Titan Comics UK Doctor Who Titles Merge

Next month's Tales from the TARDIS absorbs strips from Doctor Who Comic

Next month’s Tales from the TARDIS absorbs strips from Doctor Who Comic

Titan Comics two UK news stand Doctor Who titles – Doctor Who Comic and Tales from the TARDIS – will merge next month.

The larger A4 format Doctor Who Conic breathes its last with the issue on sale now, with strips from the title continuing in the smaller US format Tales from the TARDIS #4, which in most WH Smiths has been racked alongside Doctor Who Magazine, 2000AD and other teenager titles.

“Sadly, this isn’t unexpected,” notes British comic creator and archivist Lew Stringer. “Titan’s decision to launch Doctor Who Comic as a nice big A4 size publication was a welcome move that showed off the art better but it immediately met with problems.

“Even though Titan had a ‘Rated T teen’ advisory on the barcode, most branches of WH Smith I visited tended to stock it alongside the younger readers comics such as The Beano and nursery titles. (In my local branch it was often tucked behind Doctor Who Adventures so no one could even see it!).”

Although fans of Doctor Who Comic will be disappointed by this unofficial merger of the two TITAN titles, the merger may come as a welcome relief to cash-strapped collectors already reeling, perhaps, from the number of available titles featuring their favourite Time Lord on newsagents shelves.

Rival publisher Panini will surely be hoping the disappearance of the often wrongly-racked Doctor Who Comic will result in increased sales for their own, intentionally junior reader oriented Doctor Who Adventures.



Categories: British Comics, Doctor Who, downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News, Television

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4 replies

  1. I think this was Titan’s plan, probs with racking A4 beauty, launch limited series TFTT and see what sales look like. Merge into the format that sells best. Shame as I was enjoying all the Who comicry available in UK. Will have to work out whether I’ll need to start buying US editions again now.

    • Electronic Point of Sale data helps publishers work out how well your title is selling very quickly these days – you get quite a lot of useful data after the sale of three consecutive issues, which means you’ll know if you’re instincts were right about a title in terms of sales levels. However, that data won’t tell you how well your title is being displayed and you also these days have little time to adjust stock levels to redistribute your print run to places where the title is doing better.

    • That does indeed seem to have been their plan, as in Tales 1 they asked readers what format they preferred. Evidently the smaller one won. My only concern is that Asda and Tesco were selling DWC – and unlike WHSmith, in the right section – but don’t sell Tales, nor any of the Marvel/Panini and DC/Titan US format superhero titles. As such, I’m expecting them to delist DWC instead of switching to Tales, which will mean less places to get it from.

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