Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
There’s a relatively straightforward distinction between the
DWM
comic strip and other
Doctor Who
comic strips: while it’s the work of many writers, artists and editors, it also has a strong internal continuity and sense of identity. This book, in all previous editions, has confined itself to “long form”
Doctor Who
and there’s a case to be made that the
DWM
strip represents one “ongoing story” that’s run for over a quarter of a century. The
Doctor Who
Magazine
strip has now run for longer than the original TV series, and most fans must have encountered it at some point.
That said, this book excludes
DWM
strips that are clearly parodies that aren’t meant to be considered within the continuity of the strip. The same logic applies to spoofs like
Dimensions in Time
and
The Curse of Fatal Death
. For the record, the affected strips are “Follow that TARDIS!”, “The Last Word” and “TV Action”.
DWM
has reprinted a number of strips from other publications over the years. We have tended to include these. The main beneficiary of this is
The Daleks
strip from the sixties comic
TV Century 21
(and
DWM
’s sequel to it from issues #249-254).
It’s certainly arguable that the
DWM
strip exists in a separate continuity, with its own companions, internal continuity, vision of Gallifrey and even an ethos that made it feel quite unlike the TV eras of its Doctors. This certainly seemed to be the case early on. However, this distinction has broken down over the years - the comic strip companion Frobisher appeared in a book (
Mission: Impractical
) and two audios (
The Holy Terror
,
The Maltese Penguin
); the village of Stockbridge (from the fifth Doctor
DWM
comics) has featured in various audios starting with
Circular Time
; the audio
The Company of Friends
incorporated characters from different book and comic ranges; and for a number of years the strip and the New Adventures novels were quite elaborately linked. In the new TV series, we’ve met someone serving kronkburgers (in
The Long Game
, first mentioned in “The Iron Legion”) and the Doctor even quoted Abslom Daak in
Bad Wolf
.
The strip tends to “track” the ongoing story (the television series in the seventies and eighties, the New Adventures in the early nineties) - so the Doctor regenerates, without explanation within the strip and on occasion during a story arc. Companions from the television series and books come and go. Costume changes and similar details (like the design of the console room) do the same. It’s broadly possible to work out when the strip is set in the Doctor’s own life. So, the first
Doctor Who
Weekly strips with the fourth Doctor mention he’s dropped off Romana, and he changes from his Season 17 to Season 18 costume - so it slots in neatly between the two seasons. There are places where this process throws up some anomalies, which have been noted.
Also included are the
Doctor Who
comics produced by IDW for the American market; the
Radio Times
comics featuring the eighth Doctor; the comics that first appeared in
Torchwood: The Official Magazine
; and the
Torchwood
and
The Sarah Jane Adventures
webcomics.
4) Spin-off series featuring characters that originally appeared in
Doctor Who
(whatever the format), and were used elsewhere with permission by their respective rights holders.
This needs some explaining...
Doctor Who
is a very unusual property in that, generally speaking, the BBC retained ownership of anything created by salaried employees, but freelance scriptwriters working on the TV show in the 60s, 70s and 80s (and the novelists working on the books in the 90s) typically wound up owning the rights to any characters they created. Infamously, this has meant that writer Terry Nation (and his estate) kept ownership of the name “Dalek” and the conceptual property therein, but the BBC retained the rights to the likeness of the Daleks, which were created by staff designer Raymond Cusick.
This is very counter-intuitive to how other series work - a world where
Star Trek
is so divided (say, with one person owning the Klingons, another owning the Horta and another owning Spock, while Paramount continues to retain ownership of Captain Kirk and the
Enterprise
) would be unthinkable. Nonetheless, over the years, the rights holders to iconic
Doctor Who
characters and monsters have licensed them for use elsewhere, and - unless given reason to think otherwise - their use in a non-
Doctor Who
story seems as valid as any BBC-sanctioned story.
The spin-offs included in this volume are:
• The Bernice Summerfield novels, audios and novella collections, featuring the Doctor’s companion who was first seen in the New Adventure
Love and War
(1992). Benny was the lead of the Doctor-less New Adventures novels published from 1997 to 1999; Big Finish took over the license afterward, and has produced Benny audios, novels, short story anthologies, novella collections and one animated story. The first five Benny audios were excluded, as they were adaptations of New Adventures novels.
• BBV audios and films featuring licensed characters such as the Sontarans, the Rutans and the Zygons.
• Big Finish spin-off series (
Cyberman
;
Dalek Empire
;
Gallifrey
;
Graceless
;
I, Davros; Jago & Litefoot
;
Sarah Jane Smith;
and
UNIT
).
•
Faction Paradox
books, audios and a comic; featuring characters and concepts first seen in the EDA
Alien Bodies
(1997).
• Iris Wildthyme audios and (as of 2011) one novel; a character seen in the original fiction of Paul Magrs, and who first appeared in
Doctor Who
in the
Short Trips
story “Old Flames” and the EDA
The Scarlet Empress
.
•
Kaldor City
audios, spun off from
The Robots of Death
and the PDA
Corpse Marker
(1999).
•
Minister of Chance
- undatable audios featuring the lead from the webcast
Death Comes to Time
(2001-2002).
•
Miranda
comic, from the character seen in the EDA
Father Time
(2001).
• Reeltime Pictures direct-to-VHS/DVD films, featuring the Sontarans, the Draconians, etc.
•
Time Hunter
novellas, featuring characters from the Telos novella
The Cabinet of Light
(2003), and also involving the Fendahl and the Daemons.
Despite this volume’s efforts to be inclusive whenever possible, there are also some significant omissions:
• Comic strips released prior to the advent of the
Doctor Who Magazine
strip, including the
TV Comic
and
Countdown
strips. There are some profound canonicity concerns with these strips, plus there simply wasn’t the room to include them.
• Short stories, whether they first appeared in annuals,
Doctor Who
Magazine
, the
Decalog
and
Short Trips
anthologies or any of the innumerable other places they have cropped up.
There are a few exceptions to this... anthologies were included if they were a rare exception in a full-length story range (say, the
Story of Martha
anthology published with the New Series Adventures novels). Also, information from the Bernice Summerfield and Iris Wildthyme short story anthologies were included if they were so interwoven into continuity elsewhere that omitting them would have been confusing. The prime examples of this are the Benny anthologies
Life During Wartime
and
Present Danger
, as well as the occasional nugget taken from the Iris Wildthyme short story collections published by Obverse. Similarly, information from
Faction Paradox: The Book of the War
(itself a guidebook) was included if it directly pertained to characters or events prominently featured in other
Faction Paradox
stories (for instance, the background of Cousin Octavia, the lead character in
FP: Warring States
).
• Short stories from the
Doctor Who Annual
s.
• The Big Finish stageplay adaptations (
The Curse of the Daleks
,
The Seven Keys to Doomsday, The Ultimate Adventure
) were excluded out of canonicity concerns. It was tempting to make an exception for
The Ultimate Adventure
and its sequel audio,
Beyond the Ultimate Adventure
, as they are more compatible with the established timeline, but both were finally omitted - even in a book as large as this - for reasons of space.
• Unlicensed “cover series” with actors playing thinly veiled counterparts of their
Doctor Who
characters, such as Sylvester McCoy starring as “the Professor” in the BBV audios.
•
Proposed stories that were never made, including the sixth Doctor story
The Ultimate Evil
(abandoned after the Season 22 hiatus and, unlike many of its contemporaries, never adapted for audio) and
Campaign
(a Past Doctor novel that was commissioned but never released by the BBC; it was later privately published).
• The 2003
Scream of the Shalka
webcast, which debuted Richard E. Grant as the ninth Doctor and was then superseded with the advent of the new series. This story was previously included in
Ahistory
, but has been excluded because the sheer preponderance of material establishing the Eccleston version as the ninth Doctor means that almost nobody at time of writing (not even the
Scream of the Shalka
’s creators) accepts the Grant Doctor as canon.
• Stories that were explicitly marketed as being apocryphal, such as Big Finish’s
Unbound
series featuring different actors playing the Doctor.
On the whole, the television series takes priority over what is said in the other media, and where a detail or reference in one of the books, audios or comics appears to contradict what was established on television, it’s been noted as much and an attempt made to rationalise the “mistake” away.
The New Adventures and Missing Adventures built up a broadly consistent “future history” of the universe. This was, in part, based on the “History of Mankind” in Jean-Marc Lofficier’s
The Terrestrial Index
(1991), which mixes information from the series with facts from the novelisations and the author’s own speculation. Many authors, though, have contradicted or ignored Lofficier’s version of events. For the purposes of this book,
The Terrestrial Index
itself is non-canonical, and it’s been noted, but ultimately ignored, whenever a New Adventure recounts information solely using Lofficier as reference.
Writers’ guides, discussion documents and the authors’ original submissions and storylines provide useful information; we have, when possible, referenced these.
Key
The following abbreviations are used in the text:
BENNY - A Bernice Summerfield book or audio