The problems with Evening's Empire by John Freeman 8/5/03

The problem publishing Evening's Empire lay with artist Richard Piers Rayner who did not deliver the artwork to deadline. I did have issues with Andrew's original script but he did deliver it on time. The story changed considerably from plot to final script (as did his first story for DWM, Fellow Travellers). No problem with that, stories do have a habit of taking on a life of themselves in the writing. But I was concerned that for a six issue story there was not enough action in the delivered script and asked for rewrites, which beefed up the UNIT involvement. Andrew gladly complied, delivered the scripts, on time -- and then the problems began.

Richard is a consummate artist and his work is well known, particularly for Road to Perdition. But in my experience, back then, he was not the fastest of artists and when his art failed to arrive and he often became difficult to get hold of, I was forced to put the strip on hiatus. Running reprint strips from Doctor Who's early days was our first option, and in that we were very lucky since artist David Lloyd had original art for the Auton strip Business as Usual and this not only enable us to reprint from that, but also "tidy up" the lettering, which in my opinion was poor in places. I also took the liberty of making some minor edits to the strip -- written by Alan Moore.

Anyway, we never gave up with Empire and when Richard finally delivered, it was Gary Russell who took the wise decision to run the strip as a special. I edited the strip on receipt of all the art, just as I did with Emperor of the Daleks, even though I had then left Marvel UK. I'm really glad it finally saw print, since I think it is one of the best non-TV Seventh Doctor stories of the Cartmel era.