You Were Expecting Someone Else 4 (TV Comic)
It’s been a while since we’ve been over on this end of the Doctor Who pool, and with the Troughton era coming to an end imminently, it seemed like a good time to pop back over and look. Especially because last time we were looking at the World Distributors annuals, and this time we’re looking at the Polystyle TV Comics strips.
What’s funny, though, is that despite being a completely different company and publication, it’s tough to make too much out of the differences between the two sets of comics. This might not seem surprising given that they are both telling Doctor Who stories, and thus presumably have some unifying influence. Except that both are so wildly different from the television series that it ends up being mildly surprising to watch them end up more or less on the same planet given how far afield they are from the target.
And yet somehow the comics end up with an odd consistency to them. It’s tempting to allude to some vague sense of a proper order of things in Doctor Who here – the occasional and uncanny sense we’ve had before that this ship is not as rudderless as it should be. But in this case, it seems to me there’s a much more prosaic option – given what British comics were, there was only one way the strip could have been, and both World Distributors and Polystyle did it that way.
For an American comic book fan, there is a lot about the British comics industry that is puzzling. But the thing that should be noted first is that virtually nobody talks about British comic books. It’s not that there aren’t any. It’s just that there aren’t very many, and fewer still that actually matter. Instead, the primary form for British comics is the anthology magazine. The most famous of these are probably, in terms of children’s comics, The Beano and The Dandy, and in terms of science fiction, Eagle and 2000 AD. (Though some would make a case for Eclipse, those people are inevitably Americans who forget that the British comics scene extended beyond Alan Moore. Or, more depressingly, Brits who forget that.) The format of these was generally simple – a couple strips of maybe 4-8 pages each, published weekly.
I could – and really should some day – write a book about how this format shaped British comics. But one of the big things is that it meant that comics often had a bit of a house style. A magazine still had to feel coherent, after all. Furthermore, there’s a fairly tight structure to these strips. With eight pages, fitting a cliffhanger, resolution of last week’s cliffhanger, advancement of the plot, and some exposition to catch people up who have forgotten since last week is a challenge. And so the pace of any action-based strip had to be fairly frenetic.
Even in a setting like the World Distributors Annuals, which don’t serialize stories, the structure this implies is prevalent simply because it’s the structure people expect action comics to be in.…