UK based Titan Comics brought plenty of Doctor Who comic news across the pond for their appearance at SDCC. In addition to assembling some of the artists and writers behind their SDCC 2015 exclusive story and upcoming four Doctor crossover, panel moderator and Executive Editor Andrew James announced a new mini-series and holiday special both coming this Fall.
The panel kicked off with Senior Editor Steve White leading the room in singing Happy Birthday to Ninth Doctor series artist George Mann before James took the podium to premiere a teaser trailer for the forthcoming four Doctor crossover as series writer Paul Cornell looked on. Fans got a taste of never before seen artwork from series artist Neil Edwards, including an image of Doctors Ten, Eleven and Twelve gathered around the TARDIS console with companions Gabby, Alice and Clara. A title card proclaimed the crossover would feature four companions, which begs the question of who the fourth might be.
The crossover hits stores August 12 to coincide with the second annual Doctor Who comics day the following Saturday, August 15. The celebration will feature appearances from Doctor Who comics creators “at over 2,000 stores and libraries world-wide,” according to James.
“This all comes about because Clara Oswald desperately tries to prevent what she refers to as ‘some kind of multi-Doctor event’ which she doesn’t want to happen,” said Cornell, describing the basic premise of the series. “Thankfully, she fails to do that completely.” As with any multi-Doctor tale, from early seventies television serial “The Three Doctors” on down through 2013’s “Day of the Doctor,” disagreements and power struggles between the iterations take center stage.
“Ten and Twelve really don’t see eye to eye. Twelve can’t explain how he’s even alive to the other two,” Cornell said, noting that the story takes place before Doctors Ten and Eleven meet up in “Day of the Doctor.” He acknowledged that how the pair don’t remember this earlier encounter is one of the main points his series will have to explain.
“Ten thinks Twelve must have done something diabolical to even exist, he calls him an ‘abomination.’ And Twelve says, ‘Abomination? Dalek word. Nice.'” Cornell’s take on the Twelfth Doctor includes further witticisms such as his referring to Doctors Ten and Eleven as “Manic Pixie Dream Doctors,” leaving the Eleventh Doctor in the unenviable position of trying to help the other two manage to get along. He promised that the story, which he said was “all about a photograph, the nature of which means the end of the universe,” would feature some compelling cliffhangers, lots of old monsters and some surprise cameos.
Cornell wrapped up by saying: “All the Doctor Who titles are coming to a halt to clear the way for this for five weeks, and then they’ll all be relaunched again with any survivors.”
One of those titles is the recently launched Ninth Doctor comic series. To the right of Cornell on the panel was Cavan Scott and Blair Shedd, respectively the writer and artist behind the series. Scott remarked that he couldn’t quite believe he was writing for a Doctor that had already reached the 10th anniversary of their appearance and then death.
“We wanted to do a big event to celebrate that,” Scott said, “and wanted to do things we hadn’t seen the Doctor do very often in that year.” He said that Nine is still dealing with the Time War, leaving him a “very, very raw, a man who’s remembering how to be the Doctor.” Scott felt the TARDIS team of Rose Tyler and Jack Harkness helped the Doctor with that, saying he loved the brilliant way that group interacted. He also noted the flirting between Jack and the Doctor and Rose, which he likened to a love triangle that was perpetually spinning.
In terms of story, Scott explained that annihilation of the Time Lords left a “vacuum of power” that two warring factions are vying to fill. This leads the Ninth Doctor, Scott said, “to come face to face with people who are saying, ‘We are the new champions of Time’ and he might not like that.”
Scott added another Doctor to the growing roster of Time Lords he’s written for when he paired with Mann on writing duties for the SDCC exclusive story “Selfie.” James explained that the origins of the Con-centric story, which he described as a “delight” to work on, lay truly with the writers as his brief for the tale only asked that they do a story set in San Diego with the Twelfth Doctor and Clara.
“We spent an evening on Skype arguing, basically,” said Mann, who elaborated that the loose brief from James gave them the freedom to go anywhere in the city, but that both writers agreed they wanted to do a story at the convention center which they saw as “the heart of comics.” This was why the story opens with the TARDIS landing in the middle of the convention’s main floor, in a full-page shot that James explained took artist Rachael Stott weeks to complete as she kept adding detail and costumes for con goers that referenced a variety of fandoms.
Scott said he and Mann asked themselves what summed up a convention these days and decided it was the many selfies taken by attendees. This led to the concept of an alien that could only be seen in selfies, and what endgame such a creature would have. “So if you look on your phones and see this,” Scott intoned in an ominous voice, gesturing to a slide showing a panel of the alien, “run.”
James segued into the announcement portion of the panel by saying that the Titan editors so loved Stott’s work on “Selfie” that she was the first artist invited to work on year two of the Twelfth Doctor series. Stott will support returning writer Robbie Morrison. “Selfie” writing team Scott and Mann will also return to a Twelfth Doctor story in a holiday special due out in early December. “Doctor Who is synonymous with Christmas back in the UK and around the world,” James said, “but we’re going to go slightly more international with the holiday.”
The other big announcement from the panel was the release of a new mini-series featuring the Eighth Doctor. James showed a slide of the series’ issue one cover by Alice X. Zhang, whose oil painting-style imagery depicts actor Paul McGann. McGann’s brief on-screen tenure as the Doctor only included one ill-fated TV movie, meant to test the waters for a possible BBC series collaboration with Fox. Though the film is much maligned, fans largely agree McGann himself shined in the role.
Due out October 28, the new series will be written by Mann with art by Emma Vieceli. “It’s a different format to the mini-series you’ve seen before,” Mann said, explaining that this was a later version of the Eighth Doctor, as seen just prior to “Night of the Doctor.” That television short, which served as a prequel to “Day of the Doctor,” was well-received by fans and may have paved the way for Titan to feature him in comic form.
Mann himself stated the short had personally made him want a season’s worth of Eighth Doctor stories. As a result, he wrote each issue as it’s own “episode” and “separate adventure.” Issue one will deal with a “village under siege set in the modern day,” but the issues will also see the Doctor travel to distant worlds and introduce new villains. Mann also said that we’ll meet a new companion named “Josie” who will be central to the stories, calling her “the backbone of the series.”
The Eleventh Doctor year two sees the introduction of a new writer to pair with Robbie Williams, Si Spurrier, who sent a video greeting to play to the panel introducing himself. Artist Simon Fraser returns, joined by newcomer Warren Pleece. The Tenth Doctor year two brings back Nick Abadzis on writing, while returning artist Elena Casagrande will be joined by Eleonora Carlini.
Check out some of the upcoming covers from Tenth and Eleventh Doctor year two, upcoming Twelfth Doctor and new Eighth Doctor covers below!
When David Tennant’s Doctor departed the hit BBC series in 2009, fans on both sides of the pond were stricken at seeing him go. Apparently, even the BBC was concerned the show didn’t have much of a future without it’s 10th Doctor and Russell T. Davies, the creative mind that resurrected the series in 2005. Luckily, Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor came on the scene with a new creative team and won scores of new fans for the long-running series. For those who still miss the 10th Doctor’s particular brand of swashbuckling, writer Nick Abadzis has penned the popular comic book adaptions that give fans a bit more of Tennant’s iconic turn. We talked with Abadzis about being a British expat in New York, and the first Mexican-American companion Gabby Gonzalez: also the TARDIS’ first artist.
Edie Nugent: How did you decide where in the 10th Doctor’s timeline to begin the story?
Nick Abadzis: That was part of the brief [from Titan], but it made sense to me. No-one really knows how long the Doctor has lived, and there’s always potential for setting stories between TV episodes or seasons or any kind of gap, but that end of the tenth Doctor’s life is largely undocumented, so there’s even more room than usual.
Nugent: What made you choose the Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY as the setting for Revolutions of Terror?
Abadzis: Because the books were initially aimed at the US market (albeit all Who fans) it was suggested it could be an American companion. I’m British, but I live in New York, so automatically I wanted to set some stories here. I live in Brooklyn, next door to Sunset Park as a matter of fact, and I happened to be cycling around there while I was thinking about all this. It’s a very Mexican and Chinese area and it struck me that it would be a lot of fun to have the TARDIS materialize in the park there, with that fantastic view of the bay and Manhattan. The idea for Gabby Gonzalez as a companion and Cindy Wu as her best friend came shortly after – it all sort of grew from there.
Nugent: How long have you lived in New York? You’re name-checking
actual anchors from NY1: the beloved new york city local cable news channel, and setting an alien invasion on the subway (finally!)–along with the wonderfully representative location art it feels very New York City.
Abadzis: Thank you. I’ve lived here for just over five years now, but I go back a long way with this city. I first came here in the early eighties when I was a kid – my oldest friend is from Westchester County and eventually he moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side around 72nd St. and I visited him a lot as a teenager. So NYC has always been a big part of my personal mythology. See also my strip Hugo Tate from Deadline magazine.
The NY subway is overdue for an alien invasion, no? The London Underground had the second Doctor rooting out an infestation of Yeti down there. Cybermen on the F train – now, there’s a thought…
Nugent: So did the idea to set the story in Sunset Park come first, and lead to the development of Gabby Gonzalez as a companion? Or was it the other way around?
Abadzis: I think they occurred concurrently. Gabby assumed a character very, very rapidly in my mind… I was bouncing ideas at Andrew James, the Titan Comics Doctor Who editor, and Robbie Morrison, one of my co-writers, and once I had the idea for Gabby I really went for it; I really wanted to write this character, her family and friends. It all sort of cohered. When that happens, as a writer, as a storyteller, you listen to those instincts and you go for it.
Nugent: It’s so wonderful to see some real diversity in companions for the Doctor. What about Gabby stuck out to you most as first, that defined who she is? The kind of energy & dynamic she brings to the TARDIS?
Abadzis: There’s probably a lot of me in her – first generation, immigrant parents, their children are of the country they’re born into rather than the old one, but at the same time, to a certain extent, she’s bound by the constraints and expectations of family. She’s very open-minded, she wants to get out there and really live, experience things, so she chafes a bit at what’s expected of her. These are not uncommon traits; I’m sure they’re recognizable to many readers…
She’s also creative, she lives by her instincts as well as her intelligence (which is both emotional and intellectual) but, other than Turlough, a companion of the fifth Doctor’s, I’m not sure there’s been an artist per se onboard the TARDIS before. This seemed like a good way of availing ourselves of the language of comics and at the same time giving Gabby a distinctive voice, a way of recording all she sees and experiences.
Also of course, I must just say, once the initial character sketches started coming in from Elena… that just sealed it. Gabby was there. Elena had loads of little visual ideas about how to bring about these characteristics of Gabby’s, embed them in her visually and it was beautiful to see Gabby come alive. You should’ve seen all the work she put into trying out all these different hairstyles for her.
Nugent: Well, unless you count the brief Van Gogh trip to see his future art gallery, I can’t think of any TARDIS artists either. What you say about Elena’s art sealing the deal makes sense: Gabby feels like a very real person to me. The comment about her last name–Gonzalez—being used to taunt her on the playground by referring to the discontinued Loony Tunes character hit me right in the heart.
Abadzis: Doctor Who is about diversity in a way – if you dig, there’s been a lot of stories about intolerance in Doctor Who. The Daleks are essentially fascism personified.
Nugent: Oh yes, the Kaled’s from Genesis of the Daleks even wear the Hugo-Boss stye Nazi uniforms before they are turned by Davros to the Daleks we know and fear. I agree that Doctor Who often explores intolerance, but rarely have we seen it through the eyes of racially diverse companions.
Abadzis: True enough. Given that we had the opportunity to pick a companion from New York City, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world, she could’ve come from almost any background…
For a while I played with the idea of naming her “Gabriella Gomez.” I kept Gonzalez because I was aware of the discourse over the animated character. Also, Gabby is named (sort of) after a friend of mine, a real-life mexican-American cartoonist and teacher, Gabrielle Gamboa. I always loved the way her name sounded, kinda reminded me of the LL thing in the Superman books – Los Lane, Lana Lang, if you see what I mean. Although I will probably refrain from naming other characters in a similar way.
Names of characters are important. I spend a lot of time getting that right.
Nugent: I really appreciated the inclusion of the song “Cielito Lindo” as a source of power. Looking at the lyrics it seems tailor-made for a Doctor Who alien invasion!
Abadzis: Like I say though, when I was cycling through Sunset Park, I saw potential Gabriellas everywhere – I imagined the TARDIS landing there, and if the Doctor came out, who would he meet? One of the locals. When a character feels like she created herself (I’m romanticizing it), you have to go with it.
Nugent: How did you decide where Gabby would travel to on her inaugural TARDIS trip?
Abadzis: She wants to be an artist (she already is, she just doesn’t know it) and she asked the Doctor to teach her… so he decides to take her to an art gallery. Not just any art gallery mind, because the Doctor is a show-off… he wants to take her somewhere impossibly glamorous too, so that’s why he picks Ouloumos. he has a history with the place (of course).
Nugent: It was great to see the 10th Doctor falling through those MC Escher staircases after name-checking that the artist they visit as having become and adept at Logopolis. Did Classic Who of that era influence how you decided to tell this story?
Abadzis: All that stuff, those classic episodes, are in my head, so yes. Can’t quite recall where the idea of a block-transfer sculptor came from precisely, but I just thought it’d be fun to have someone who was trained on Logopolis be able to use similar abilities in a creative way. It gets out of hand, inevitably.
Zhe (the artist) has known the Doctor at least since his fourth incarnation, as you can tell by the portrait of him and Romana II on her wall.
Nugent: Does that place the start of the Doctor’s friendship with Zhe during that era?
Abadzis: From that you can infer that the Doctor has known Zhe a long time – s/he certainly seems to be very long-lived and from this adventure and that painting, we know that at least two incarnations have known her – probably more. I’m sure she really dug the sixth Doctor’s coat and I can certainly imagine her sharing a cocktail or two with the eighth Doctor.
But as to when precisely it takes place…? “All of time and space, my dear, all of time and space…”
Nugent: You penned a story about the 10th Doctor and Rose for Doctor Who Magazine almost 10 years ago. What was it like returning to the same character at this point in his “song” (or maybe “Coda” would be more appropriate)?
Abadzis: Yes, that was strange… that was the tenth Doctor’s debut adventure in comics, and at the point that it was written, no-one knew what he was goig to be like, how David Tennant would play him! I’d seen Tennant in things before, so I recall us basing his manner, his cadences a little bit on previous performances and also, fundamentally, it’s the Doctor, it’s the same man, so there are certain basics to his charcater that are common to all incarnations of the character.
It was really lovely to be asked to write him again… Of course, by this point, I knew everything about him, how he’d lived and regenerated, so I had a much better angle on how to approach it. In my mind, he’s still very much a living breathing character, his time has not ended, that song is still going strong. I think that’s the ebst way to approach it, because it makes the threats he comes across very real and all the more terrifying.
Time can be rewritten, don’t forget…
Nugent: The idea that a harsh critic can aid in transforming a creative spirit into a lethal monster is an interesting framework for a Who adversary, as is the fact that creatives can often be their own worst enemy; how did you decide on that idea?
Abadzis: It developed naturally out of the narrative. Originally, this was going to be a story about artists becoming subsumed into a wider, greater entertainment machine, about creatives servicing a voracious alien entity, but it was just too huge for two issues and, quite correctly, the BBC and Andrew, my editor, made me slim it down to something less epic. The element common to both versions was the block-transfer sculptor Zhe, who sounded like an interesting character, so I worked more on her. I had these very visual ideas about Giacometti-style sculptures coming to life and Elena drawing these and to a certain extent, when you get an idea like that, it suggests a story. And I was right, she did a great job there, with that whole sequence of the Doctor and Gabby’s journey up to Zhe’s mansion.
And Zhe is the ultimate artist in many ways – oversensitive, but full of empathy, creative but holding herself to high standards so that when she doesn’t meet them, she feels she’s failed. She’s kind of a reflection of the Doctor in some ways, which is probably why their friends – that, and he’s a real Renaissance man too, of course.
Nugent: How are you both feeling about the recent news that your comic story line will merge with that of the eleveth and twelfth Doctors this fall in a limited series to be written by Hugo-nominated Doctor Who television writer (and longtime who fanboy) Paul Cornell?
Abadzis: I can’t answer for Elena, but I’m fine with that! I’ve read (and watched) Paul’s work for many, many years and he really is among the greats of Doctor Who writers in my opinion. He wrote Human Nature (which, if you haven’t read the original novel featuring the seventh Doctor, go buy it now)! Multi-Doctor stories are part of the tradition of Doctor Who and I get the idea they’re tough to write, but you are in extremely good hands with Paul Cornell. He’ll write a blinder.
Nugent: Are there any tantalizing story clues or tidbits you can share with our Comics Beat readers from the upcoming issues of the 10th Doctor?
Abadzis:Let’s see… we have a new “big bad” on the way, a being who isn’t deliberately out to get the Doctor but simply by virtue of his very powerful presence upsets a lot of things, keeps them out of balance. He’s not even a villain exactly, he’s a almost a victim of circumstances himself who is weary with the universe and this huge weight of responsibility he has upon his shoulders. When he encounters the Doctor, he sees a solution to his problems and wants the Doctor to help him. But it’s not the kind of help the Doctor is inclined to give…
Doctor Who: Revolutions of Terror is available in comic shops on March 25, in bookstores March 31. For more information on Gabrielle Gamboa, the inspiration for companion Gabby Gonzalez, check out Gamboa’s website: http://www.gabriellegamboa.com/
