The inspirational ‘light bulb’ moment for me, when I first decided to start trying to write and draw comic book stories was in 1985, sometime after the rental release of the BBC Video “Doctor Who: The Seeds of Death”. Back then, still a young teenager, I was obsessed with the time-travelling BBC television series and had been imagining a slew of adventures whilst playing the video game cartridge “Bezerk” for the Atari Video Computer System. Frustrated by being unable to record the exploits of my pixelated Timelord, and having created an additional mythology whilst pretending my collection of Kenner “Star Wars” action figures were really “Doctor Who” characters, I started to scribble down the highlights of my battles with Daleks, Cybermen and Ice Warriors. From here “Mooretoons” were born…
“Doctor Who and London Nights Of Terror” was a four-page adventure drawn ‘right off the cuff’ which, despite its title, only concerned itself with the First Doctor spending a single night on the streets of London in 1965. It introduced the television series’ original TARDIS crew of Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, as well as the stranded Ice Warrior called Catus. Drawn with a blue ink ballpoint pen, the quality of the artwork is increasingly erratic throughout the story as I started to development my own style. Indeed, at times the look is considerably different from my current method, as the mouth is actually visible beneath the enormous nose and the hands have no fingers, just some scratch-lines to represent digits. However it already contains some of the elements which dominate my cartoons’ approach today, such as the closely set eyes, the wrinkles and the side-on waist-level viewpoint.
“Doctor Who and London Nights Of Terror” was a four-page adventure drawn ‘right off the cuff’ which, despite its title, only concerned itself with the First Doctor spending a single night on the streets of London in 1965. It introduced the television series’ original TARDIS crew of Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, as well as the stranded Ice Warrior called Catus. Drawn with a blue ink ballpoint pen, the quality of the artwork is increasingly erratic throughout the story as I started to development my own style. Indeed, at times the look is considerably different from my current method, as the mouth is actually visible beneath the enormous nose and the hands have no fingers, just some scratch-lines to represent digits. However it already contains some of the elements which dominate my cartoons’ approach today, such as the closely set eyes, the wrinkles and the side-on waist-level viewpoint.
I’m not sure how long
it took to sketch the four pages. I would not have thought too long as most
panels lack any sort of a background, even those set within the TARDIS. What I
do know though is that the finished product motivated me to quickly draw a second
seven-page adventure, and then another and another, until, after a few years, I
had built up quite a collection of original “Doctor Who” stories covering the
wanderings of the first three incarnations of the Doctor…
Ah! a man after my own hearrt I too would act out my own adventures for Dr Who, though my medium of choise was "lego", my starwars figures for some reason tended I tended to use as proxies for characters from my "Blakes 7"/"Mirconauts" mish mash games. though I never created comic strips I did used to make endless small cardboard "figures" often strangely about 25mm tall (thought this was many years before I discovered wargaming). As I recall I had a waste paper basket full to the brim with them along with cardboard houses bridges etc.. I assume they all went in the bin in the end, sad really.
ReplyDeleteGood to see you old work, I love stuff like that, if only so I know that there were other kids as strange as me, what we used to do to fill our time before computer games, eh!
Cheers Roger.
Roger, Glad you enjoyed the post. I hope to post something like this each Sunday if I can, and keep the rest of the week for story posts etc. In scanning the fragile pages I found myself really going back in time, and even remembered sitting on my bed drawing the first few pages. Next time I'll probably put up some of my drawings of the classic Doctor Who monsters,,, here come the Daleks..!!!
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