Thinking about it, so many great British genre and comic writers have tackled the Doctor here and there.
Alan Moore made Rassilon and Omega contemporaries and that became “true”. His Who backup stories have a lot of treachery, betrayal, and recognisably human motivations even for the likes of Cybermen.
There’s rather a lot of Mills and Wagner’s Doctor Who Weekly comics in the DNA of the new series, not least the homage to The Star Beast in Smith And Jones. Having art by Dave Gibbons didn’t hurt either - indeed, early exposure to DWW has skewed my idea of how big and mad and fast and visual Who should be, so I always wanted something more like the new series than the old...
Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano, and John Ridgway’s lovely - and thankfully black and white - art, helped make the Sixth Doctor a less flamboyant figure while his world became a riot of visual surrealism based largely on letting Ridgway draw whatever he wanted.
Warren Ellis has joked about it, but I’d love to see what he could really do.
And of course there’s a whacking great Michael Moorcock novel looming over the Eleventh Doctor’s other tie-in books, as well as Stephen Gallagher going from surreal adventures to horror novels, Douglas Adams recycling bits of Shada into Dirk Gently...
It goes the other way, too. Some of Ben Aaronovitch's earliest works are Doctor Who novels, but he seems to have built a name for original fiction -- at least, I've seen his original books discussed without mention of his roots in Who.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, Paul Cornell has gone on from tie-in novels to write for big name comics.