DOCTOR WHO
CUTAWAY COMICS IS ASSEMBLING SOME OF THE WHONIVERSE'S GREATEST HEROES AND VILLAINS FOR ITS DEBUT CROSSOVER EVENT - JUST DON'T ASK WHERE THE DOCTOR IS!
Enter a universe beyond the laws of time, space and, yes, even the BBC.
LAUNCHING WITH LYTTON before continuing with Omega and most recently Paradise Towers: Paradise Found, Cutaway Comics is providing some fascinating insights into different corners of the vast
Doctor Who universe. Now the Manchester publisher – which is also responsible for Who comics fanzine Vworp Vworp! – is embarking upon its most ambitious project to date.
A 12-part superhero-style crossover which brings together such disparate characters as Omega, Sutekh, Iris Wildthyme, Drax and the Tharils, Gods And Monsters is set to hit Kickstarter later this month. It begins in January 2022 with Faustine, a special 48-page standalone story written by “Warriors’ Gate”/ “Terminus” author Stephen Gallagher and illustrated by seasoned Who artist Martin Geraghty, before a quartet of one-shots featuring Omega, Sutekh and the others arrive in April. They in turn will lead into June’s Gods And Monsters, a six-issue blockbuster miniseries by Ian Winterton and Paradise Found artist Silvano Beltramo.
“As with most of our books, Gods And Monsters came about through a happy confluence of accident and design,” says Cutaway’s Gareth Kavanagh. “I’ve often talked to the team about the brilliance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, the way that one-shot movies work as satisfying, entertaining individual experiences and as gateways to bigger stories. It’s always been there as an aspiration, and Gods And Monsters turned out to be the result.” Gods And Monsters follows directly on from Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway’s Omega four-parter. “A desire to find the right sequel for Omega was probably my starting point for Gods And Monsters,” recalls Kavanagh, who is intent on exploring seldom-seen aspects of the rogue Time Lord’s personality. “This time around, I really wanted to do something different and more heroic with him, as poor Omega rarely gets to do more than just rant and weep. There’s so much more to him than that, as he’s an engineer, a nobleman and a creator.”
OWNING ME, OWNING WHO
According to Kavanagh, several of the other cast members almost selected themselves. “Drax and Iris Wildthyme are diametrically opposite time travellers in many ways, each with a different relationship to time, which is a fun thing to explore,” he reasons.
“The Tharils arguably have a different relationship to time than anyone else in the whole history of classic Doctor Who, and once Stephen Gallagher indicated his willingness to script his first comic strip for us with the Faustine one-shot, I knew we’d have something interesting to dig into there.
As for Sutekh, the Egyptian god of death felt like a worthy match for Omega: a fallen god and the Father of Time – that’s an epic face-off even I can’t wait to see pan out!”
With the original scriptwriters of the classic Who era retaining the copyright to any characters and concepts they devised, Cutaway has worked closely with authors like Eric Saward, persuading the former script editor to script the just-concluded four-parter starring charismatic mercenary Lytton. Given the sheer scope of the story, Gods And Monsters required liaising with more writers than ever before.
“Securing IP is a strange process,” reflects Kavanagh. “Sometimes deals should be smooth but run into sand, while seemingly impossible ascents go like clockwork. I think where we do enjoy great success is where we have established strong and enduring relationships with writers and estates going back years.
“For example, Bob Baker, the co-creator of Drax and Omega, we know well and have kept in the loop since day one. Paul Magrs, the creator of Iris, I’ve known for years, and he was generous enough to let us use her in return for a donation to a charity of his choice. I’ve also known Steve Gallagher for years and I knew he’d never written a comic or expanded on the Tharil mythos.”
BY THE BOOK
For Gallagher, Faustine was a natural progression from his recent BBC audiobook Doctor
Who: The Kairos Ring, which also picked up on plotlines from his 1981 serial “Warriors’ Gate”.
“It was all fresh in my mind because I’d been back to that world a couple of times already,” recalls Gallagher, who also had a special “writer’s cut” of his
1982 Target novelisation of the story released by BBC Audio in
2019.
“That led to an invitation to write an original novella, which became The Kairos Ring, where
I got to tell the story of Romana and the Tharil Laszlo, who are left behind in the Gateway along with K-9,” he continues.
“Most of the ideas were already in place, as I’d been carrying them around for years. It had been my contention from way back that here was a ready-made answer to calls for a female Doctor, either as an occasional character in guest episodes or in a spin-off series. I mean, think about it. A female Time Lord, an alien companion, and a device – the Gateway – which gives them access to all of time and space.”
A Tharil who is cut off from her people and thrown into a crisis situation, Faustine is a completely new invention. “She’s pretty formidable, as she has the natural arrogance of someone from a slave-owning culture, but she has to depend on a slave for her survival,” explains Gallagher. “I aimed to tell a selfcontained story, while at the end of the book she’s poised to enter the shared world with those other characters. Each of the standalones is a different thread, each heading to a certain point where the series story picks them up and weaves them in.”
“Elements of Steve’s Tharil story most definitely feed into the rest of the story, and with his blessing I’m getting to add to the Tharil mythos,” says Ian Winterton, who will resume the story in June’s event series. “There’s an opening to #6 that’s all Tharils, which Steve liked so much that he has also seeded things into his story to make mine land better.”
Noting that “we merged it with an idea
I had for the main Gods And Monsters story,” another crucial element is the starship Eltrella, which first appears in Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway’s Omega one-shot. “The Eltrella is a
We’ve even got postcredit short scenes that will help tease things to come
huge city-ship with a malfunctioning warp drive that’s flipping it randomly through the space-time continuum,” explains Winterton. “The people on board – who are scavenging from where and whenever they appear – have become desperate and feudal, having been travelling randomly from their point of view for 20 years.”
While Cutaway Comics’ Doctor-less template is based on Doctor Who Weekly’s much-loved back-up strips, which focused on the likes of the Daleks and Cybermen, Kavanagh concedes that the Time Lord can’t help but continue to be conspicuous by their absence. “The Doctor-shaped hole never really goes away in any of our stories, but as ‘Turn Left’ teaches us, there’s always someone who will step up, even at terrible cost to themselves,” reasons Kavanagh, referring to the 2008 Russell T Davies-written episode.
“So, while in Gods And Monsters Drax and Iris fulfil some of the functions the Doctor normally would, so does Faustine in her own way, while Omega is in many ways a noble, conflicted lead like Ian Mckellen’s Magneto.”
For his part, Gallagher (who made his television scripting debut with “Warriors’ Gate”) insists that he hasn’t missed writing the Doctor himself. “The over-writing that gave me such trouble in that first TV job has now turned out to be an asset,” he laughs. It’s the nature of these projects that you can only work with elements you created and own, and I didn’t only have the Tharils, I had the Gundan and the Gateway, and the whole human/tharil backstory to play with – as well as Dwarf Star Alloy, which some sources attribute to The Atom [Dwarfstar being an enemy of the DC hero], but I brought the alloy concept in.”
“If you look back at the novelisation of ‘Warriors’ Gate’, and the expanded audiobook, it’s clear there was a tremendous amount of thought and care that went into that world, and we barely glimpse it,” adds Kavanagh. “‘Faustine’ is notionally set before ‘Warriors’ Gate’, but fits beautifully with what we see there.” “Because I’d taken inspiration from so many sources, I could go back to the originals for the visual references,” explains Gallagher, who drew on a diverse range of influences. These included Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle Et La Bête, Caspar David Friedrich’s art, the ghost in Russian director Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 film of Hamlet, and Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year At Marienbad. “For Faustine herself, I took the name from the Algernon Swinburne poem,” he says. “So now you know: I steal everything!”
Like April’s quartet of one-shots, Faustine introduces its main protagonists and lays the groundwork for the real fireworks in June’s Gods And Monsters blockbuster miniseries. “Like all those MCU movies, sometimes the links are lightly woven, sometimes they’re hardwired into the plot,” says Kavanagh. “And in the true MCU tradition that we’re lovingly paying homage to, we’ve even got post-credit short scenes that will help tease things to come.”
While ’80s properties Lytton, “The Happiness Patrol” and “Paradise Towers” struck the wrong note for the ’70s-centric Gods And Monsters, Cutaway still has big plans for the so-called Cartmel-verse, including a Happiness Patrol miniseries by Seventh Doctor script editor Andrew Cartmel and artist Adrian Salmon.
“Gods And Monsters is by no means the end,” says Kavanagh. “We’ve got a slate that stretches into 2024, so we’ll be here for some time to come!”
The Gods And Monsters Kickstarter launches in October.