Christmas 2025

Of relevance, the Doctor Who Annual and the DWM 15 and Ruby comic collection The Monster Makers.

All month on the regular blog I came up with adventure ideas and the like based on fairytales for my Adventure Calendar.

And could spin them around here to provide a festive adventure for The Door In Time except one of the stories in that comic collection is already about Hans Christian Andersen and the Snow Queen.

So to do another one...

King Of The Mice

The travellers arrive at a 19th century German Christmas and find themselves being asked for help by mice. Their king has gone missing!

Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2024

A Merry Christmas to all of you at home!

Having a new Doctor and companion debut at Christmas means you can’t have much merch for them, but Ncuit Gatwa gets to share the Annual cover with David Tennant (as well as all the magazines - so many magazines!) and the back pages, after the story and comic section in between features and mostly puzzles.

The Giggle

One more special and we could have been weekly!

Still, there’s quite a lot to unpack here.

Bear in mind that this is the casual viewer friendly version of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a weird show.

(Extra behind the scenes featurette where the end about what come next repeats the Unleashed episode)

The Toymaker!

Creepy puppets!

The Toymaker having a creepy puppet copy of the Doctor, as seen in the first Eighth Doctor comics!

Mel!

Wild Blue Yonder

Quite Midnight but also very Eighth Doctor comics. Also showing off the virtual set bit, while also being a bottle episode.

It does feel like we got one “normal” episode in a very compressed season as a result. (Not necessarily a complaint - I wish the nine episode Buffyverse audio drama Slayers had had standalone episodes - but odd when we only have three, like Sherlock.)

The Star Beast

It’s so weird seeing such a close adaptation (in the middle of other fun stuff) if a story I’ve loved since I was six. And yes I want a Meep toy.

Big Who Stuff Humble Bundle

Humble Bundle has the first edition (well, last edition of first edition) RPG rulebook and sourcebooks along with various comics collections and audio dramas to download for about fifteen quid, with a chunk going to Children In Need.

Doctor Who anniversary specials trailer

“Sometimes I think there’s something missing...”

The Anniversary Specials

The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder, and The Giggle.

And yes, they rally are doing one of the formative stories of our people.

A happy Christmas to all of you at home!

Doctor Who finally daring to tackle one of its classic non-TV stories. Meep!

Flux: War Of The Sontarans

The Halloween Apocalypse felt less like the first episode of a six-parter and more like sex pre-credit sequences, and the one with Sontarans was the start of this.

Sontarans in the Crimea! And in the present too.

Sontarans still mostly funny, so having them massacre people feels a bit jarring.

“Also, I wanted to ride a horse.” I was expecting the Doctor to just agree there.

The Doctor being angry about a human attack on a retreating enemy, but in this case letting it go.

The floating crooked house looks more Halloweeny than anything last week.

Vinder and the engineer arriving along with Yaz, and poor old lantern guy.

A planet called Time where all time runs through the Mouri and hang on is this Logopolis?

And okay, turning people to dust, but also snapping fingers threateningly? Although Passenger looks like Darkseid, the model for Thanos...

Dan Slott's Silver Surfer was very Doctor Who but...

Comics writer Dan Slott has always said his run of Marvel’s Silver Surfer with artist Michael Allred was a love letter to Doctor Who and a number of the plots could inspire Whovian adventures, but one of the thirty stories started as a Who pitch...

The 90s comics Doctor that never quite was

Via Vworp Vworp! -

In 1997 Matt Bookman came up with a proposal for a BBC SF magazine with Doctor Who, Red Dwarf and more comics, called The Sci-Files and then Robot. It got as far as a dummy issue, with a new Doctor design.

The look is very “character actor in a mismatched historical costume” as DIY Doctors often are. The likeness started out (to me) looking quite Christopher Plummer, and then a bit Alan Rickman, and ended up kind of a blond Peter Wyngarde without the moustache.

And I like that opening. “I only know I’m running. I don’t know when I started, or where I’m going...” Of course it starts with running.

Doctor Who Comic

Doctor Who Comic, a new series from Titan, launching on the anniversary-adjacent Doctor Who Comics Day. DWM began as Doctor Who Weekly, so the simple title is new. And on the same day, a Time Lord Victorious series as well.

The Haunting Of Villa Diodati

“Definitely a hand!”

The Haunting Of Villa Diodati comes weighted with expectations. The Year Without A Summer is one of those stories that science fiction, horror and fantasy fans know very well, from the resulting Frankenstein and The Vampyre to Ken Russell’s Gothic and many more.

I did it in The Door In Time too, drawing ideas from Frankenstein’s Womb by Warren Ellis and Marek Oleksicki, and I suggested it as a historical setting for the Frankenstein-inspired Chronicles Of Darkness RPG Promethean: The Created.

This includes audio and comic Doctor Who. So the TV version is not the first, but as the one that gets on TV it will be the definitive Whovian take for many.

A Doctor Who idea from Dan Slott

(Dan Slott, writer of the Marvel Silver Surfer run that the most Whovian thing of that year.)

Here on Twitter

What's one controversial thing that you would do if you were the show the runner of #DoctorWho for a series?

The Doctor stops the Master from his latest doomsday scheme... but both are caught in the resulting blast.

2 regenerated beings emerge, their clothes burnt beyond recognition.

Both claim (or believe) they're the Doctor.

We don't let the viewers know till the end of the season.

Doctor Who Magazine at 40

Many happy returns!

Hear The Iron Legion! Sound Of The Star Beast!

Big Finish are releasing adaptations of those early Doctor Who Weekly comic strips that I keep talking about. Will more follow?

Here comes tomorrow

First Doctor Who Magazine cover with the new logo!

How to write a multi-Doctor crossover

A look at writing the latest multi-Doctor miniseries from Titan Comics. Which nearly featured Cthulhu.

Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby was born 100 years ago today. Known for designing a massive chunk of the Marvel universe, his work at DC creating the Fourth World in the early 1970s is most directly relevant as a huge over-the-top space opera of human-ish space travellers fighting across the universe coming to Earth and pulling ordinary people into their adventures.

It features, among other things... an exiled son of Apokolips hiding on Earth with human companions, a heroic escape artist who is essentially a mythic take on the Houdini idea of escapologist as symbol of hope, a not-exactly-neutral observer in a time and space chair, accidental time travel, deliberate time travel, sufficiently advanced technology even by spacefaring alien civilisations, an artificial planet built for war, an undersea culture with a mix of enemies and allies, unwitting human underlings for alien invaders equipped with unearthly technology, a loch monster, a miniaturised planet with a society based on Universal horror movies, a thing called The Lump who is surprisingly amenable to conversation, superhuman propaganda, a robot boxer with a convenient off switch, a Metropolis cop defeating an alien champion with a weapon using the city’s entire power grid...