This is a fun little extra for Death’s Head fans out there, with emphasis on the words “fun” and “little”. We’ll get to that, first up though let’s set the scene by beginning at the, well, beginning of #173 of Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Magazine. I’m already taking umbrage though. How could they revert to the 70s logo when the latest series to have aired was the Sylvester McCoy era and my favourite series logo of all?

Oh well, inside there’s an interesting mixture of features and contemporary news, the latter of which reports on rumours surrounding the return of the show and much of it really was clutching at straws. The mag still had to report on it, after all we were in the pre-internet gossip days, so how else would the readers get their fix? It reminds me of the year or so before the Knight Rider sequel series launched in 2008, when I’d clamour for every juicy morsel of official news (but not spoilers, naturally).

On a side note, I loved everything I heard about that new Knight Rider and the pilot movie was ace. But when it went to series NBC gave the show runner position to the guy who created The Fast and the Furious and he didn’t have a clue about Knight Rider. We were SO close to something great! A great cast, a great car, a great premise… all ruined. At least we had the movie though. It makes me wonder what a series of Doctor Who would’ve looked like if its own pilot movie five years after this issue had gone to series.

Somewhat tied in with that news page is Lies Lies Lies, a feature looking back on the wild rumours and blatant lies people had made up about Doctor Who in the past just to get some attention. It’s somewhat ironic to have this in the same issue as that news page, don’t you think? I reminds me of social media today, or even discussion forums before that, and the things included here are the reason I no longer look out for future Knight Rider (or Doctor Who) news anymore. Some things never change.

Having recently watched all of the Seventh Doctor’s stories I don’t understand the hate it received from some corners of the fandom, but then again those corners are still there today moaning about the latest series so I still don’t understand them. I loved these stories. Stills of The Happiness Patrol in particular always made it look rather weird and I had a feeling of dread going into it, but it was fantastic!

Through this strange outer shell was a solid gold story and I particularly liked the feel of the dystopian future and the ending as described here, with the Doctor and Ace bringing sorrow, pain and sadness to a world forced to be happy. A happy ending through the importance of feeling sad. Again, it was brilliant! I found this feature about the writing of the story fascinating too. You should really give it a read.

Back in the 90s I collected Babylon 5 on VHS tapes, spending £8.99 for each volume of just two episodes. Or if we wanted to see the outtakes from Red Dwarf or find out how Thunderbirds was made we’d to fork out for additional tapes at about the same price. In the same decade the BBC had an idea which sounds equally bizarre when we’re so used to extras being include in our purchases today. Long before iPlayer The Eras Tapes were a way to get caught up on the earliest adventures with a rather random selection of episodes tied together by video links of Sean Pertwee and Sylvester McCoy. A real product of the time.

Elsewhere in this issue is a Fourth Doctor prose story and a humour strip written by Steve Noble (who I couldn’t find credits for when I wrote about Red Dwarf Smegazine) and drawn by OiNK’s Kev F. Unfortunately, there are also the kind of Doctor Who episode reviews (of then-recent VHS releases) that are more suited to today’s internet than the official mag. Much like certain modern online reviews they’re overly long, overly negative and the reviewer is more interested in promoting themselves and how ‘clever’ they are than writing honestly. There are even letters of complaint about this reviewer!

But anyway, for Death’s Heads fans the wait is over. Party Animals is the issue’s comic strip, written by Gary Russell, pencilled by Mike Collins (Zoids, Transformers, Captain Britain), inked by Steve Pini (Knights of Pendragon, Bloodlines) and lettered by Gary Gilbert (Transformers, Thundercats, 2000AD). Gary Russell would have a huge career in the universe of the Doctor, including becoming editor of this magazine from the next year, script editor on The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, and producer on Big Finish’s audio dramas.

So just why is this issue of Doctor Who Magazine in this section of the blog? In this strip the Seventh Doctor is visiting a bar at the centre of the space-time vortex run by Bonjaxx, whose birthday it is. Everyone from across space and time frequents this bar and have turned out to celebrate. Friends and enemies drink side-by-side as the Doctor and Ace meet two mysterious strangers, the Doctor and the other man exchanging a cryptic conversation while Ace and Ria get caught up in the inevitable 80s movie-style bar brawl.

In the end we find out the other man is a future incarnation of the Doctor, which is rather disappointing. His face may have been based on Nicholas Briggs from Big Finish (who supplies the current show’s Dalek voices) but this depiction does him no favours, the character coming across as rather boring. Even his costume makes him look more like a maître d, so the twist in the tale is a bit flat as a result. But the real highlight here was always going to be the bar itself and the wonderful array of cameos for readers to spot and their funny interactions both before and during the fight.

As you can see, our resident Freelance Peacekeeping Agent was also taking a well deserved break, at least until a Meep got a bit angry and things escalated as only bar fights can. Death’s Head is only in a few panels but he makes his presence felt and thankfully this was before his horrible redesign for Death’s Head II. It’s an insane little piece, although I’ve no doubt there are some who took it far too seriously and either saw it as proof these characters all existed in the same universe, got annoyed that it was “timeline/universe inaccurate” or who went to great lengths to explain how they could all be together.

Relax! It’s just a bit of fun. After all, that’s what comics are for. It even has Bart Simpson in it and some Daleks actually enjoying themselves in the background! It was a lovely surprise stumbling upon this Death’s Head cameo then purchasing it for the blog. Not only because of him, but also the amount of time I spent pouring over every panel to see who I could recognise. There were some genuine moments of laughter to be had when spotting them.

Finishing off the rest of the magazine I wanted to touch upon Enlightening, a superb interview with director Fiona Cumming, especially as it counters some corners of today’s online world. There were so many hateful men complaining about seeing women’s names on writing and directing credits during Jodie Whittaker’s and Ncuti Gatwa’s runs but the 1980s got there first. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many in the credits during this era. How little the sexist trolls actually know, eh?

There are some great nuggets of information here. It’s strange to read how little the writer was involved in the production back then, or that much like today whole seasons were filmed out of order. The latter is testament to Janet Fielding’s and Sarah Sutton’s talent in acting out their characters getting to know each other even though they’d been working together for months already. There’s a lovely Jon Pertwee story too, as well as some very clever examples of using set design to get around the tight budgets.

I certainly wouldn’t have said Doctor Who was famous for its incidental music back then, some of it was atrocious, especially in the 70s. However, in Sylvester’s years it really was superb, with each story individually tailored for and I loved hearing the theme tune woven into the episodes in various ways, something we’d never had before and wouldn’t get again until Jodie’s era. It’s a great article so I’ve included it all here for you to read.

Yes, I really did fork out for an old Doctor Who Magazine because Death’s Head appeared in three panels of a comic strip! As a fan of Doctor Who I was never going to complain though. I always enjoy reading contemporary coverage of such things, even despite the negatives mentioned above. Thankfully the positives (most of all the strip itself, of course) more than make up for any shortcomings. A fun little addition to the Death’s Head section of the blog, yes?

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