Mooretoons - Some More Early Original "Doctor Who" Monsters

Top: The Dekkarian astronaut Dallos.     Bottom: The Earth is invaded by Chang Fang's Toilet Tube Army.  

Inspired by the 1986 UK video release of Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor adventure "Doctor Who: Day of the Daleks", as well as a rather impressive-looking astronaut action figure I owned, I wrote "The Daleks Return" simply to introduce the Dekkarians into my 'Mooretoon' world of "Doctor Who". Essentially they were created as a space-faring alternative to the British television science fiction series' extremely popular UNIT (Unit Nations Intelligence Taskforce) family and the anti-Dalek taskforce consisted of Captain Derek Manning, his trusty number two Dallos and a Rambo-like soldier called Botreil. However the four-page plot of the team almost single-handedly dispatching an entire spacecraft full of Terry Nations' 'pepperpots' didn't really work and it would be some considerable time before the Dekkarians would make a return.

 

To be fair "Invasion Of The Toilet Tubes" marked the start of a serious decline in my "Doctor Who" story telling and came at a time when I was seemingly struggling to both draw consistently and with much enthusiasm for the stories I was writing. In a nutshell the Earth is successfully invaded by a race of giant toilet tubes lead by their king, Chang Fang. The Doctor tricks a group of the cardboard aliens into chasing him through the TARDIS and 'drowns' them in the swimming pool. In the meantime companions Barabara Wright and Ian Chesterton distract Chang Fang long enough for the Earth resistance to kill the toilet tube King.

Top: Barbara Wright is captured by Orcs.     Bottom: Ian Chesterton battles a Werewolf.

"Orckingdom" was an attempt to combine two of my main hobbies together; cartooning and 'Dungeons & Dragons'. Unfortunately I quickly ran out of ideas whilst drawing the four-pager, and what started as a possible run of stories set within a fantasy world of goblins, wolfmen and lizard creatures, turned out as simply a series of set-pieces where Ian Chesterton and the (First) Doctor encountered a werewolf, a lizardman and some warty orcs; all in order to save Barbara who had once again been captured at the start of the story.

 

The plot was so rushed that I apparently forgot to even include fellow TARDIS companion Viki (or as it should have been Vicki) in the story until the last few panels. However the tale would lay the foundation for the next adventure; a six-pager which saw the Doctor return to Gallifrey and introduce my version of the Timelords...  

"COSMIC CUSTODIANS" Gloom Of The Glooms - Part Two Post One

On the face of it this was a reasonably simple quartet of panels to draw. I wanted to show a bit more of the Glooms and their laser pistols, prove to the General that the aliens were real and show that Galaxian was actually a human; thus he momentarily takes his helmet off. I also thought that having 'proper eye contact' with the General would help the 'intergalactic interloper' more easily convince the old soldier that he was 'a good guy'. There's also a bit of a hint as to Galaxian's origin story hidden within the General's dialogue. Something I plan to cover in a future 'flashback' adventure.

 

Unfortunately at this point I had a moment of doubt as to how well the look of Mistress Tendril worked for the cartoon. As a result I swiftly provided some finished drawings of her alongside a rough pencilled alternative sketch to my 'greatest critic' and had all my fears and doubts confirmed. There were too many tentacles and she looked far too similar to an "Alternate Heroes" villain of mine called 'the Hooded tentacle'. This was actually unsurprising as Mistress Tendril, up until this point, was the only one of the Custodians I hadn't drawn from scratch, In fact in my haste to get her ready I had simply 'retouched' an old Hooded Tentacle drawing...

 

The Mistress Tendril in these panels therefore is an entirely new drawing, complete with four arms; albeit they're hidden by word balloons for these frames. I also took the opportunity to draw some new firearms for both the Glooms and Galaxian, as originally they were wielding previously created hand-weapons. However all this 'creativity' came at a cost, as I had to completely recompose all the panels featuring Mistress Tendril and redraw her teleportation effect.

 

As alien lasers fly around the Pentagon, General Marietta needs to decide whether to trust the Cosmic Custodians and then inform the President of the United States of his decision...   

"COSMIC CUSTODIANS" Gloom Of The Glooms - Part One Post Three

In many way this entire first episode, and certainly the penultimate three panels, are all about setting the scene for the final frame - the arrival of the Cosmic Custodians. When writing this story I wanted the cliff-hangers to be especially good, and was somewhat torn between either having the aliens not appear until the last shot or have the heroes arrive at the last minute.

 

In order to get the action going as quickly as possible I had already written for the Glooms to be seen shooting up the Pentagon. This therefore left me with little choice but I was still in something of a dilemma as its always a bit of risk having a new serial start and you don't actually see the main characters until you're already a quarter of the way through the story.

 

The final panel took quite a bit of time to draw, as having pencilled, inked, scanned and then redrawn Mistress Tendril and Galaxian, I then had to erase most of my lining in order to create a simple outline for the teleportation effect. Having scoured the internet for a suitable effect, I eventually decided to superimpose some somewhat translucent light beams over my drawings to give the impression of them materialising in front of the General and his military staff.

 

What the last frame doesn't show is that all four Cosmic Custodians have actually teleported into the Pentagon. However the sudden appearance of Tortoise-Shell Eddie and Sagittarius do not become evident until Part Two. If I had my time again with this story I would probably therefore re-draw this scene, either resizing the final panel to include the entire super-team or cutting some of the dialogue from the earlier panels, and extending the last frame to encapsulate the entire bottom of the page.

 

The Cosmic Custodians have arrived. But why should the American Military trust the fate of the Earth to three more aliens and an arcade-machine obsessed Human..?

"COSMIC CUSTODIANS" Gloom Of The Glooms - Part One Post Two

Having set the scene in the first four panels, I wanted to leap straight into the action with the next few frames. As a result I threw in loads of laser beams ripping in between my characters and had the aliens, the Glooms, make a very early appearance. These scenes were actually re-drawn several times, as at one point I actually wanted to scale down the size of my figures in order to show off more of the mayhem the aliens were causing. In the end though I reverted back to these 'standard-size' characters and just filled each panel with as much movement and sound effects as I could muster. They're very cluttered as a result but hopefully this also imparts to the reader just how busy things are in the Pentagon during the initial stages of the alien's attack.

 

As aforementioned, I really wanted to get this story finished quickly, and as a result some of the figures are from some quite old former Mooretoons. A few I redrew (such as the more modern grey camouflage for the soldiers) but others appear exactly as they were originally drawn and to my eye it shows. However as the initial panels had already taken far longer than I'd wanted, I simply went with them. In hindsight this was actually a wise decision as I'd encounter some serious hurdles in the pages to come...

 

The President has left the White House for the safety of Air Force One but will General Marietta depart the Pentagon to join his Commander-in-Chief? Perhaps something 'Cosmic' about to happen...  

"COSMIC CUSTODIANS" Gloom Of The Glooms - Part One Post One

This particular science-fiction adventure was both written and then drawn in just a few weeks. It’s the first in a series of tales I’ve been sketching this year in order to scratch a ‘super-hero team in outer space’ itch I’ve recently been having. As I wanted to get the ‘introductory’ story out quickly I’ve utilised characters from a variety of older Mooretoons, and simply ‘tweaked them’ here and there. As a result it let me rattle through the panels fairly fast despite some quite major hiccups along the way.

 

As I didn’t simply want the plot to be a typical ‘this is how the heroes obtained their super-powers’ storyline, I went with a standard Earth gets invaded theme, and brought the Custodians in as an already established super-group who were determined to save the planet. Setting the tale on our planet was advantageous because as it let me re-use a load of military figures I’ve previously drawn and established that Galaxian, Mistress Tendril, Tortoise-Shell Eddie and Sagittarius were all part of the same super-hero universe I’ve created in series such as “Alternate Heroes”, “Heroes of Godwinson” and “Men of Mystery”.

 

The initial few panels are designed to set the scene of the half-asteroid half-alien space-ship coming into orbit of the Earth and settling above the United States of America’s Pentagon. I wanted to try and draw something a little different for the Gloom’s craft and I can’t help feel that it didn’t work out as well as I’d liked.

 

The satellite also took some reworking, as my actual drawing was much larger than it appears, and literally dwarfed the alien’s vessel. As a result it had to be scaled down significantly in size, so a lot of the detail I put into its panelling and exterior computers has been lost.

 

An alien invasion of the Pentagon is about to begin. But it’s not the only American military building the extra-terrestrials have targeted…

Mooretoons - More Early Original "Doctor Who" Monsters

Many of my original “Doctor Who” cartoon monsters were inspired by the toys and games I was playing with in the early Eighties. The most prominent of these creatures was the Magma, a large carnivorous race of aliens who dwelt on the volcanic planet of Maglang. Unsurprisingly these terrors were based upon an especially big toy figure which I often used as an adversary whilst playing Doctor Who with my “Kenner” Star Wars action figures. It was therefore probably inevitable that my adventures with the plastic monster would transfer over to the inked page, but never did I anticipate that the Magma would feature in three of the first five stories I drew during my second phase of cartooning.

 

Interestingly the artwork to “Magma”, “Magma’s Return” and “Magma’s Curse” is especially detailed for its time, as I used a phenomenal amount of line-shading in almost every panel. This ‘technique’ would remain as part of my drawing style until I moved to a graphics editor on a computer, and even today I still utilise such line-work for scenery such as bushes and snow mounds. However I have never used it as exclusively as I did during this particular period in the evolution of the Mooretoons look.

 

This was however also a time when I tried to start adding some detail to my backgrounds, and this can clearly be seen in the six-page story “The Carrots”, a tale which followed directly on from the first appearance of the Magma. Inspired by the 1964 Doctor Who television serial “Planet of Giants”, I thought it’d be fun to have the TARDIS crew land in a supermarket shopping trolley, and then, having fallen out, desperately try and find their way back. However mid-way through the story I introduced the Karrots, an alien race of mind-reading vegetables who attempt to trick the First Doctor into letting them enter the TARDIS.

 

The story is rather forgettable, as you can probably imagine, apart from the fact that I kill off Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s grand-daughter, by having her fall into a meat grinder at the conclusion of the adventure.

"MEN OF MYSTERY" Embassy Of The Fist - Part Four Post Three

In many ways this is a bit of a rushed ending, and ideally I'd have liked to have included one or two additional panels in order to mix-up the composition of the frames a little more. I think the simple punch - kick- punch frame combination makes the sequence look too repetitive or monotonous as a single page layout.

 

The last panel is actually a bit of a rush job as I'd scripted showing Sensei Cheng Fu leaping out of the Embassy's window from an exterior perspective. However I was somewhat stumped as to how to portray the Chinese soldiers discovering the combatants, and their arrival causing the British martial artist to flee so dramatically. With hindsight I could have composed a much smaller frame simply showing the guards' appearing, and placed that within a normal sized panel depicting Cheng Fu smashing out of the upstairs window.

 

Indeed I'm not sure its even clear that most of the action in this concluding part of "Embassy of the Fist" takes place on the building's top (residential) floor; although the Chinese soldier in the final frame does allude to it by stating "A masked intruder escapes into the gardens below".

 

I was also keen to show that Cheng Fu does not actually kill Yamamoto. Not only because I wanted the opportunity to be able to write a sequel at some point, or at least a second adventure featuring the Chinese assassin. But I also wanted it to be clear that despite his anger at the former Triad bodyguard, the hero of the story is not a murderer.

 

Next time Kung Fu action gives way to science fiction and alien invasion as the Earth is attacked by the Glooms in the first story of the serial "Cosmic Custodians"...