Richard Jennings

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-daleks-ed-marcus-hearn/

This is a collection of the Dalek comic strips from the magazine TV Century 21, published between 1965 and 1967, a page a week about everyone’s favourite evil metallic pepperpots and the obstacles that get thrown up in their plans to dominate the universe. I found it an unexpected pleasure. There are about a dozen storylines across the run, each reasonably self-contained in the structure of needing each page to have a beginning, middle and end. There are not a lot of women – a slave princess in an early story, a little girl who gets into trouble in a later one – but there aren’t in fact a lot of humans, as the main dynamic in the stories is between the Daleks themselves.

There’s also a dozen pages of introduction setting the scene for the series and printing a 1986 interview with one of the main artists. The only two women mentioned are both fictional – Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds and Maria from Metropolis, but no doubt this reflects the reality.

I must say that this greatly exceeded my expectations, and it seems a lot more mature than the contemporary First and Second Doctor strips that I have seen. Hugely recommended. Sadly it’s out of print, but I’d keep an eye out for it if I were you.… (altro)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

The Daleks was a sequence of one-page strips that ran in the anthology comic TV Century 21 from 1965 to 1967. It was reprinted in restored form as a "bookazine" by Doctor Who Magazine in late 2020; I added it to my DWM marathon, placing it between Evening's Empire and Emperor of the Daleks by virtue of the fact that some of the strips were reprinted in DWM at around that time, in issues #180-93. A flimsy excuse, but hey, it's my marathon.

These stories do not feature the Doctor; they are usually told from the perspective of the Daleks themselves, though occasionally other characters become the protagonists. It begins with the beginning of the Daleks—at least as it was envisioned in 1965, with the Daleks being mutations due to the war between the Daleks and the Thals. There are no Kaleds or Davros here. The stories then move forward through time, following things like the Daleks exploiting a crashed spaceship to develop space travel, their first invasion of an alien world, their battles against the mutations of their own world, an attempted uprising by a Dalek named "Zeg," their war with the Mechanoids, their discovery of a planet called "Earth," a new Dalek fad of protecting beauty, and so on.

The plots kind of don't matter; the science is often (always) nonsensical. But there is a pure delight to be find in a story that causes you to root for the Dalek Emperor or hope that the Daleks do invade a planet. The Daleks might be metaphors for fascism in other stories; in these, they're just pure force, and the joy of the stories is in seeing them sweep up their enemies in all forms. Nothing stops a Dalek! The art is amazing. We have two distinct styles. Richard Jennings's is more painterly and more detailed, more traditionally "British comics" in its appearance. A Dalek being destroyed from the inside by a malevolent flower is an amazing sight! He's later succeeded by Ron Turner, whose more abstract style communicates the pure power of the Daleks, layouts bursting with energy. I was particularly taken by the set of strips focusing on Agent 2K, an android dispatched by aliens to prevent a Dalek-Mechanoid war from breaking out.

It's definitely aimed at seven-year-olds, but I found it the exact kind of read I needed when stuck at home sick, and I appreciated getting to read these for historical reasons: the Dalek Emperor originally appeared here, and this is also the source of the Dalek lettering later used across numerous Doctor Who tie-ins (though it's only actually used in about a dozen strips, curiously).

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (altro)