April 14, 2025

Nemesis of the Daleks

Printed in for four monthly episodes from August to November 1989, Nemesis of the Daleks (reprint available here) was the sole Doctor Who Magazine comic strip story on shelves during the TV series’ 1989 run. It ran in parallel to the slow, drawn-out ending of twentieth century Doctor Who on television, being exactly contemporary with the stories we’re currently looking at in The Long Way Round section of this newsletter.

The first DWM Dalek strip for most of a decade, the appearance of El Tel’s Metal Meanies was negotiated by the DWM’s then-editor, John Freeman, who had cultivated a positive relationship with Dalek creator Terry Nation’s agent Roger Hancock by making prompt and regular payments for the magazine’s use of photographs from Nation’s Doctor Who stories, including when Hancock was not yet aware money was owed.

Nemesis was plotted by the strip’s outgoing editor (and legendary comics letterer) Richard Starkings, under his usual pen name “Richard Alan”¹ and scripted by another Marvel UK staffer John Tomlinson writing as “Steve Alan”. The joke was that “Steve” was the fictional Richard’s equally fictional brother, with the additional insight that as anyone who was anyone in UK comics in the 1980s was called either “Steve” or “Alan”, someone called both would inevitably have a great career.

Daleks in comics are often either impressionistic, having life and energy as characters but also in many respects looking quite different to how they do on television (think much of the TV Century 21 canon). The usual alternative is that they are drawn with a kind of photo-inspired screen accuracy that’s also curiously lifeless; they’re still-life television props, not moving monsters.

But the art for this new story was by Lee Sullivan, an old school fan who had had his Doctor Who strip debut on the twenty fifth anniversary classic Planet of the Dead. (No pressure there, then.) Sullivan’s Daleks somehow short-circuit both the usual problems. They have an angular quality that that renders them solid on the page, but they somehow seem in constant motion. They look like the props, but they burst with character.

The opening pages of Nemesis, in which Daleks on TV Century 21 style hover bouts bring down a Draconian spaceship, is a proper action sequence that twentieth century Doctor Who could never have dreamed of. That even the Cushing Dalek films could not have gotten anywhere near.

Aware of the need for scale, on some scenes in the story (although not that one) Sullivan adopted a technique used by Alan Davis and suggested to him by Starkings of turning a single page of art paper on its side and drawing a horizontal double page spread, simultaneously doubling the scale of a drawing, while in effect creating two pages of art in the time it took to draw one. It’s carefully deployed, and only once an issue in this story, but it leads to moments such as the arrival of the Dalek Emperor on the bridge of their ‘Death Wheel’ and the revelation of the scale and location of that Death Wheel’s central reactor.

As perhaps those scene descriptions above imply, the storyline of Nemesis of the Daleks is simple. Strong and straightforward. A proper action film on the page. The Doctor arrives on a planet looking to attend the birthday party of his old friend Bonjaxx (a running subplot in the strip for some time at this point), discovers that the Daleks are building a space station in orbit and are going to gas the planet’s inhabitants once its complete, and then stops them. So far, so Star Wars. The script too is spot on. The Doctor sounds exactly like McCoy (you can hear the actor’s delivery of every line on the page, which is not always the case with the strip) and there are subtle little threads in the strip that deserve greater examination.

The story was partially influenced by the all-action success of Remembrance of the Daleks, and its Emperor’s design splits the difference between that seen in Remembrance and that of Sullivan’s beloved TV Century 21. Like Remembrance’s Emperor, this one is intended to be Davros, but in a twist - and perhaps latching onto Remembrance screenwriter Ben Aaronovitch’s comment that Davros was “becoming a compromise Dalek” - he has lost all sense of his former identity.²

There’s also a moment that perhaps exerts an influence on a much later Dalek story, The Witch’s Familiar, as written by DWM reader Steven Moffat. In that story, the Doctor realises that a Dalek is not a Dalek because it asks for “Mercy”, a concept he knows the Daleks are insufficiently familiar with to not even know the word. Yes, both are also references to the “Pity!” motif from the end of Genesis of the Daleks, and reprised in Remembrance, but the juxtaposition here is very striking.

While in 1979 Doctor Who Weekly had been principally a comic with some articles, by 1989 Doctor Who Magazine was exactly that, a magazine that also ran a comic strip. A comic strip that took up roughly 50% of each issue’s budget despite account for only eight of its 36 pages. There was an argument that this was not what the magazine’s audience really wanted in 1989, that this cost disparity was disproportionate - and it was an argument Marvel UK’s management were keen to make at any opportunity.

One suggested solution to this problem was that DWM share its comic pages with newly launching The Incredible Hulk Presents... This was a Marvel UK title aimed at children of about ten which was going to run new, five page Doctor Who strips weekly, alongside reprints of 1970s Marvel stories featuring the title character, the company’s newish adaptation of that summer’s hit Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and rounded out with a final attempt to service the UK’s dwindling but still real audience for Action Force / GI Joe comics material.

Freeman fended off this idea; “I argued against the wholesale reprint of the TIHP strips in DWM, thankfully convincing management they were, largely, written for a younger audience. I was against losing originated strip in DWM”. It was agreed DWM and TIHP would run their own, tonally distinct strip stories³ but on his way out the door Starkings’ acceded to another management request: to cut the strip’s page count. Nemesis would be the last story to run eight pages an issue. In future it would be reduced to seven. This once again shifed DWM’s emphasis away from fiction and towards fact. In 1989 this must have seemed inevitable. But it’s an interesting question as to whether Marvel would have considered it quite such a good move had it known that there would soon be no television series to report on in that page that had been freed up for exciting text features.

After all, from the issue after the final episode of Nemesis, and for a good eighteen months, the strip would be the only new Doctor Who fiction produced in any medium. That was one of the problems with 1990. With living through 1990, as a Doctor Who fan still young enough - just - to also purchase The Incredible Hulk Presents… not just out of completism but because the rest of the contents and the specific balance of them honestly appealed: the programme evaporated. The people in the liminal space between hardcore fans and committed viewers who might have held on, had nothing to hold on to.

I have friends - contemporaries or near contemporaries, some of whom I knew then, some of whom I didn’t - who by the end of 1990 principally thought of themselves as Twin Peaks or Star Trek: The Next Generation fans. Some of them are people you've heard of, probably. They’ve written books and / or audios about or even starring Doctor Who. But even they’d begun to drift away - with some dragged back towards the TARDIS’ light by the promise of the New Adventures. We mock, rightly, the lyrics of the 1985 Doctor Who novelty single Doctor In Distress and their refrain “Eighteen months is too long to wait!” but a year is an unfeasibly long time when you’re in your early teens. About fifteen or twenty percent of your conscious life, and you’re literally incapable of perceiving that it could ever be any different.⁴

I mentioned the slow, drawn out nature of Doctor Who’s 1989 death because, if you look at DWM #152, the issue in which the first episode of Nemesis was published, you wouldn’t pick up much a hint that the series was, to all intents and purposes, already dead. The main news story is that the Doctor Who movie had got a “green light at last!” (The on-paper project of fly-by-night company that went under such names as ‘Coast to Coast’ it, of course, never happened.) There are also mentions of additions to Dapol’s then recently launched Doctor Who action figure range and rumours of an increase in VHS releases of old stories.

Instinctively, one does not see a ramping up of merchandising as indicative of a series about to end. The magazine’s other articles include previews for stories that are yet to be broadcast, and plenty of information about the touring play Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure that seemed to be raising the show’s profile that summer. (The back cover of this DWM is a charming publicity photograph of the play’s two Doctors, Jon Pertwee and Colin Baker, together on its TARDIS set.)

Perhaps that should have been a clue, though. That Doctor Who was becoming something that didn’t quite exist in the present. “Doctor Who” was “the whole of Doctor Who” not “the Doctor Who that is on now”. The contemporary version of the show, whatever its many fine qualities, had somehow lost purchase on the public. Its fingers had slipped off on the present. You could even see that reflected in how Nemesis of the Daleks revives not merely the Daleks - who had at least been on television a year before - but also Abslom Daak Dalek Killer, a character from DWW’s deep past, beloved of fans then over twenty, but of whom none of my contemporaries had ever heard. He was not in our vocabulary bank, either.

An intriguing quality that the DWM strip can sometimes have is an odd asynchronicity with the television series, and Nemesis is a prime example of that. Although it ran along alongside Season 26, Nemesis stars a companion-less⁵ Doctor wearing the Season 25 version of his costume. (Producer John Nathan-Turner didn’t want the Doctor’s new coat to debut in another medium⁶ and even insisted that McCoy changed back into his old jacket and tie for the publicity photographs.) That the title is a mix of those of two 1988 stories barely needs stating.

There’s also something of the Doctor Who of the mid, rather than the later, 1980s, in the story’s resolution; in which the problem that the Doctor faces can only be resolved through suicidal violence and, this not being a regeneration story, it isn’t Doctor Who who is going to get blown up for the greater good.

Something else that Nemesis shares with 1988’s TV Doctor Who what was writer John B McClay had described in DWM’s own silver jubilee special as “the air of a man putting his affairs in order” before an ending, and as such Nemesis’ offing of Daak (and his supporting cast) fits the unknowingly-preparing-for-a-wake mood of the era well.⁷ It might only have been the end of a decade, but there was a fin-de-siècle feeling in the air, in fiction as well as fact.

Except, we’ve already said that there wasn’t, right? That reading the DWMs that Nemesis appeared in suggested a healthy series with plenty going on in its hinterland. That is true, although it was less so as the serial progressed. “Slow start to season” noted DWM’s news page for #155, reporting the unprecedentedly low ratings for a Doctor Who series opener. The Ultimate Adventure closed, albeit after a solid run. More pointedly, The Incredible Hulk Presents… was canceled after just 11 weeks.⁸

But as this point, all Doctor Who’s possible futures and non-futures all existed simultaneously, at least to a member of the audience rather than someone privy to BBC paperwork or in the more informed echelons of fandom. And if that’s a bit quantum timey-wimey, then so be it.

Nemesis of the Daleks is the last Doctor Who comic strip published tying into an ongoing television series until The Love Invasion in March 2005. A generation later. Appropriate then, that the first DWM strip of Doctor Who television interregnum, and the first in which the Doctor wears his darker coat, should be written by Paul Cornell⁹ whose own first Doctor Who television episode would be broadcast during The Love Invasion’s own run. Nevermind eighteen months, sixteen years is an incredible time to wait. More than the lifetime of much of Doctor Who’s audience, in 1989 or 2005.

“I could have stopped [Daak]. It should have been me.” mopes the Doctor on the final page of after Daak’s sacrifice, wondering what can be done about the Daleks and how many more people will have to die before the universe is “purged” of them. By the time that episode was published Doctor Who had been cancelled, although no one was admitting it yet. It was the Daleks, not the Doctor, who had been purged from the timeline.

The end of 1980s Doctor Who has been characterised by some as a mercy killing. Even something necessary if the series was ever to return stronger.¹⁰ Although this is a characterisation I would personally vigorously dispute. For the demographic of fan-viewers I was a part of, it felt very different.