‘In Bloom’ Comic

This is a comic strip I wrote for the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club‘s prestigious zine, TSV in 1997.
(I put this on LJ last week; here’s a lot more about it for the readership here.)



I was approached to write a strip in 1996 I think, presumably thanks to my heavily comic-styled short story Tempest that had appeared in TSV’s 1995 fiction offering Timestreams 5. Eager to take the chance to write a comic that would actually be drawn, I set about developing some ideas.
This was the era of the Doctor Who New Adventures. Starting in 1991 and continuing until 1997, Virgin Publishing released a series of novels carrying on the Doctor Who series after the first TV run came to an end in 1989. They are highly regarded, and with very good reason, as they took many risks and generally pushed the Who concept into unexpected new realms. They were often bleak and willing to address very dark subject matter. Notably, several key personnel on the new Doctor Who series also wrote for the New Adventures series, including the revival’s showrunner Russell T Davies.
The arrival of the New Adventures in 1991 coincided with my own teenage fictional exploration of the Doctor Who universe. I was writing a series of short stories in the post-apocalyptic setting of 1964 serial Dalek Invasion Of Earth. I saw that serial in 1988, when it screened as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations here in NZ. It had a big effect on me, and I’d spend the better part of the following decade-plus picking over that serial and its themes and ideas. These stories were about a teenage boy named Raan learning to assert himself and survive in the wrecked and dangerous society. His mentor was a man called ‘the Judge’, who had fought against the Dalek invasion ten years before.
The sting in these stories – and it was clearly and deliberately present in the very first pages I wrote at age 14 – was that the Judge’s efforts to train Raan were actually messing with the boy’s head. He was being taught to use violence as a quick solution, to trust no-one, to keep everyone at a distance. Ultimately, Raan could be turned into a fighting machine, but at the cost of his humanity.
(This angle was a direct response to a fetishisation of human-as-combat-machine that was abundant in popular culture at the time. Comics of the era were full of young people who had trained to be deadly weapons. I wanted to examine the psychological cost such training might have if it was treated a bit more realistically.)
Eventually, these stories grew into a novella, in which this theme expanded. Raan’s combat training was actually working against society’s recovery. Sure, Raan could kick dangerous gang toughs in the head, but that wouldn’t help society find its soul – in fact, it would make social recovery even harder by perpetuating violence. Raan was part of the problem, not part of the solution. The journey Raan made through the story was from being proud of how hardcore he was and how well the Judge had prepared him for survival, through to recognising that he had been trained to dehumanise himself and that his instincts were counter to the greater good. Raan – and the reader – come to see the Judge’s training as an abuse, born of the Judge’s stubborn pride. Ultimately, Raan rejects the Judge – but his redemption comes too late for him to achieve the escape he dearly wanted.
Looking back now, I’m quite impressed by what 15-year-old me was doing with those themes.
Back in the early 90s, I was in talks with Paul and other key NZDWFC folks to get this novella published as a special fiction release, like their other standalone Glory of the Daleks by Chris Owen. Alas, it never quite came together. This comic strip seemed like a good way for me to revisit the setting and the themes, and actually get them into print.
The gloomy mood I was interested in dovetailed perfectly with the New Adventures era, so I decided to tie the story explicitly to the New Adventures continuity. The Sylvester McCoy Doctor appears in his NA aspect accompanied by Bernice Summerfield, who was introduced in the novels by Paul Cornell (who would later write several much-loved episodes of the new series).
The link was tightest with Cornell’s 1994 NA No Future, in which an ongoing story in the NAs was resolved – essentially, the Doctor’s companion Ace had become disillusioned with his manipulative and sometimes amoral behaviour, and had left him to become a hard, emotionless soldier. In this book, Ace comes to terms with what has happened and forgives both him and herself. The parallels with Raan’s story were not lost on me.
So with all these elements in place – Raan, the Judge, No Future – I was able to build up a new story. Set during the invasion, it again features young people being stripped of their humanity by adult men who have forgotten what they are fighting for. It also features the Judge, making this mistake just as he would ten years in the future in the Raan novella. I don’t think you need any prior knowledge to understand the main story – it should stand alone just fine. (The “we’re friends of a relative of yours” comment is just an excuse to get the Doctor and Bernice involved. The implication is that Sarah is a descendant of Ace, but to be honest I don’t care in the slightest about that. All that matters is that they turned up, not why or how.)
The last page deserves a bit of extra comment. This is actually based on a scene at the conclusion of Cornell’s No Future. (I remember being a bit nervous about that, because Cornell was a subscriber to TSV at the time. At least, I think he was.) I added in the flower badge because Ace was always fond of badges and it gave me a nice token to tie the events together. It was meant to be implied that Ace had bought the flower in Glastonbury as part of her emergence from the soldier-life and her re-connection with her past; and that she had inadvertantly left it behind when she left the company of Bernice and the Doctor some time later.
Paul Potiki did the art, and I was very impressed with his work. With my script I’d sent down some layout thumbnails to indicate what I was trying to do, but I’m pretty sure I told him to ignore them whenever he desired and do what he thought was best. The final version more than exceeded my hopes. It really is a beautiful bunch of pictures, and I still get a thrill knowing those are my words turned into illustration there.
So, there you go. More information on a Doctor Who comic strip than you could possibly want. Now go read it.
(See also comments from editor Paul Scoones and Alden Bates.)