Review by Tony Keen
In 1979, Dave Gibbons was an up-and-coming star of British comics, having made his name drawing Harlem Heroes and Dan Dare for breakout science-fiction comic 2000 A.D. He was now looking for something a little different, and Marvel UK offered it to him. They were putting together a magazine celebrating the BBC’s long-running (a whole fifteen years by then!) science fiction series Doctor Who, and wanted to include some comics. They had commissioned two of 2000 A.D.‘s chief writers, Pat Mills and John Wagner, to write the strip. Was Gibbons interested in drawing it? He was.
In fact, Gibbons stayed with the strip for the next three years, only missing a couple of stories. These are obviously not included here, but the self-contained nature of Doctor Who stories of the time means that the narrative flow is not interrupted. During this time the lead actor of the television series changed, from Tom Baker to Peter Davison, Mills and Wagner were replaced by Steve Moore, and then Moore by Steve Parkhouse, and Marvel’s Doctor Who publication went from weekly to monthly. Gibbons finally departed at the end of 1982, when DC came calling with the prospect of more lucrative work in the US. It is doubtful that this would have happened, had Gibbons not honed his skills at depicting science fiction stories in these pages. As his art matures, you can see why Dick Giordano decided he would be the perfect artist for Tales of the Green Lantern Corps.
In the 1980s, US Marvel would reprint his stories in colour, and while Gibbons drew new covers for these they are sadly not included in this collection. Eventually, after licenses had transferred, IDW reprinted the old Marvel strips, with more sympathetic colouring by Charlie Kirchoff (see sample image). These were collected in Doctor Who Classics Volumes 1-4 and Doctor Who Classics Omnibus Volumes 1-2. Never a company to let a comic be reprinted only once when it could be be reprinted four or five times, IDW then collected all of Gibbons’ material into this collection (often erroneously referred to as The Dave Gibbons Collection). Also included are an introduction from Gibbons, and some sketches of his. IDW even issued a teaser, Doctor Who: Dave Gibbons Treasury Edition 1, containing the first two stories here, ‘Doctor Who and the Iron Legion’ and ‘City of the Damned’. (Treasury Edition 2 never appeared).
If you are a Gibbons fan and don’t have this material, this is a good way of acquiring it. The stories are good, and whilst we’re not talking Watchmen quality here, it’s some of Gibbons’ most attractive artwork. You might prefer to have it in its original black and white, however, in which case you can find it spread across the volumes Iron Legion, Dragon’s Claw and The Tides of Time, and all but the last two stories can be found in The Fourth Doctor Anthology.
