COLLECTIVITY
Comics
Doctor Who comics have been around for almost as long as the programme itself and older titles can be hard to find. JAMIE LENMAN meets some of the fans who have risen to the challenge.
top to bottom: A selection of Evan Marshall’s comics; a page of the Dr. What comic strip, reprinted in the Cor!! Summer Special (IPC Magazines, 1972); a page of The Daleks from TV Century 21 issue 91 (City Magazines, 1966) featuring artwork by Ron Turner; a selection of Richard Unwin’s Titan comics; a detail from Gerry Haylock’s art for the cover of TV Action issue 112 (Polystyle, 1973); Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 10 (Marvel, 1993); TV Action issue 123 (1973).
TV Comic issue 798 (1967).
Most people think Doctor Who is a television programme, and they’re both right and wrong at the same time. Doctor Who has also been (and still is) books, several radio shows, two movies, countless audio series, a handful of cartoons and, of course, a startling amount of comics.
In November 1964, TV Comic began its 15-year run of official Doctor Who strips, featuring the first four television Doctors along with original companions and a bevy of wacky new monsters. Collectors have been hunting down these publications for decades.
“I just adore all the weird and wonderful ‘lesser-spotted’ Doctor Who stories, especially if they’re from the 1960s,” says Evan Marshall, a film archivist from Belfast. A collector with a capital C, Evan made it his mission to obtain a complete run of TV Comic, having completed his previous aim of collecting all the Doctor Who annuals. “The silliness of some of the early comics really appealed to me, and I just decided on a whim to look online and see what was out there. I looked at the average prices for 1960s issues, for 1970s issues, totted up what a complete collection would cost and almost gave up on the spot! However, I noticed one seller had a very large number of Pertwee issues for sale…”
Having caught the scent of a potentially huge haul, Evan wrote to the seller directly and asked if she had any more issues hanging around. “She got back to me saying she had loads from the 1960s, that they’d all belonged to her grandfather, and that she was happy to make a deal with me. Therefore, just a few days after making an idle question of whether or not it was possible to collect all of TV Comic, I was now the owner of the vast majority from 1964 to 1976, including nearly all of the beautiful Doctor Who covers from the Troughton era.”