Dr Who comics

Where? Who owns the rights? Marvel or the BBC or DWM (unlikely)?

it's being published by some lot called Panini, who also publish DWM.

they seem to be doing the reprints in black and white and in their original size. Size.

FANTASTIC! When is this going to happen then? Will they be doing the Alan Moore/Special Executive stories, or is that all Copyrightally Dodgy?

If I was going to make up a 90s indie-dance band I would call it Panini.

I hope they reprint The Tides Of Time, the Peter Davison one that was running when I bought DWM back in the day.

Is that the one that was drawn by Mick Austin? I liked that, it was very evocative.

at the moment the impression they give is it's just going to be the Mills-Wagner-Gibbons stuff, but they'll run out of that fairly quickly.

It was a Dave Gibbons one too. It had the Davison Doctor and a medieval knight teaming up to fight some time-related menace, it was quite trippy for a DWM story, they'd been given some colour pages and were determined to use it. The Tardis materialised in a giant bathtub at one point.

Oooh. I think I am remembering a different story then. The one where he meets a Japanese soldier in a second world war that never stopped, or something like that.

What do people think of the later stories that were written by Steve Parkhouse (I think) and drawn by... Neary, was it? I mean the ones with Astrolabus and Frobisher in them, and Colin Baker as the Doctor. I remember them as being entertainingly odd. But not as good as the one with the Meep, or the Iron Legion, or CITY OF THE DAMNED.

Yeah that one was good - the Japanese soldier one - I have never read/heard/anything a Frobisher story.

Frobisher was this shape-changer guy who hooked up with the Doctor. His preferred form was an anthropomorphic penguin.

Astrolabus is kind of hard to describe. He was kind of the bad guy in those stories, but he was an interesting bad guy.

This book appeared in my comics shop AND I BOUGHT IT.

not merely does it have the Iron Legion, but also City of the Damned, the one about the Meep, and the one in which the Daleks team up with some werewolves. WINNER.

must look out for it

It's worth getting. The Star Beast & The City Of The Damned are both total classic.

The introduction says that the four Wagner-Mills stories were based on pitches they made to the BBC for actual stories for the actual TV programme. Of the four, the above two are the ones I can most imagine on television.

Meep.

They are promising a second volume which will have that Tides of Time story, and the Mike McMahon one about the Cyberman.

looks like Tides of Time is in the THIRD volume.

has anyone read the 2nd volume yet? It looks like a lot of disjointed stories, but maybe is fun.

Volume 2 collects the rest of the Tom Baker stuff, split between Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse. And yes, it has got Junkyard Demon. I think there's a Parkhouse-written strip in there called End Of The Line in there I remember having a surprisingly nasty ending, which they never would've got away with on telly.

The TOT collection should be good as it'll have all the Davidson era stuff in one volume - a big epic story arc over three years worth of strips. Can't wait.

The first volume (which I finally got) is fantastic - very high thrill-power levels. It really is like finding a lost 2000AD classic.

do you reckon any of the stories would have worked on TV? City Of The Damned would have been fun, I reckon. I think that has the best ending of any of them.

I don't know if the stories would have worked on TV, but there's an interview at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/news/drwho/2004/12/08/15937.shtml with Dave Gibbons where he says that they were submitted to the TV show, rejected, then recycled for DWW.

David A