rdfs:comment
| - In 1979, Marvel UK wrested control of the license to produce Doctor Who comics from Polystyle. Editor Dez Skinn immediately changed the style of the comic strip by hiring youngsters who were principally comic book artists, rather than the cartoonists and illustrators who had been in charge of Polystyle's output. With soon-to-be-luminaries like Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills and John Wagner working on the main strip and Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Steve Dillon and Steve Parkhouse initially handling the back-ups, Skinn instantly brought modern — and more American — sensibilities to the comic Doctor Who world.
|
abstract
| - In 1979, Marvel UK wrested control of the license to produce Doctor Who comics from Polystyle. Editor Dez Skinn immediately changed the style of the comic strip by hiring youngsters who were principally comic book artists, rather than the cartoonists and illustrators who had been in charge of Polystyle's output. With soon-to-be-luminaries like Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills and John Wagner working on the main strip and Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Steve Dillon and Steve Parkhouse initially handling the back-ups, Skinn instantly brought modern — and more American — sensibilities to the comic Doctor Who world. At the same time, those early issues of Doctor Who Weekly brought American comic strips in front of British eyes by having a long series of reprints taken straight from Marvel's long line of American science fiction anthologies. Called variously "Tales from the TARDIS" and "Time Tales", the non-Whoniverse backup strips of those early issues involved a few panels of the Fourth Doctor framing a Marvel US adaptation of a classic science fiction story or an original strip taken from a Marvel US science fiction anthology of the 1950s or 1960s. Borrowed as they were from Marvel US, they featured the talents of Marvel legends Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, and even Stan Lee himself. Skinn also resurrected the long-out-of-print Dalek Tapes stories that had originally appeared in TV Century 21. For a time, Doctor Who Weekly regularly had three or four different strips in each issue. Skinn's successors rather quickly ended the non-Whoniverse material, and made reprints of 1960s material increasingly sporadic. But the non-Doctor original back-ups remained well past the time the magazine became Doctor Who Monthly. These backups, however, dried up at about the time the Sixth Doctor debuted. By the end of the 1980s, the magazine generally ran only the main Doctor Who strip. However, there were rare instances when a Polystyle comic made its way into print during the 1990s. These occasional reprints ended entirely by the dawn of the 21st century. In the 1990s DWM temporarily ran a series of comic strips featuring past Doctors in lieu of the then-current Seventh Doctor, but from 1996 it once again featured exclusively the current Doctor. Today, Doctor Who Magazine exclusively publishes a single original comic strip per issue. As has been the case since 1979, most stories are serialised and told over the course of several issues, with the occasional single-chapter standalone. Originally published in black and white, the comic strip has been published in colour since the early 2000s.
|