The 1966 Annual
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World Distributors The 1966 Annual |
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| Author | David Whitaker |  |
| Illustrator | Walter Howarth | |
| Published | 1965 |
| Starring the 1st Doctor and the Menoptera, Zarbi, Voord and Sensorites |
A Review by Finn Clark 14/1/04
Fandom seems to have forgotten World Distributors' Doctor Who annuals, which would have astonished me twenty years ago. To UK fandom of a certain age, these silly things were a huge deal. If you wanted to buy everything Who-related (and we did!) there were Target novelisations, the Marvel magazine and miscellanea like jigsaws and colouring books... and these. Twenty of 'em were published altogether. The Tom Baker annuals were ten-a-penny, available from all good car boot sales and second hand shops, but the earlier Doctors were harder to come by. (In fact I still don't own the first Pertwee annual, so there's gonna be a gap in this series of reviews.)
As a teenager I coveted the Doctor Who annuals, but I don't think I actually read 'em that much, especially the early ones. This first Hartnell annual has no jokes, quizzes, comic strips or Fantastic Facts pages to liven it up to a child's eyes, while an adult would see big-print stories printed on cardboard with three-colour illustrations seemingly scrawled by a four-year-old. It doesn't look particularly appealing, to be honest... which is a shame, since it's actually rather interesting.
For starters, this is a 93-page book with up to 800 words on each page. Without pictures this would have been novel-length, whereas even with Walter Howarth's illustrations it's easily the equivalent of a novella. [Howarth was a talented artist, but here his work was being printed on toilet paper and so subtleties would have dissolved into a blurred smudge. Nevertheless he draws a good Hartnell and his cover painting is lovely.] Without the kiddie inserts, there's more room for fiction - and this is effectively a chunky anthology of six good-length 1st Doctor short stories.
More importantly, these stories' author was an uncredited David Whitaker. (World Distributors were bastards who rarely credited their creators.) This feels like one of his first extra-curricular non-TV Doctor Who projects (the prose at the start of the opening story is a bit dodgy) and here we see Whitaker's original vision for Doctor Who, unfettered by the restrictions of sixties TV production values. It's an odd reading experience, of course. For example its hero isn't called the Doctor, but "Dr Who" or occasionally "the doctor". At first I thought that was a typo. There's even a two-page spread called "Who is Dr Who?" which is virtually the David Whitaker equivalent of "never cruel or cowardly".
(This Doctor has a more-or-less steerable TARDIS, by the way, though I do wonder about the temporary companions he acquires in The Monsters From Earth. The Doctor seems confident about getting them home afterwards, but the book's back cover painting shows the Doctor on another alien world with two children who look like Tony and Amy. Poor kids.)
The stories themselves are an odd mix of childish and startling; they're hard-edged, portraying a universe of utter bastards and not a few downbeat endings. The Lair of Zarbi Supremo is saved by its last page, for instance, turning on a dime from ridiculous "hurrah, we've killed the monster!" nonsense into something morally ambiguous and sophisticated. The Lost Ones (another Vortis story) has one of the most disturbing endings I can remember in Doctor Who, with the Doctor deciding that some Atlanteans don't deserve to live, while The Sons of the Crab is simply one of the best Doctor Who short stories I've read. The Yend's affliction is mind-boggling and the Doctor-Fomal scene is awesome, Hartnell at his best. ["Men breed men and donkeys breed donkeys. Your question is absurd."] And the final twist blew me away.
There's much imagination. The Lair of Zarbi Supremo seems to be ripping off The Tenth Planet... but then you realise that when this book came out, The Tenth Planet hadn't been screened yet. Also The Fishmen of Kandalinga inspired both Grant Morrison and John Ridgway for their 'Genesis of the Cybermen' comic strip The World Shapers in DWM 127-129.
However there's also much dumbness. The Lair of Zarbi Supremo's Menoptera are too stupid to live, while The Monsters from Earth has spiders which hate light and aliens which hate loud noises. (Okay, they're the Sensorites.) I bet you can't guess how the Doctor wins there, boys and girls! Though bizarrely The Fishmen of Kandalinga gives that latter weakness to the Voord too, but then does nothing with it and makes the Doctor find another way to beat them. Most astonishingly, The Lost Ones has the Doctor completely failing to recognise Vortis, the Zarbi or the Menoptera... sixteen pages after encountering 'em in Lair of the Zarbi Supremo! Is this a clever plot twist? No, I think it's simply a flashback to the story in which the Doctor first landed on Vortis. That was weird.
Oh, and the illustration on p92 for The Fishmen of Kandalinga gives away the ending.
There are no TV companions but plenty of TV monsters, with the Menoptra and Zarbi (twice!), the Sensorites and the Voord. The continuity is good, better than the contemporary TV Comic stories. Also twice the Doctor acquires temporary companions. There's nothing remarkable about Gordon, but I laughed out loud at Amy and Tony Barker. They're a brother and sister playing hide-and-seek in the bushes in 1966 when they stumble into the TARDIS and... okay, you know the rest. Also they have a small French bulldog called Butch. I now want to see Amy, Tony and Butch in an upcoming PDA.
Regarding continuity... We meet space-travellers from Atlantis (they're eight foot tall and worship the Greek gods) on Vortis, but we never learn whether they're from our Atlantis or a far-future one. Meanwhile the other Vortis story has dating peculiarities too. According to the Doctor, Gordon is "obviously" an Earth child from the 20th century, though this becomes unlikely when Gordon mentions space rockets in "the first half of the century". As a random side-note, it's hard to think of many stories with as many sequels as The Web Planet... there are two in here, plus Bulis's Twilight of the Gods (MA), The Naked Flame (1995 Yearbook) and On The Web Planet (TV Comic 693-698).
Oh, and remember Hartnell on TV calling himself human? Here he calls himself an Earthman! However a footnote on p46 observes that "of course, he did not come from Earth", so it's all a bit confusing. The astrophysics is better than much of TV Who, "galaxy" for once being used in a sensible fashion, but sometimes one wonders if Whitaker isn't using "million" as a handwave for "lots". It's hard to swallow the ending of Peril in Mechanistra otherwise, unless the Doctor misread his instruments. However elsewhere the Doctor implies that The Keys of Marinus was millions of years away in either the past or the future... taking into account The World Shapers, I'd suggest the past.
David Whitaker even managed to impress me with his namechecking. There are a couple of mentions of the Daleks... but they both come in a story where the concept of the Daleks is thematically relevant. How cool is that?
Overall I'd say that the first Dr Who annual (sic) has been unfairly overlooked. It's historically interesting for being written by David Whitaker, but it's also a worthwhile collection of stories. (All the best ones come first, unfortunately... if only to avoid getting confused by The Lost Ones, I suggest reading 'em in reverse order.) Give it a try!