TV Publications Ltd The 1966 TV Comic Annual

Published

1965

Starring the first Doctor, John and Gillian

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 24/6/04

So I'm reviewing TV Comic's annuals. You wanna make something of it?

TV Comic was published by Polystyle Publications Limited from 1951 to 1984. (Their last issue has the same date as my birthday.) Doctor Who fans tend to regard TV Comic as a trivial footnote, unworthy of anyone's attention, but in fact 'twas a weekly magazine that spanned four decades. Even focusing only on their Who content, Polystyle published 166 Doctor Who comic strip stories over 1,601 pages in TV Comic, Countdown and TV Action in 1964-78 (not counting the redrawn reprint strips that continued into 1979). That's eighteen years' worth of DWM's strip at their current rate of output - and a two-page episode of the TV Comic strip often packed in as much incident as seven pages today.

Since I once calculated that a year of DWM's comic strip deserves as much attention as a novel or an audio, personally I'd say that Polystyle's Doctor Who comic strips warrant about as much weight as, say, the Davison era on TV.

1966 wasn't the first TV Comic annual, but it's the earliest one I own. It's a 104-page book with only eight pages of Doctor Who content (two four-page comic strips), so I'm afraid this review won't be particularly Who-centric. Believe it or not, this is my favourite of my TV Comic annuals. It has the underrated Neville Main drawing Hartnell, but its other strips were strong this year too. In particular it has the Telegoons and Beetle Bailey. To give a quick run-down...

Foo Foo & Gogo... WHAT THE HELL? Apparently based on ABC Television's "Foo Foo" (whatever that might be), they're like the animated drawings of an eight-year-old and really surreal. The helicopter story is just plain weird and their pirate ship exploits are brain-bending too. (I liked the travelling salesmen story, though.)

The Dickie Henderson Family is painfully unfunny, though I liked the pretty wife and her beehive hairdo. With shame I'll admit to enjoying Dickie's doomed DIY attempts on p47, but that story's punchline is so crap that it crystallises anti-humour into a substance as yet unknown to science.

The Telegoons are funny. Admittedly I was hearing the real Goons in my head as I read, but these stories go further than usual for TV Comic. They take the piss out of the Goons' grovelling economic status (somewhere between a layabout bum and a rotting mackerel) and have gratuitous Bluebottle abuse, using him as lion bait and trying to feed him to the Loch Ness Monster. You can see the touch of Milligan's trademark anarchy. Classic stuff, though I wasn't so keen on the storyless double splash page o' random jokes.

[By the way, if you've never heard of the Goons, you've missed Britain's best ever comedy courtesy of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. The Telegoons were a sixties attempt to do the impossible and create visuals to adapt the original radio recordings for TV. It wasn't as successful, but 'twas good for a laugh or two.]

I also loved Beetle Bailey. Created by Mort Walker and distributed by King Features Syndicate, Beetle grew out of late 1940s cartoons about a bone-lazy college student named "Spider". Walker sold him in 1950 to King Features (who changed the name to Beetle) and then in 1951 sent him from college into the Army. More than fifty years later, apparently the character's still going today! Despite lots of comic books (1953-80, 1992-94), a 1989 TV special, animation and various merchandising attempts he's always been fundamentally a newspaper strip character. Nothing wrong with that. In my opinion Beetle Bailey taps into a rich vein of Army-based comic stereotypes, particularly dear old Sergeant Snorkel. This is a guy who can jump out of a plane without his parachute. Anyone who doesn't laugh out loud at pp98-99 has had a humour bypass; personally I can't see why TV Comic dropped him after 1970!

Apart from Doctor Who (obviously), precisely three strips lasted throughout 1966-1979: Popeye, Mighty Moth and TV Terrors. The last two were original to TV Comic, making Popeye the only one who's a licensed character. (He was even the cover star of the weekly magazine around now.) He's okay, but nothing special. I like Bluto, but Swee'pea stories suck.

Mighty Moth, drawn by Dick Millington, was TV Comic's longest-running strip of all (1959-84) but I wasn't impressed. It's likeable, but bleah. Dad and Mighty Moth are like a very poor man's Tom and Jerry.

Finally we have the TV Terrors, three autograph-hunting children at war with a megalomaniac studio guard called Hoppit. He's a complete git! Theoretically he's merely a doorman, but his idiosyncratic interpretation of the job description involves persecuting the Terrors at every opportunity. [To see Hoppit in DWM, check out TV Action! in DWM 283.] These stories are a lot of fun, at one point going so far as to feed Hoppit into a sausage-making machine! Unbelievably he survives intact.

That's it for the funnies, but the adventure strips are strong too. Terror of the Long Ships is a violent Viking historical with a British king called Spartacus! Huh? It's a decent story with a really nasty bad guy, but it ends weakly. Robin Hood is the other historical, not based on any specific TV production that I could recognise but simply an original retelling of the traditional archery contest of legend. I liked that too. There's Dr Nolan's TeleVarsity, a text story that's lots of fun, but best of all is the insane Space Patrol, which is as unintentionally goofy as TV Comic ever got. The second Space Patrol story even has an intriguing SF puzzle, at least until the let-down ending.

I guess it's time to talk about Doctor Who, huh?

There are two <Who stories here: Prisoner of the Kleptons and The Caterpillar Men. They're both four pages long, drawn by Neville Main and pretty damn good for TV Comic. They actually have plots! Okay, they're goofy plots that violate your every conception of Doctor Who, but it could have been worse. Count your blessings. Prisoner of the Kleptons is a sequel to The Klepton Parasites (TV Comic 674-683, reprinted in Classic Comics 2), with strong visual continuity and plenty of incident. Its only plot problem is the fact that John's gun is the solution to everything.

The Caterpillar Men is about an alien invasion in the year 2035 and it's good too. The eponymous aliens are slightly cartoonish, but less so than you'd expect and arguably better than many "straight" Doctor Who monsters. This story's biggest problem is the fact that John and Gillian beat the alien invaders by randomly wandering into the World Pest Control offices and suggesting sprays to defeat the Caterpillar Men. You'd think someone else would have thought of this, what with the Earth being invaded and all, but...

"Ah! I've heard something about these creatures. I'll help you at once. Our sprays are lethal to all insects and harmless to humans."

Things I learned from reading this book:

1. If the Noxids blast hell out of the Spectrons, saving your sorry arse, this is obviously because they're rewarding you for an earlier kindness and can't have anything to do with the fact that those two races are at war.
2. If you destroy a man's parachute in mid-air, he will land in a pond.
3. A runaway beach ball, if allowed to accumulate snow, can destroy a truck.
4. Professional pest exterminators use dynamite to deal with moths.
5. Dickie Henderson only had one facial expression.
6. Fifties beehive hairdos are sexy.
7. If you perform badly on television, the camera crew may throw vegetables at you.
8. Feeding a man into a sausage machine is perfectly safe, but it will encase him in a six-foot-long sausage.
9. In the Dark Ages, good kings looked like Claudia Schiffer but their evil brothers looked like Fagin from Oliver Twist.