Culture
Shock! finds the Doctor pondering
his rootless life, wondering whether it's time to hang up his umbrella
for good, when he hears a telepathic cry for help from what appears to
be a small mammal.
In fact the animal is only a host for a sentient cell
culture, under attack from a virus. After the Doctor saves the culture
its boundless gratitude proves ust what the Doctor needs to gear him up
for further travels.
Grant Morrison, whose past Who strips
included a Cybermen origin story, The World Shapers,
may have gone on to better known comics such as The
Invisibles, All-Star
Superman and X-Men but he has always
been a Doctor Who fan.
"These stories were
very early on, when I was starting to work in comics," Morrison told MTV
in 2008, with the focus of Culture Shock - a living creature playing host
to a microscopic universe all its own - pre-dating wider exploration of
such themes in series such as The Invisibles.
"It came up because I met John Ridgway through some other work, Liberators,
on Warrior, so it was
kind of through John, he suggested it," Grant recalls of his time working
on the Magazine.
"I was a big Doctor Who fan
all my life, so it was a good fit... I absolutely enjoyed doing it, and
I would love to do more Doctor Who." Although
not necessarily as a comic, "because I've done enough of it in the comics."
Bryan Hitch, now well known for his stunning work on Marvel's
Utlimates book and more, would rather skate over his first ever Doctor
Who strip, which he drew when he was just 17. "I usually encourage people
to burn my early work," he pleads. Bryan has, of course, gione on to do
design elements of early episodes of the "modern" Doctor
Who show, including
spaceship design, the updated Daleks, the Reapers of Paul Cornell's much-praised
episode Father's Day – and the Slitheen.
Mercenary space ship captain Keepsake picks up a
distress signal from the planet Ryos and becomes a reluctant partner in
the Doctor's attempts to
rescue the medic that sent the signal.
Keepsake only responded to the call there because he thought that there
might be something worth salvaging from any wrecks, but despite this,
together they rescue the medic and the Doctor leaves Keepsake to return
the medic home. Keepsake doesn’t complain, since the medic just happens
to be a rather attractive and generously proportioned woman - although
his pet vulture seems very jealous!
First published
in Issue 140, John Higgins also delivered
a stunning painted cover for the Magazine.
Keepsake is a smashing
story in which the Doctor rides roughshod over Keepsake's personal agenda
to save the aliens. Does writer Simon Furman remember if he wrote it with
the Doctor knowing really that Keepsake was a mercenary or was the Doctor
just oblivious?
"My personal feeling is that the Doctor is rarely oblivious,"
feels Simon. "He just sometimes appears so. I was trying throughout these
early stories to capture the essence of Sylvester's Doctor, and I think
I came closest with that one. Cold Day in Hell was
written having never even seen Sylvester as the Seventh Doctor!"
"Ah the power of social drinking!" recalls artist John
Higgins, creator of Razorjack and
colourist on Watchmen, of this Doctor
Who commission.
"Marvel UK at the time was a great place to go in
to for freelancers as it was London based, for anyone who wanted a day
out and an evening socializing. All the editors, freelancers and the production
staff use to socialize regularly and being in comics on any level, it's
never just a job, we were all fans. So anytime we met for a drink after
work we talked comics, characters and story ideas, Richard Starkings was
always looking of ways to bring people in to Marvel who might add a different
perspective to his line up of artists. I was more 2000AD at
the time, so when Simon came up with this idea which he thought would suit
my SF bent, we talked it through and there it was."
John also delivered
a stunning painted cover for the issue, which was also offered as a poster
to encourage subscriptions. "I was known more for my painted work at that
period of my career and had done a number of movie tie in illustrations
for Starburst Movie Magazine, thanks to its editor, Alan McKenzie who first
commissioned me for fully painted work." (Alan is of course also a former
Doctor Who Monthly editor).
"So I had a couple of portfolio pieces of work which showed I could paint
good likenesses, in those day before Photoshop it was so important to get
an artist who could paint the actors so they were at least recognizable.
"I remember talking to [magazine editor] John Freeman and
asking for as much photo reference as I could get," recalls Higgins: but,
unexpectedly, his first interpretation did not meet with Sylvester McCoy's
approval and, rarely for the ever-helpful actor, he asked for his to be
re-drawn. John was surprised by the reaction.
"I felt, overall it was one
of my more successful covers at that time and John was happy with it too.
Well, until he took it in to show Sylvester McCoy who apparently disliked
my portrait of him, thinking it bore no close relationship to his own fair
countenance." If I had been dissatisfied with his likeness by my own critical
appraisal of the cover as a whole, I probably would have been mortified
for not pleasing the subject of the image."
Capturing McCoy's likeness was
often an issue for the various artists who drew the strip, and an issue
often raised by the Magazine's readers.
"I'm breaking into a cold sweat
as I think about it now," says John, "about how little opportunity artists
had back then to get reference for actors for cover depictions. There were
no DVD's in those days. If you were lucky maybe some bad magazine photographs
but they were never much use."
|
Above: John Higgins' cover
for Issue 140, which was also sold as a poster. Below, one of the
reference pictures taken during recording of The Greatest Show
in the Galaxy after Sylvester McCoy asked the face be changed. |
 |
Equally embarrassed at causing a fuss, Sylvester
McCoy helped John give the painting its final look by posing on scaffolding
during recording for The Greatest Show in the Galaxy at
Elstree.
"Being a lowly artist, I was not allowed on set but John
was, so we did manage to get some relevant photo reference, not completely
right for what I was attempting as it needed my direction to make it completely
appropriate but I did appreciate Sylvester McCoy taking time out do what
must have seemed slightly absurd," John Higgins acknowledges. "But he is
an actor and lives in a world of the absurd I suppose. I did finish the
painting and I remember I was very happy with the end result, feeling I
had got a dramatic cliff hanger image with a recognizable likeness of Sylvester
McCoy."
The experience didn't put him off Doctor
Who, but John has
no desire to work on licensed comics today. "Every image can be improved,"
he notes, "but I was judging it a success on a number of other aspect's,
which for me made it work. So the criticism of the likeness or lack of
it, for one part didn't put me off Doctor Who licensed comics. Other jobs
I subsequently did for Marvel UK in those days did put me off licensed
comics to this day.
"But as a freelancer I always have a price, get that
right and I am all yours!"
Planet of the Dead,
a two-part story featuring several past companions and the first seven
doctors - in likeness, if not as the originals - was intended as an anniversary
tribute to Doctor Who. "It also featured the Gwanzulum," recalls John
Freeman,
who was also editor of Doctor Who Magazine at
the time and was delighted to be asked to pen the story. "These were shape-changing aliens that were
also slipped into several other Marvel titles in the same month, to see
if readers noticed their "secret invasion!"
Working with Richard was valuable experience for the writer.
"Richard devoured writing and comic art books and was, and is, a mine of
information on the comics form," he says. "He taught me how to edit my
strips, shape them better. There was one instance on a Thundercats story
I wrote, where economic circumstance force the cutting of a strip from
11 to five pages overnight and I argued it couldn't be done. He did it
with consumate ease -- it was a very useful lesson!"
Lee Sullivan notes
that Planet
of the Dead was the first strip he’d
drawn extensively featuring humans. "I’d
only just done a couple of strips for Transformers,
he notes. "In
one of those I had drawn a likeness of Richard Branson and that proved to be
a 'career-moment' because,
as a result, when Richard Starkings was assigning Who scripts
to artists, he swapped mine to Planet from the
one that (I think) Dougie Braithwaite ended up
drawing. Suddenly I was having to deal with likenesses of all the 'dead' companions
and all the Doctors, as well as being very aware of all the great artists I was
following!
"It was a dream come true, though. I had followed Who
in strip form since the first appearance of the Neville Main 'Hartnell'
in TV Comic.
Of all the Doctors he had to visualize, the Seventh proved
the most elusive to capture. " I think everyone found him hard – his
face has an infinite variety of expressions," Lee says. "I find that I
have to build a ‘virtual model’ of
the character in my head, so that the drawings look consistent from panel
to panel, but every photo of Sylvester shows a different face."
The artist, today the longest-serving
semi-regular Doctor Who comic-strip
artist across the widest range of titles and media, has since gone on
to draw strips for the partwork-trading card title Battles
in Time --
which is just coming to the end of its current run. Is the comics crreation
process any different today?
"It’s still script/ roughs/ pencils/ inks, but these days
the pages are completed and tweaked in Photoshop before being e-mailed
instead of posted," says lee. "It’s
good for resizing bits of anatomy – for example I sometimes find
I’ve
drawn a head too big by a fraction and if you have a good likeness, it’s
lovely to be able to shrink it!"
Lee also worked on a proposed "comic strip Doctor"-only
project for the BBC after his work on the Radio Times Doctor
Who comic strip and we took the opportunity to ask him how that came about
-- and why it finally didn’t happen.
"Matt Bookman was my last editor on the Radio
Times Eighth
Doctor strip, and he put together a proposal for a science-fiction BBC
magazine. It was initially called Sci-Files;
subsequently Robot and
would feature various BBC sf strips and articles. Doctor Who was
one of them, and it featured a future Doctor (I think the last regeneration)
with memory-loss, rediscovering himself and thereby introducing the format
to readers who may not have been familiar with Who.
"I drew a double-page
spread in full colour; Stephen Cole was the writer and Cybermen were
the baddies – cloth-faced
and running! Dummy issues were produced and tested with focus groups, but
at that time both strips and Doctor Who were
not considered cool by the youngsters they showed it to, and it was not
commissioned."
This strip markes the first appearance of Dan's Foreign
Hazard Duty, a futuristic version of UNIT, when the Doctor arrives
in a deserted human survey base on the planet Mekrom: deserted,
that is, apart from the presence of a single dead body. Finding a
piece of crystal next to it, the Doctor picks it up, the warnth of
his touch activating a holographic
recording of the dead man describing his expedition's discoveries.
At that moment, a Foreign Hazard Duty team arrives in response to the
expedition's distress call, and after first thining he may be a killer,
assume the Doctor to be the team's medical officer.
Although all of
the evidence suggests that the planet's former inhabitants, the warlike
Mogor, are extinct, two FHD team members are seemingly attacked by
one; however, when the Doctor studies their bodies, he finds that they
in fact died of shock. He soon discovers the empathic crystal is in abundance
on the planet and the "Mogor" are not real, but merely albeit
dangerous echoes from the crystals.. When another Mogor attacks the FHD
team, the Doctor dispels it by refusing to accept its reality.
Notable as the first appearance of Dan's Foreign Hazard
Duty, a futuristic version of UNIT, Dan
Abnett confesses that although
he is "ridiculously good" at archiving back issues of his work, his Doctor
Who Magazine collection seems to have disappeared
into an alternate dimension, and, like Alan
Grant, writer of Invaders
from Gantac, he
has few memories of his story in this collection. "I hope it's a good one,
and not an 'Ooh, did I really write this crap" one," he opines.
"The funniest
part of all is where working on DWM got
me. I loved it, but I never expected to write for Doctor
Who again.
I tried to get a Virgin novel commission early on, and they didn't even
reply. I felt I was very much 'not in the Who clique'
and had only been lucky enough to write for the good Doctor because I knew
John Freeman and Richard. Then, suddenly, in the last few years, it all
came back to haunt me. Gary Russell came to me for a couple of Big Finish
adventures, which led to the likes of my Torchwood novel
and audios, and the Martha novel, and the Tenth Doctor audios for the BBC
etc., and that train of events only happened because Gary had remembered
how much he'd liked my DWM strips
and came looking for me.
"The FHD were envisaged as a future version of
UNIT," he confirms. "I can't be sure, but I think that connection actually
gets made somewhere. I intended it too, anyway. They've popped up from
time to time in all sorts of places, not all of them Who stories."
"The FHD was originally a very infantile piece of slang
that was invented by my mates at college," Dan reveals. "An FHD was a
really good night out, because one got so drunk, one had a terrible hangover
in the morning, otherwise known as a F****** Horrible Death. Obviously,
for DWM purposes, I changed what it stood for!"
At one point an FHD US
title was considered, along with a number of other stillborn projects,
shelved after editorial changes instigated by Marvel Comics directors
in America.
• This feature continues here
• Making
Of Cold Day in Hell Part One
• 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 2 
Keepsake 
Echoes of the Mogor! 
