Another blog, and another something I should have been plugging a month ago, but never mind, it’s not as if this blog has any effect anyway. But as of last month, I’m the writer of the comic strip in the official Doctor Who Magazine. There are other Doctor Who magazines out there for kids, which are also official, but Doctor Who Magazine is the biggie, grown-up magazine. And it’s had a comic strip running, more-or-less continuously, since the magazine started in 1979, when it was written by Pat ‘Charley’s War’ Mills and John ‘Judge Dredd’ Wagner and drawn by Dave ‘Watchmen’ Gibbons. Since then, writers have included Alan Moore, Steve Parkhouse, Grant Morrison, Andrew Cartmel, Dan Abnett, Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Alan Barnes, Scott Gray, Robert Shearman, Nev Fountain and Dan McDaid, and artists have included David Lloyd, Mike McMahon, John Ridgway, Bryan Hitch, Lee Sullivan, Arthur Ranson, Mike Collins, Martin Geraghty, Roger Langridge and Rob Davis.
So it’s quite an honour for my name to be added to the end of that list. In addition, a couple of Doctor Who TV stories have been ‘inspired’ by comic strips from the magazine. For me, as someone who’s been following the comic strip for 30-odd years, it’s a massive, vertiginous responsibility.
I’ve already done half a dozen or so comic strips – the most well-received being one about a group-therapy session for failed Doctor Who monsters called Death to The Doctor! and a goodbye-to-Donna strip called Time Of My Life. But now I get to do long, complicated story arcs!
My first story is called Supernature (I intend, wherever possible, to name my stories after Erasure b-sides) with quite simply stunning artwork from Mike Collins. I’m particularly pleased that the story has some Real Science in it – in the current issue you’ll see a cave which looks like the inside of the Mandelbulb. I couldn’t be more delighted with it – though I am equally delighted with the artwork for the second story, an attempt to write a Doctor Who as a Bollywood Musical. And I expect to be blown away by exactly the same amount by Rob Davis’ artwork for the Xmas comic strip, which I wrote last month. But before we get there, well, I’ll just have to end with a mysterious ellipsis...
