of them.
And it's jolly good.
With hindsight, looking at the, all the Hartnell comic strips, you know, in the context of
the whole run of Doctor Who in comics, they are quite basic and childlike.
But you do have to remember, they were aimed at children, you know, so they did fulfil
what was required of them at the time.
But when you compare them now to something that's in Doctor Who magazine, you know, they
just don't compare really.
And they're not really comparable to the TV series at the time on television either.
So they're a little bit of an oddity in their own world.
They're fun.
You can certainly get a smile out of reading them.