The 1969 TV Comic Annual
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Polystyle Publications Ltd The 1969 TV Comic Annual |
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| Published | 1968 |  |
| Starring the second Doctor, John and Gillian |
A Review by Finn Clark 4/7/04
It's quite a good TV Comic annual this year. Beetle Bailey's still going strong, while Ken Dodd's Diddymen are becoming a surreal highlight.
Admittedly the new characters are underwhelming. Basil Brush talks like Bertie Wooster and behaves like Lord Basil of Brush, with a butler and a country estate. There's a daftissimo kiddie King Arthur whose problems involve getting a haircut and inventing a wheel with carpet slippers to reduce noise. There's Boz, but there might as well not have been. However most jarringly of all are Larry Harmon's Laurel & Hardy. They're not terrible if you go in expecting the worst, but you'll still get oxygen starvation from the quality gulf between this and the original works of genius. What really blows my mind is that the live-action Stan & Ollie were far more childish and child-like than these cartoon misrepresentations. Isn't that the wrong way around?
Mind you, they get a weird story on pp90-91. Ollie won't exert himself on a ride in the country, to the point where Stan must physically carry Ollie along. Oh, and I like the art on Basil Brush and Arthur. It's almost as stylised as Mike McMahon (the artist of Junk-Yard Demon in DWM 58-59), with Basil Brush looking kinda Captain Pugwash-y. In later years TV Comic gave Basil to Dick "Mighty Moth" Millington, which left the strip with no redeeming features whatsoever.
Mighty Moth is predictably bland, though I laughed at Dad sending a letter to the 'DAILY SOB, Fleet Street'. Whaddya mean, SOB isn't an acronym? Popeye gets a story good enough to be put on the last page, which is doubly surprising for having Swee'pea in it. Orlando is okay. Even Bob Monkhouse's Mad Movies are okay-ish, I suppose, with the Keystone Kops working better as a double splash page o' jokes than the Telegoons did.
I was most surprised to find myself enjoying Ken Dodd's Diddymen, which have gone insane even by TV Comic standards. It's rather good, in its own mad way. The surrealism includes exploding hats, a human train like a synchronised conga and the octopedal Moggy-Walloper of Knotty Ash Jungle.
TV Terrors are still finding new heights of mania for Hoppit, who this time has decided that his moustache has powers of extra-sensory perception. I particularly liked the tale in which Hoppit swaps roles and clothes with a Terror, which just looks funny. There's not much to say for this year's straight adventures, though. The Charge of the Light Brigade is just a random historical, while I'll always be slightly baffled by the "heroic dumb animal" genre and Skippy the bush kangaroo.
As for the Doctor Who content...
The Time Museum is the saner of the two strips. Painted in full colour by John Canning, it involves the Cybermen laying a trap for the 2nd Doctor, John and Gillian in a "time museum". Naturally the Doctor uses the museum's exhibits to outwit them, including a "mini rocket" from 2150 and the empty casings of Trods ("space war mongers for generations"). Incidentally TV Comic's Cybermen were always the cloth-faced Tenth Planet versions and this is no exception. They did nine Cyber-stories altogether, all starring Troughton's Doctor and all drawn from Tenth Planet photo-reference despite the fact that they all post-dated Tomb of the Cybermen. Maybe John Canning just found the originals more fun to draw?
Mind you, even in later years cloth-faced Cybermen were the most popular Cyber-race in comics... see Junkyard Demon (DWM 58-59), The Good Soldier (DWM 175-178) and the Barnes-Salmon Cybermen strip (DWM 215-238). Coming second are the Invasion tin-can versions, as seen in many of the Weekly's back-up strips - including the adventures of Junior Cyberleader Kroton, later to became the 8th Doctor's companion around 1999-2000. Perhaps surprisingly, Earthshock Cybermen have scarcely featured in the comics apart from a few low-key glimpses during Colin Baker's era.
Back to TV Comic. Much sillier than The Time Museum is The Electrodes! In it, a Beatles-like pop foursome of the year 2208 hire the Doctor as their manager when the materialising TARDIS makes their car crash. You know, as you do. The Doctor gives them rocket packs to fly them to their stage show, then foils their former manager's attempt to blow them up. Yup, the Doctor's hit the big time! We even learn two of the Electrodes' names: Fuzz and Muff. I suspect that even sixties readers might have detected innuendo there, especially in the following dialogue: "I'll grab muff and fuzz you snatch the other two."
Things I learned from reading this book: