There’s clearly something in the air – Maybe it’s the impending seventh season of the rebooted version of the show – because at the same time as the Mindless Ones’ Andrew Hickey writes about the launch of Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Weekly in the 1970s, Paul Scoones makes a preview PDF available from his book The Comic Strip Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics: 1964–1979.
Here’s Hickey on the launch of the Doctor Who title:
Doctor Who Weekly was started by Marvel UK, in the belief that all those seven-year-olds who loved Star Wars and were buying Marvel’s Star Wars comic would also buy anything else with space and robots in it. So they started a cheap weekly comic, with little attention paid to what was in it, so a bunch of young nobodies, most of whom had been in the business a couple of years at most, were asked to work on it. Nobodies like John Wagner, Pat Mills, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons…
Scoones, meanwhile, goes more in depth into the creation of the stories, with some interesting revelation:
BBC Publicity’s Editorial Assistant, Evelyn Thomas, raised some concerns with Donald Wilson (BBC Head of Serials) about the above proposed storyline. Wilson responded, ‘I am quite sure that you are right in worrying about this outline. It is a direct crib of our “Dalek” serial. If they want to do this they must do the Dalek serial and make acknowledgement, including financial acknowledgement, to the copyright owners, namely, the author and ourselves. I am personally against changing our four characters and I think we should hold out against this.’
Longtime and newcomer Whovians, these are things you might want to check out.
