A
Cold Day in Hell collects eleven Seventh
Doctor comic strips, taking its name from the four-part Ice Warriors
adventure written by Simon Furman, with art
by John
Ridgway,
that pitted the Time Lord and his diminutive shape-changing companion
Frobisher against the Ice Warriors.
Digitally re-mastered and collected for the first time, also
featured in the collection are the Doctor's encounter with the original
Death's Head in Crossraods
to Time, the robot bounty hunter lifted from Transformers universe
and sent on his way to his new home in the early Marvel US-styled title, Dragon's
Claws; and a special two-part story, Planet
of the Dead, which
featured every "classic" doctor.
All the early Seventh Doctor strips were edited by Richard
Starkings, now better known, perhaps, as First Tiger of Comiccraft and
as the creator of Elephantmen,
who gathered a wide range of upcoming and established British comics talent
to work on the Doctor Who strip
at the time.
A Cold Day in Hell opens in
which the Doctor and Frobisher are heading for a holiday on the paradise
planet A-Lux only to find it a snowy wasteland because Ice Warriors plan
to turn it into a new Mars. Aided by the Dellyn heat vampire Olla, the
Doctor manages to defeat the Ice Warriors
and put things right. This was the last regular appearance for the shape-changing
Frobisher, who had been stuck as a penguin for some time. He woudn't return
until Issue 329, in Where
Nobody Knows Your Name, a story by Roger Langridge, in which
it turns out he now runs a pub!
Writer Simon Furman was determined to have a TV villains
the Ice Warriors in the story, which required clearance from (and payment
to) creator Brian Hayles' estate. "My first two Who
strip stories had obeyed the unwritten directive 'thou
shalt not
use established villains straight out of the gate,'" he recals, "but with
my third story, the first to feature the Seventh Doctor in
strip form, I felt a grade A Who villain was called for.
"I’d always
loved the Ice Warriors, back from when I was a little kid (I caught the
original Troughton Ice Warriors story when he was partnered with Victoria
and Jamie and it blew my whatever-year-old mind), and the chance to do
a new Ice Warriors story was simply too tasty to resist."
Artist John Ridgway has mixed
views on this tale and all his strips featured in the collection, as they
came at a time when he ceased to be the regular artist on the Doctor
Who comic strip, having drawn all the adventures featuring the Sixth Doctor,
Colin Baker, including the oft-reprinted Voyager and
stories by Grant Morrison.
"I seem to have done quite a few stories featuring the
Seventh Doctor - yet not many at that time,"
recalls John.
"I can't say I was happy with Sylvester McCoy taking over from Colin.
I'd met Colin at a small Doctor Who convention at Bath and had been very
impressed by his enthusiasm for the part. It must have been a bitter blow
for him after he had fought so hard to keep Doctor
Who on
TV. Also, Peri had been written out of the strip and replaced by a changeling
girl. Added to that, Frobisher dropped out.
"I was working flat out at the
time Hellblazer for DC and Tim
Perkins was
helping me out on Doctor Who by inking some
of it (my way of working means it is practically as fast for me to ink
my own work as it is to detail it in pencil so an inker can go over it).
This, together with information that the magazine might be coming to an
end, was resposible for me dropping out of drawing Doctor
Who. I disliked drawing Hellblazer so
much I also dropped out of that and started working with Jim Hudnall on
The Agent,
graphic novel for editor Carl Potts at Epic.
"At the time, I wasn't sad to leave the book - it had changed and I suppose
I don't like change," the Commando artist
says. "It was good to come back to it later and do the odd story now and
again.
"The good side of working on Doctor
Who was that Tim
and I have been friends ever since," John reveals. "Tim didn't
seem to mind working over my rough pencils. The odd thing is, that when
I did really detailed pencils (or so I thought) both Al Williamson and
Alfredo Alcala complained that they weren't detailed enough. Only Charlie
Vess came back for more!"
Tim Perkins recalls feeling
rather daunted by the opportunity to work with John, but his inks proved
very popular with readers who voted him their favourite back in 1988. "Working
on Doctor
Who meant working with John, who I had met previously and
whose work I really admired, so it was daunting and I’m still not sure
I was ready for it.
"John being the gentleman he is though was brilliant
and lent his advice where it was needed and made me feel I was doing it
right," Tim continues. "I had a ball on the series and was pretty much
left to ink it the way I saw fit.
"John basically draws with ink, with very
sparse pencils, but everything is there, so even though he was pencilling
more for me than he would for himself, there wasn’t as much on the pages
as some of the other artists I had worked with at the time, which also
meant there was more of me in the art.
"I think I can now do a good impersonation
of a John Ridgway ink job, but back then it was just me inking like I would
anything for anyone, I was learning such a lot.
I remember being really
pleased with the clouds in The World Shapers [a
Colin Baker strip], as they weren’t there in the pencils. We became friends
through the series and recently he said my graphic novel, Worlds
End is the best work of my career. As far as I’m concerned from the words of
the master that’s a compliment indeed."
Cold Day in Hell is probably Simon Furman's favourite Doctor
Who story that he's writtern to date, "and not just 'cause
it’s that collection we’re discussing.
"I think it’s the
only time I’ve used an established Who alien/nemesis
and I had a real blast. But close seconds are Salad
Daze (which is collected in The
World Shapers), Keepsake and Who’s
That Girl, which appeared in Hulk comic
(of all places). Maybe Panini will get around to collecting those some
day."
In this one part story, the Doctor is rather disturbed that
new travelling companion is waiting on him hand and foot. Then, the TARDIS
is caught in a tractor beam and Olla’s former master, Skaroux, boards the
ship and it's revealed Olla has been trying to escape him - along with
most of his money. Bitterly disappointed by the revelation the Doctor hands
Olla over to Skaroux on the condition that she gets a fair trial and travels
on alone.
It was strip editor Richard Starkings laid the trail for
Olla's devious nature by adding a last minute "Now's my chance" balloon
to the final episode of Cold Day In Hell,
foreshadowing the revelation that all was not it appeared.
"The one thing I wanted to avoid was a lame duck companion
slowing the strip down," he explains, "so we got rid of Olla and I asked
writers to focus on characters in each story that could fill the companion
role." (That device is of course one recently employed in more recent Doctor
Who TV Specials such as The Christmas Invasion and The
Runaway Bride).
"I was quite disappointed we ditched Olla quite so quickly,"
says Simon, who came up with the idea of the heat vampire. "I saw potential
there, but clearly Richard Starings (who was editing the strips at the
time) didn’t.
Shame. I thought she had a nice brutal edge to her that would have inevitably
put her at odds with the Doctor.
"She was something of a story contrivance
for Cold Day in Hell, I’ll
admit," he adds, "but nevertheless I saw potential to develop her above
and beyond such beginnings. As things turned out, maybe her exit was for
the best, as I’m
not sure how some of the subsequent stories (Crossroad
of Time, Keepsake)
would have played out with Olla in tow. We shall never know!
The Seventh Doctor has a brush
with the original Death's Head in the time vortex, at this point in his
timeline all the more of a threat because he is a sixty-foot tool mechanoid
bounty hunter! The Doctor accidentally shrinks Death’s Head down to a more
manageable size through use of the Master’s Tissue Compression Eliminator
and cons him into entering the TARDIS, where he then programs it
to latch onto the nearest mechanical organism and sends Death’s Head through
the vortex to eighty-second century Earth...
In part, this story was a means to bring the popular Death's
Head character, created by Simon Furman, out of Marvel UK's Transformers
comic and send him on his way to Marvel UK's new US-sized title, Dragon's
Claws and, ultimately, his own fondly-remembered title.
"It
was an enjoyable experience to 'pit' Death's Head against the Doctor," recalls
artist Geoff Senior, "mainly
because I didn't expect it to happen! I never thought they would ever meet,
so when they did I was pleasantly surprised."
Geoff had no problems realizing
a battle between the giant Death's Head and the diminutive Doctor. "The
scale didn't really cause me a problem. It was something that may have
troubled Simon more - he had the problem of figuring out a way to shrink
DH down in size.
"Death's Head was initially a 'throw away' character who proved too
valuable to throw away," Geoff notes. "It was important to find
an excuse to reduce him in size, so that could interact with other more
normal sized Marvel characters."
"My particular memory of Crossroads
in Time is of Lee Sullivan’s uncredited assistance to the
story," recalls Simon. "It wasn’t just about removing
Death’s
Head from Transformers, it was getting him into Dragon’s
Claws #5
and thence into his own series. But to interact with Dragon et
al, we had to get him down from Transformer size to human sized.
"I vaguely remembered some gadget of the Master’s
that might fit the bill in plot terms, but couldn’t remember what
it was called or what it looked like. Lee not only provided the name (Tissue
Compression Eliminator) but also a sketch of the gizmo in question for
artist Geoff Senior... free of charge! What a trooper!"
This would not be the last time Death's Head encountered
the Doctor: indeed, The Incomplete Death's Head mini series revealed it
was the Doctor who had been responsible for many of the robot's mis-adventures
in the first place! He - or rather, it - should never have crossed a Time
Lord!
Claws finds the TARDIS materialising in the smoggy streets of Victorian
London, the Doctor soon plunged into an investigation that reveals there's
an alien spaceship in the Thames which needs a huge amount of pwer to escape
the planet once repaired. Realizing the Klathi will also kill thousands
of people when the Klathi re-energise their ship's crystalline power source,
he races to stop them, aided by the reptle boy, Caval and the scientist,
Derridge. In the end it is the Kalthi's own robot guardian, Batella, that
proves the key to stopping the menace.
"I was going through one of my 'more writer than artist'
phases," recalls Mike Collins, "doing scripts
for various licensed books and Future Shocks for 2000AD. I'd written one
Who story before - Profits of Doom - which sowed the seeds for a major
arc featuring the Sixth Doctor who unfortunately got 'moved on', so it
never got completed.
"I was lured back to Doctor Who by
Richard," he continues, also admitting the commission, like many others, "may
have been in a pub and may have involved Guinness.
"I love Victoriana," the artist-writer, who has since written modern-era Who
for DWM, reveals. "Talons
of Weng Chiang is one of my favourite ever Who stories,
and I wanted to do something with that vibe."
At the time the strip was
written, little had been seen on screen of the Seventh Doctor. Did this
present problems when it came to characterizing him?
"I liked the darker version of Sylvester's Doctor, and wanted
to play on the sarcastic, knowing figure - not the gurning boob he sometimes
got written as," Mike recalls. "Thinking about it, my earliest memories
of McCoy was on [the childrens art show] Vision
On goofing around - it always seemed a stretch
for him to be The Doctor but when he got it right, it was wonderful. In
the TV movie I really resented his ending - just as they had his character
absolutely perfect he was gone!"
Mike did a huge amount of research before
writing the strip, also providing artist Kev Hopgood with huge amounts
of reference. "I
studied Politics at college (after transferring from the joyless and draining
Law degree I'd been following) and became enamoured of the 19th century
and its machinations," he explains. "My initial story was actually
about an alien assassination attempt on D'Isreali at the Great Exhibition
but it morphed and developed into something else, as these things do. I
think Richard thought no one but me cared about long dead Prime Ministers
- he may be right. It became a more personal tale and dealt with a lot
of the crappy environment of early Victorian London, echoing a lot of what
Disreali and Charles Dickens write about."
Such was Mike's attention to
detail, it may come as no surprise to learn there really was an Osler's
Fountain. "Yes,
there was a great fountain as I've described," he laughs, "and a million
other things I would have loved to have put in had I the room!
"As a kid I remember seeing a school's TV show about the Great Exhibition
and from that the music hall song about it is still stuck in my brain,
even today. I can sing it when drunk but for your own sake, never ask me
to.
"The New Lunar Society are an echo of the original group of scientist and
inventors that used to meet in the late 18th century at Great Barr Hall,
not far from where I grew up," he reveals, "and at Matthew Boulton's
house in Birmingham. Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Joseph Preistley and other
such heavy hitters would discuss and share ideas - kind of like a Justice
League of America for scientists. At one point, I wanted to develop more
around the group but the story shaped itself as they so often do."
As for
visual reference, Mike says he bombarded Kev with it. "I'd worked with
Pat Mills on Slaine [for 2000AD] and developed an appreciation for the
level of research he did and sent with his scripts. Whether Kev appreciated
this or not I'm not sure! Osler's Fountain is as he drew it. I also used
David Lynch's Elephant Man as a touchstone for the feel of the strip."
Mike wasn't the only person enthused by the strip's Victorian
setting. "I
did do a load of research for that one, I was really fired up by Mike's
script," says Kev Hopgood. "I'm
really into Victoriana, too, which I think Richard knew from our time "working"
in comics fanzines. It was great having Dave Hine ink my work on this job
as well. Although he's now gone more into writing, he's one of the few
inkers that I've been absolutely happy with," Kev admits "It was a
bit of a jolt to go onto the good Doctor after having drawn Zoids and Action
Force.
"This strip was very different to my previous collaborations with Kev Hopgood," recalls
David Hine. "I was used to producing a slick brush line but this strip
called for a very different style because of the Victorian setting.
"This was shortly after Berni Wrightson's illustrated Frankenstein had
appeared: his illustrations recalled the pen-and-ink work of American illustrators
like Joseph Clement Coll, John R. Neill and Franklin Booth. Intricate pen
work that looked almost like etchings.
"Kev and I were both big fans of Wrightson and we set out to emulate that
work. I ditched the brush, took up the pen and spent long days and nights
finishing the job to deadline. It was a lot of work, but I think we achieved
the look we were after and I remember that story going down very well with
the readers."
Claws of the Klathi even made it onto television. In an episode
of Cilla Black's Surprise, Surprise, co-presenter Bob Carolgees surprised
a school boy fan of Marvel Comics, taking him to the Marvel UK offices,
then in London, where they watched an artist work on the Doctor
Who strip.
The boy then drew his own Real Ghostbusters strip, which was published
in the comic.
"I've got absolutely no memory of the being filmed for TV!" laughs Kev. "But
heck, it was the eighties!"
Mike Collins has of course gone on to both
write and draw modern Doctor Who. Are there any major differences in the
strip creation process today?
"The first 'New Who' story I wrote was Art Attack, after having only seen
the first two episodes. I liked the breakneck speed of End
of The World and tried to echo that. I think it's fair to say that writing old Who,
I always imagined What Robert Holmes Would Do - WWRHD? The new series was
What Would Russell T Davies Do - get jokes, heart-stopping moments and
grand vistas into 40 minutes, or in this case, 10 pages. That was a real
challenge after the mannered, long-game approach of the old show. My Futurists strip was probably a mix of the two styles - told at a breakneck pace but
with cliff-hangers!"
• This feature continues here
• Making of Cold Day in Hell Part
Two
• Making
of Cold Day in Hell Part Three
• Buy
A Cold Day in Hell from amazon.co.uk
• Buy
A Cold Day in Hell from amazon.com
A
Cold Day At Marvel UK: Doctor Who Comic Memories Part 1 
Redemption
Claws of the Klathi 
