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Grant Morrison and the Dr Who
comics phenomenon Thanks to its position as one of Marvel UK’s flagship titles, and the ongoing popularity of the show, the official Doctor Who Magazine has always enjoyed a visible profile and high quality writing. Perhaps this has been most evident through its comic strip, where many of the Dr Who authors of today learned their comics craft, and where many of Britain’s fledgling comics stars of the 80s were called in to do a stint. Jamie Delano, Steve Parkhouse and Dan Abnett all penned a strip or two, and the pen and ink adventures of the Doctor have been one of his most unsung, and at times spectacular, homes. Grant Morrison is certainly no stranger to the range, having penned three adventures for the Doctor – and perhaps unsurprisingly kicking up substantial amounts of controversy in the process. His first story, the two part Changes, appeared in the mid 1980s and featured then Sixth Doctor Colin Baker’s version of the Time Lord, along with television companion Peri Brown and the wisecracking, Marvel-created shapechanger Frobisher (who, for reasons known only to himself, had adopted the shape of a King Penguin.) Short and sweet, and described by one Dr Who comics website as “a good read, if a little padded”, Changes was little more than a romp, giving writer and artist the chance to show off the TARDIS interior far better than a BBC budget would allow. Picking up from an unusual, and somewhat cute conceit – the Doctor rescues endangered species and transports them to safer planets to survive – it does unfortunately degenerate into a Sword in the Stone-esque battle of the shapeshifters, as an escaped member of the zoo faces off against Frobisher. His second strip, appearing in DWM just a few issues later, raised far more eyebrows and left continuity buffs scratching their head in disbelief. Combining a hard-core sense of the show’s history with some over-the-top storytelling and off-beat imagery, Morrison launched a far more unusual tale onto the unsuspecting fan community…and barely lived to tell the tale. The World Shapers stemmed from the deepest roots of the show. Tying in Cyberman mythos to a monster race from the earliest days of Doctor Who – the Voord – and featuring a return by the now elderly companion Jamie McCrimmon (played by Fraser Hines in the show), the strip was to provoke much furious letter writing and debate among fans. For those who liked to keep the Who history pure and sacred, this was sacrilege. Seemingly betraying one set of backstories for another, there was still nothing in Morrison’s tale to suggest he was wrong. Illustrated by the ever-reliable John Ridgeway, the three episode story brought the curtain down on Colin Baker’s tenure in the comic strip – and provoked as much controversy as his television reign had done. Killing off a companion, providing continuity buffs with yet more knots to untangle, the story is nowhere near as clever as it would like to be. The 13 years gap since it was first published has not been kind to The World Shapers. Coming across as the worst excesses of fanboy writing, too steeped in continuity and not paying enough attention to plot, it’s rounded off in a not too neat way. Morrison would make one last visit to Who comics writing during the 1980s, the one shot, Sylvester McCoy starring Culture Shock. High on high-concept moments and characterisation, low on plot, Culture Shock provided Grant with a chance to do what he does best. Featuring a depressed, lonely version of Sylvester’s Doctor, he looked at the human condition with an SF twist. The plot, as it is, features the Doctor landing on an alien planet and finding a creature stricken with a virus. Curing it with drugs from the TARDIS, he is given a new reason to appreciate life, and continues on his journey a happy man. That’s it, really. But it’s a neat exploration of both the alien and human sides of the Doctor’s tortured psyche, and characterises the moody nature of the Seventh Doctor far better than his version of the bombastic Sixth. Morrison’s control of the TARDIS amounted to little more than six issues of nearly 300, yet people still talk about his stories – a sign of the impact he managed to make. World Shapers continues to prove controversy from the continuity cops left to reconcile the new threads he brought to the series, while Culture Shock gave us a slice of the 7th Doctor close to his character on tv. The legacy he, and the other writers who have gone on from Who to bigger things, is still being felt today as the strip continues to produce some of the most original Who stories in the show’s history. And with rumours of Grant Morrison supposedly writing a Dr Who novel for the BBC, he may yet return to haunt those fanboys once more…
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