Lawrence Miles's Blog, page 2

Wimbledon interrupted by Skagra's mind-sphere: full story...

Wimbledon interrupted by Skagra's mind-sphere: full story, page 3.

Actual screencap from Countdown: makes a good warning sig...

Actual screencap from Countdown: makes a good warning sign when discussing future episodes on newsgroups.

I had around 2,000 words to say on the state of Doctor Wh...

I had around 2,000 words to say on the state of Doctor Who in anniversary year, but I got too depressed. So here's a picture of a lion saying the word "jazz".

"BEHOLD THE FINGERS OF OMEGALACTUS!"

Not all betrayals from the 1970s are covered by Operation Yewtree.

I honestly didn't know. If I'd been more active or more nosey on newsgroups, then it would've been pointed out to me years ago. But it was sodding obvious and I never even noticed.

I have a new flatmate. You can expect us to end up collaborating on something monumentally obsessive before long, but while we both grew up with Doctor Who (in his case, in a way I find pleasantly curious, since he's ten years younger than myself and has nostalgia for the original video release of "The Daleks" rather than seeing "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" first time around), we're separated by this: I'm instinctively DC, he's instinctively Marvel. Obviously, Marvel was better when I was little. But, y'know. The 1980s. Swamp Thing and such.

So of course, within two days of his moving in, the conversation turned to Galactus.

My point was, and still is, this: the original Galactus Trilogy (Fantastic Four #48-50, true believers!) was massively influential. Not just "a cult thing that might get made into a movie one day", like comic-books are nowadays, consarnit. It was Stan Lee at his most f***-you and, more importantly, Jack Kirby at his most cosmic. It changed comics, but it also had a ripple effect on pop-culture that spread through the minds of those late-'60s counterculturalists whom we now like to imagine were all on drugs, but were actually just part of a post-WW2 generation that had every reason to see the world in blistering colour. If you doubt its impact, or doubt that even the most widely-circulated comic-book would have been noticed beyond a niche readership in 1966, then look it up and find out how many college-stroke-university students - granted, mostly boys - had it passed on to them. On both sides of the Atlantic. Remember, I knew who Galactus was before I'd ever heard of John Lennon.

Bob Baker and Dave Martin saw Omega as Atlas in a mask. Godlike power, yes, but their script described something more classical than pop-art. I have absolutely no evidence that Roger Liminton, designer on "The Three Doctors", had ever picked up a Marvel comic. I haven't even been able to establish how old he is / was, although I tried, in the hope that he might have been just the right age to know what anyone familiar with Jack Kirby now knows: a god in the twentieth or twenty-first century needs a bloody great helmet that looks like architecture, a presence as unshakable as whole cities. "Look at it," I told my new flatmate. "Seriously. just look. Omega's even got the same crenelations at the top."

And then he pointed out to me that people on-line have been noticing this for years, but at second-hand.

When I was four years old, I had a copy of The Doctor Who Monster Book. I cut it to pieces and stuck bits of it on my bedroom wall. With black-and-white photographs being less than hi-def in those days, many of the illustrations were taken from Target covers, so I had Chris Achilleos' "Three Doctors" image opposite me every night while I slept.

I was, as reported in my "1979" blog entry, trained in the details of the Marvel universe. I understand the significance of the Galactus Trilogy, and have done for many years.

Yet until today, I never noticed.

Many of you will already know what I'm talking about. If you don't, then here's the evidence in a single JPEG.

Chris Achilleos! Achilleos the God! Achilleos, whose work defined what I thought Doctor Who was actually supposed to be like once you took it out of the box in the corner of the living room that couldn't contain it! Achilleos, the... no, wait, is this really a problem? So he liked Jack Kirby. So do we all. I'm fairly sure Star Wars wouldn't be as good if it had just fed on Flash Gordon without picking up any traces of The New Gods, and I'm on George Lucas' side to a degree which is nowadays seen as pathological. Fair do's, I should have noticed sooner, but it's not as if the man who gave us KKLAK! was a massive plagiarist.

Then I found this two-year-old blog entry by Paul Scoones. If you haven't seen it (and it increasingly seems that I'm one of the last to do so), then here's the full horror:

http://paulscoones.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/dalek-design-origins.html

Achilleos the tracer...?

Let's be clear on this. We knew Achilleos, shall we say, "rendered" publicity photos from the TV series into his (unquestionably majestic) Target art. "Rendering" other people's drawings is a different matter. Many people have left comments on Paul's page, but perhaps out of politeness, none of them has pointed out the other thing I should have noticed if I were anywhere near as Aspergic as I like to pretend: the Daleks on the cover of "Day of the" are left-handed. Since the images taken from the TV-21 strip have been reversed, the plunger and the gun are on the wrong sides.

Chris Achilleos. Creator of '70s Doctor Who as I used to imagine it. An undoubted genius at graphic design, but also a dab hand at the Sketch-a-Graph. And just to prove it's not all about the Daleks, there's the crippling detail in the Omegalactus affair. One of the readers who's left comments on Paul's blog has pointed out that the "Three Doctors" cover took "inspiration" from Kirby, but - again, maybe out of politeness - this is something of an understatement.

Just look at their hands.

If it turns out that there's a late-'60s comic-book with a big KKLAK! sound effect, then it'll be far closer to my Savile Moment than anything in JN-T.

"Does Lord Azaxyr look like a bitch?" Perhaps my favourit...

"Does Lord Azaxyr look like a bitch?" Perhaps my favourite thing about the Ice Warriors is that despite their frosty reptilian exteriors, one of them was always played by Sonny Caldinez, a name more suggestive of a sleazy Cuban hitman with a late-'70s moustache and a medallion tangled in his chest-hair. (Actually, Caldinez is from Trinidad, and thus about as far from frosty and reptilian as you can get. But he was known for his late-'70s moustache.) Here, though, we see proof that Mars' own criminal faction has been influencing the human underworld for decades. Tarantino would go on to work with the Sontarans in his movie "Glourious Deth".

Oh, I see what's happened here: they've copied the wrong ...

Oh, I see what's happened here: they've copied the wrong cover. For the same reason, we can expect a UNIT spaceship in the next series.

"What is This?"

I've learned three things from / about Google Images. Firstly, Doctor Who's remit is so vast that if you search for any term which even marginally impinges on history, science, or popular culture, sooner or later you'll get a picture of Katy Manning posing with a Dalek. Lesson two is that the reverse applies, and that if you enter the name of any non-monster-related story, you'll find yourself wondering what the Hell right-wing American conspiracy theory has to do with "The Hand of Fear". The third point is that Google Images really needs some sort of "New Who Filter", so that when I search for pictures of Silurians, I don't have to look at that repellent half-human abomination from 2009. Or any of the Silurians he met in "The Hungry Earth". Sticking with the first two lessons, however, here's my Google Images scrapbook for the last month.

No, it's not "our" one, and nor was Robert Banks Stuart attempting to warn us. Scarily, though, it fits the timeline of the Doctor Who universe for HIV to have been dug out of the Antarctic permafrost in 1976-80. In case you think this sounds fatuous, bear in mind that the New Adventures did the plant-like-alien-parasite-as-AIDS-metaphor in 1992 ("Love and War"), and it worked brilliantly.

Bellal was the most notorious photobomber on the planet of the Exxilons.

I like this partly for its nostalgia value (the very sight of it evokes the primal smell of tea-time, then the despair I felt when I realised I'd missed episode two of "The Krotons" in an age when we had no reason to think we'd ever have the chance to see it again), and partly because it demonstrates the difference between BBC-Then and BBC-Now. Computer-driven design means that even the PR material for "The Power of Three" looked like an ad for "The Bourne Ultimatum". Which may be apt, given that recent

Doctor Who sees the big-budget action movie as aspirational, but in 1981? "Yeah, we need a caption-card for that Five Faces thing. Here are some back-issues of Doctor Who Magazine and a pair of scissors. Oh, and they've just invented this thing called Pritt-Stick, have you tried it?"

This is from 1924, although the description of "a White Man - lost in the wild - who turns native" suggests that it's What Cliff Jones Does Next. Then we have...

...originally published in 1938. I refuse to believe that Barry Letts / Robert Sloman didn't read at least one of these when they were young. Also, if Doc Savage is "The Man of Bronze", then his version of the Green Death is probably just verdigris.

In the 1970s, all

Doctor Who jigsaws were based on a nine-year-old's fan-fic.

We're so used to thinking of Roger Delgado as the Sexy Older Man that we forget what he was like when he was younger: the sort of character actor who, were he around today, would be second-in-command to a terrorist leader grudgingly played by Art Malik. But what we really learn from this photo is where Derren Brown got his powers of hypnosis. Clearly from his father, a mysterious ex-army man called General Sam (Ret). Oh, Derren Brown was born in 1971...? What a coincidence.

After six months, the Transtemporal Stare-Out Championship still had no clear winner.

Not actually

Doctor Who, but another nostalgia trigger for anyone who happened to read DWM or Starburst in the early '80s, since it was on the back cover as often as Orca: Killer Whale was on the back cover of all Marvel comics in the late '70s. Yet see how the '80s-speak "Mutants" are clearly "Zombies" in modern terminology, the Z-word still having voodoo (rather than radiation-based) connotations in those days. I'm giving you a lesson in geek-linguistics here, and it's only slightly complicated by the memory of Doctor Who Monthly referring to the antibodies in the City of the Exxilons as "zombies" before the word was common playground-currency. Much to the confusion of we nine-year-olds, who had problems with anything more outré than Giant Robots with laser-guns.

I have no idea where on the internet this originated. But...

I have no idea where on the internet this originated. But it's both scarier and sexier if you imagine they're normal-sized Daleks, and that huge women have erupted out of them, like a softcore version of "The Mutant Phase".

Don't know how many of you saw the Polish Book Cover Cont...

Don't know how many of you saw the Polish Book Cover Contest at 50watts.com, but this was Michael John Dinsdale's entry. Guessing this will turn to to be more striking than anything published in Anniversary Year.

For some reason I find myself thinking of Pelé.

For some reason I find myself thinking of Pelé.