Tales of Old Skaro

Terry Nation said he didn't like other Doctor Who writers using his creations because they couldn't get the Daleks' psychology right. He had a point. Certainly the Daleks have been increasingly badly handled in the 21st century version of the series. I think modern writers are all suckled on character arcs and rubber ducky motivational cues. Screenwriting doctrine teaches them to wrangle stories into those familiar shapes, but they aren't taught to stretch their imaginations out of the box so as to dream up really strange and original fantasies. Give them an alien menace and they want to portray it in soap opera terms -- were they abused? what's their character diamond? how can I make them more human? 

Ugh to all that. The reason the post-Nation Dalek stories kept featuring Davros (who was good for just one story) was that writers said they could give him a lot of dialogue, whereas the Daleks' own monotonous voices meant their dialogue had to be terse. Well, less is more and vice versa. To take an example from another show, as soon as you have a Borg queen spouting theatrically villainous dialogue like Ming the Merciless, the Borg are no longer the Other and you have to start from scratch to create that weirdness and menace. Or (attention, writers) you could just not cock them up to begin with.

Anyway, back to our would-be overlords from Skaro. For two years The Daleks was a strip on the back of the weekly UK comic TV Century 21. There's the first surprise. Only two years? I remember it as a major part of my childhood but the fact is (like the Silver Age heyday of Marvel Comics that same decade) it came and went in a blink. Now those 104 strips have been collected in book form, which you might be able to get here or here. Just not anywhere convenient like Amazon.

Quite apart from the stories, which are gems of compressed comics writing by Alan Fennell and David Whitaker, the background material about the strips is fascinating. As a child I never knew the artists’ names, but I remembered the first one (Richard Jennings) as being quite sloppy in the way he drew Daleks, which for speed he just did as round bullet-shapes. He also drew the strips in the first two Dalek annuals.

Ron Turner took over after a year. His work was more stylish, and he put more effort into getting the Daleks’ shape right, but I don’t think the stories were as good later on. And because his artwork was executed with such technical precision it was less engaging than Jennings's scrappier panels. There's a lesson there for comics artists today.

Why did Jennings leave the strip? I found the answer on the ever-reliable Bear Alley:

"[Jennings] spent a year drawing The Daleks for the back page of TV Century 21 in 1965 but drifted away from comics. 'For 18 months I worked as a long-distance lorry driver. Not very exciting but I was broke! I took my ancient jeep up to the Yorkshire Dales where I travelled around painting pub signs and portraits.'"

And that was when there were a lot of comics selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies every week. How much more impossible it is to make a living as an artist today. To think of a talented creative craftsman reduced to driving a lorry because it wasn't possible for him to actually get a decent wage for his work. I'd say it makes me weep but mainly it just makes me furious.

 
Still, those are old battles lost long ago. Back to the present day: the collection's editor, Marcus Hearn, theorizes that the end of the strip runs straight into the TV/movie storyline Daleks' Invasion Earth. But that’s set in 2150 AD, whereas the human race in the TV21 strip are clearly much more advanced, with FTL spaceships, which implies that it leads into the events of The Dalek Book and The Dalek World, which are set in the 25th century. (Since that’s the Daleks’ first contact with humanity, they must use their later discovery of time travel to conquer Earth in 2150, presumably to prevent their defeat at the end of The Dalek Book.)

Bliss was it in that dawn

Regular readers will know that we have no truck here with narcissistically personal posts. So you just cut your toenails? Bought a stuffed pelican? Your baby son just puked on the rug for the first time? Honestly, the world wasn’t holding its breath to hear that.

But look, grant me this one indulgence, for here is my bright-eyed younger self at the moment I first conceived of creating my own comics. Inspired by the legendary weekly comic TV Century 21, I started producing Facer Fun. All I can remember about Facer is that he had a skipping rope and he caused a ton of mischief - an early example of the authorial alter ego, as in real life I hated skipping and was terribly well-behaved. (Apart from when I toppled the school flagpole, nearly squashing half a dozen other kids, and avoided the blame by manipulating poor Christopher Fry. No, really, that was a one-off. All the rest of the time, butter wouldn’t melt.)

By age 9 or 10, I was into superhero comics and Facer had been replaced by Photon, who had super-strength, super-speed and could fly. I think he was probably not as interesting as Facer, but 10-year-old boys really aren’t into the “less is more” ethic.

By the time I was in grammar school (RGS Guildford: top school in the country this year for A-Level results, not fee-paying in those days) the superheroes had gone and I was doing EC-style horror comics presented by “Uncle Grimmy”, who had a cowl and a scythe and a hard white bonce. My drawing wasn’t half bad by that stage, either. If I hadn’t given all the comics away to friends I’d post some of the strips so you could see. Actually, maybe I wouldn’t – I haven’t seen them for thirty-five years and it might be the touch-up brush of memory that makes me think they were any good.

Then I did no comics for decades, apart from a few short funny strips starring Necromageus Knoll, a dodgy sword-n-sorcerer who looked liked Richard Nixon, and it wasn’t until David Fickling unveiled his plans for the DFC that my interest in creating them was rekindled.

Now, I wonder… my dad’s nickname for me as that fresh-faced young nipper in the photo was “Sputnik”, a satellite whose antennae gave it a rather comet-like appearance. Could that spark of inspiration have been the reason why we picked Mirabilis as our first DFC project? But enough twittering. Next post will be back to business as usual.

Every problem has a solution!

Okay, so I know this is the Year of Wonders and not Skaro, but I had to put in a link to this feature on Down the Tubes about a Dalek TV series that never got made. (It was posted up around my birthday, when I was having my first beer since New Year's Eve - hence the long hangoverish delay in flagging this up.)

I actually did try (here's hubris) to get a Dalek TV movie going with the Sci-Fi Channel. This was before Russell T Davies's reimagining of Doctor Who, so not quite as long a shot as it sounds - the Daleks hadn't been on air for years. But Nation's agent explained that the BBC, although not actually having the rights, could stick their oar in to any production involving Daleks. Well, I've had some dealings with the BBC and I knew enough to drop the idea right there...

I'd heard years ago that Nation spent a while trying to get a Dalek series going in the USA, and that the stage play on which "Power of the Daleks" was based (see earlier post) had originally been written to pitch that. I assume the idea would have been to follow the history of the Daleks, along the lines taken by the Dalek comic strip in TV21.

I know at least one six-year-old who would have given every penny of his pocket money from then till the present day to see that ;)