Mooretoons - Early "Doctor Who" Monsters

Although I was determined to try and introduce my own cartoon creations into my “Doctor Who” comic strips, my second adventure “The Mutant Rampage” featured the large blubbery Canabalsans, the lure of using the established foes of the time traveller were irresistible to my teenage imagination. And whilst Terry Nation’s universally famous Daleks were quickly encountered by my TARDIS crew, for me, still in awe of the 1985 television story “The Two Doctors”, the alien race that was to dominate my cartoon capers had to be the Sontarans.

 

“Deadlock of the Daleks” was the fourth “Doctor Who” story I drew, its seven-pages so inspired by the multi-monster mash-up of the 1983 broadcast “The Five Doctors” that it introduced not only my version of the Daleks [n.b. no Davros allowed], but the cloned humanoids of the planet Sontar; albeit these were to be based upon the far larger version seen during the science fiction serial’s twenty second season.

 

Having turned to black ink for my drawings as a result of my blue ink ballpoint pen running out I then drew arguably one of my favourite early stories “Ode to a Sontaran”. The plot itself is rather thin with the TARDIS simply landing onboard a Sontaran spacecraft in order to rescue Barbara Wright, one of the Doctor's companions who had been abducted by the aliens during their earlier battle with the Daleks. However my drawing style remained reasonably consistent throughout, and even lead to me daring to colour the opening two parts with pencils.

 

I’m not entirely sure why the last monster to appear during my first foray was a Zygon. I have a great love for the old VHS (video) “Doctor Who” story “Terror of the Zygons, but that was released in 1988, a few years after I drew the six-pager “Julius Caesar”. Looking back on the black and white drawings depicting a Zygon invasion of Pompeii, I can still remember a specific evening at my Nan’s scribbling away inside each pencilled panel border. I was particularly proud of the detail I put into the Roman’s Galea (helmets) and would later come back to these sketches when drawing the sixteen-part serial “Pax Romany” twenty years later.