I’m rather confused as to where my inspiration to use ‘The
Meddling Monk’ in my “Doctor Who” cartoon strips came from. It could have been
some chance glimpse of a short clip from the British science fiction television
series, but I doubt it. For although the character of the Monk, superbly
portrayed by actor Peter Butterworth, appeared in two stories during William Hartnell’s
tenure as the (First) Doctor, neither would have made it to VHS Video at the
time I first started drawing my interpretation of the villainous Timelord. Indeed
it wasn’t until 1992, some six-seven years after Mooretoons were born, that the
surviving episodes of “The Dalek Masterplan” were released on PAL video as part
of the “Daleks: The Early Years”, and the 1965 story “The Time Meddler” was not available
on tape for a further eight years until June 2000.
As a result I’m far more inclined to
believe that I took such a deep interest in the character from his 1983
appearance in "Doctor Who Monthly", when the Monk teamed up with the Ice Warriors
against the Fifth Doctor. Whatever the reason, my Monk was a decidedly different
creature from that of proper Doctor Who lore, for although he still retained
some of the quirky humour Peter Butterworth invested into the television
character, my Meddling Monk most assuredly wanted the Doctor dead.
Initially
appearing towards the end of my first run of comic adventures in “The Fall of
the Daleks”, the Meddling Monk was a skulking manipulative villain, who watched
from the shadows as the TARDIS crew inadvertently stumbled upon (yet) another
Dalek city on the planet Skaro. I clearly wanted the Monk to stand out from my
usual drawing style, and as I wanted him to be simple to sketch (as I needed to
draw him a lot) I went with a monk’s robe complete with blacked out hood and penetrating
eyes. In many ways not dissimilar to the appearance of Jawas from the “Star
Wars” motion pictures. Indeed with hindsight I distinctly recall previously drawing
the adventures of a Jawa Bounty Hunter named Volcano as a child, so it could be
George Lucas’ influence over the look of my Meddling Monk could have been
stronger than I initially thought. Suffice to say the evil cloaked figure fails
miserably to cause the Doctor’s death in “The Fall of the Daleks” and instead
is blasted himself blasted to death by the Masters of Skaro.
It was quite a considerable
time later, well within my third phase of drawing Mooretoons, that I finally brought
the Meddling Monk back and in doing so I set the ground work for a series of
stories that would take me the best part of two - three years to draw. “Id?”
was a single page, eleven panel teaser story, designed to lay the foundation
for a much longer twelve-page adventure I planned to draw a short while later.
Sketched in (trendy) red ink with
yellow pencil panelling, the tale simply established that the Monk had survived
being shot by the Daleks, and had remained on the planet Skaro building a Commodore
VIC-20 home computer. Somehow this 8-bit machine was capable of sending a
mind-beam into the TARDIS and momentarily disorientate the Doctor..?
Having
briefly appeared at the conclusion of the following story “Stronties Rage”, a
re-imagining of a 1986 “Strontium Dog” serial from the British science fiction comic
“2000 AD”, The Meddling Monk would feature throughout “Game-Ball”; the
longest “Doctor Who” adventure I ever wrote and drew…
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