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.