Countdown to TV Action
The Doctor’s comic-strip exploits reached new highs in the early 1970s, with the arrival of a bold new title on British newsstands.
The first instalment of Gemini Plan from Countdown issue 1 (1971).
Art by Harry Lindfield.
When Countdown launched in February 1971, one of its gimmicks was that its pages counted down, rather than up – not unlike an Apollo rocket launch. “The original focus of Countdown was pure,” remembers reader Martin Wiggins, now a leading Shakespeare scholar. That focus was neatly summarised by the motto that often ran beneath the title: “The Space Age comic!”
In early issues of Countdown, Doctor Who often occupied the full-colour centre spread. While TV Comic, Doctor Who’s comic-strip home from 1964 to 1970, had sometimes adopted this format, it hadn’t done so with the dynamism of writer Dennis Hooper and artist Harry Lindfield’s rendition of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, racing around in a yellow tourer and solving action-packed mysteries.
“The quality of the writing and artwork were central to the impact of the strip,” remembers Wiggins. That impact was such that Doctor Who was voted the readers’ favourite strip of 1971. Like TV Century 21 in the 1960s, Countdown included many stories derived from Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s various sci-fi series. But in the eyes of Countdown’s audience, Doctor Who surpassed them all.
On TV, the 1970-72 Doctor Who stories featured a Doctor trapped on Earth, in a series less Space Age than it had ever been, so in a sense its appearance in Countdown was paradoxical. But while TV Comic’s Doctor Who strips often seemed not so much parallel to the television series as perpendicular to it, Countdown’s seemed tonally authentic, even when their incidentals differed.