For just under two years, from January 1965 to January 1967, the Daleks starred in their own Doctor-free comic strip on the back page of the comic TV Century 21. At the time TV Century 21, a comic otherwise largely devoted to strips and stories based on series created and produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, sold over half a million copies a week, making its stories some of the most widely experienced Doctor Who fiction outside the TV series itself.

From mid 1991 until 1994, those strips were reprinted in Doctor Who Magazine, starting with #180, and that’s when I first got to read more than the odd page or panel from them. They stood up then, thirty years on, and they stand up now thirty years on from that. In another thirty years or so they’ll catch up with themselves, in a strange way that the writers and artists responsible for the original stories could never quite have imagined. Because part of the shtick of TV Century 21 was that it affected to be a newspaper from the future; all its comic strip and text stories were treated as if they were news items reporting real events from the second half of the twenty first century.

This included front page colour photographic spreads written in an excitable journalistic style topped with headlines such as “World Government Official Missing!” and in-keeping with that wheeze the comic was actually dated a century ahead of its street date, with the cover spreads saying e.g. 31 July 2065, rather than 1965. The Daleks appeared on the front of TV Century 21 five times, including the 31 July 2065 edition. On each occasion they did so via a photograph from one of the Peter Cushing Dalek films rather than the television series. The strip had more of an affinity with the films than the series in terms of tone, design and story. Both the first film and the strip adopt a Dalek colour scheme approximating that from The Dalek Book, an annual sized book produced for Christmas 1964, with the strip also making the Golden Emperor introduced in the book into the protagonist of many of its stories.

Something else with which the Daleks in TV Century 21 had an affinity was the Anderson strips running alongside it. That makes sense. They were the product of the same office, the same editor and sometimes even the same writers and artists. But this had some strange implications for Dalek continuity.  Future Doctor Who script writer and contemporary TV Century 21 reader Steve Gallagher once described The Daleks strips as “shoehorned into the timeline of the Anderson universe,” and it’s true those catchy newspaper covers imply links between The Daleks, and the Anderson strips. 

Because those newspaper stories mixed and matched elements from whatever happened to be TV Century 21 that week in order to create news copy. For example, the Stingray story / headline Tempest Awarded VM! also features a sub paragraph about how a message announcing “All you have left is fear. The Daleks are coming!” has been picked up by astronomers on Mars, with another saying the Earth’s Space News Agency is assuring the general public that due to Skaro’s great distance from Earth it likely not intended for humanity. 

That’s a weird mix of foreshadowing the forthcoming Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD (1966) and the later TV Century 21 strips that would lead up to it, and implying that perhaps the Daleks of the comic strip are not those of the Doctor Who universe at all, but their counterparts from the Andersons’ shared universe. There’s more evidence for this idea if you look at the strips themselves. Later Dalek strip artist Ron Turner’s art has a distinctly Anderson vibe to its technology, while the humans seen in The Daleks final serial could pass for the crew of Stingray if they chose. Which is to say, they’re in similar uniforms and not un-puppetty. Maybe they work in a related, less submarine-based service?

Some fan websites take this idea perhaps a little too far, suggesting that the planet Astra, mentioned often in TV Century 21, is overtly meant to be the same one from the 1965 Doctor Who story The Rescue. Others even suggest that it must have been licenced from that serial’s author David Whitaker who was also involved in the comic’s Dalek strips. But “Astra” is just Latin for “star” and therefore a pretty obvious name for a planet in a science fiction story. 

But there’s another wrinkle worth pondering about this parallel universe shenanigans. The TV Century 21 dated 31 July 2065  features the comic’s greatest Dalek cover, which shows Dr Who and his Granddaughter Susie Who being interrogated on Skaro under the headline “Peaceful Thals Ambushed!” There the in-universe journalist reports that “... the Thals have been viciously ambushed and a fierce battle is still being fought.”

Yet despite the obvious seriousness of this news story, the paper takes time to explain to us that an “exciting film” portraying these events will soon be released in cinemas. It also notes that the BBC originally reported this story some eighteen months before. As well as implicitly making the television serial, rather than the film, the “true” version of events, this issue positions Dr Who and the Daleks (1965) as a cinematic treat, within whatever fictional universe The Daleks strip is itself set. 

But which one is that?  I think we should be told.