The 1971 Doctor Who Annual from Craig's newsagents in Strathaven represents the next totemic image of the series. At the time I had abandoned the frankly scary adventures of the dandy doctor and his rather severe dollybird assistant for the cheap pleasures of Aussie space adventure, Phoenix Five.
Even the endpapers of the annual hinted at the universe of terrors concealed within Jon Pertwee's cape.
At roughly the same time, a friend of my dad's passed on his son's copy of the 1964 Dalek Book to me. The map of Skaro fascinated my brother and I and a photo-text story introduced me to the Doctor's grand daughter! I don't think I was remotely aware of William Hartnell at this stage.
1971 also saw the launch of a new Space Age comic, Countdown. Largely a vehicle for UFO and the defunct Supermarionation stable, Countdown introduced a new sophisticated, realistic art style for Dr. Who. It also echoed the Glam Rock colour and spectacle of the Barry Letts Era.
I followed the comic in a pretty irregular way even as it became TV Action, with a focus on the adventure/action tv shows of the day. The Who strips I remember were the dystopian A Stitch in Time and the contemporary Earth epic, Zeron Invasion.
Pic from the collection of Chris Hester
A copy of the 1973 Doctor Who Holiday Special was bought for me in the shadowy Killermont Street bus station in the spring or early summer of that year. It might have been on a shopping trip to Argyle Street to buy me a purple tracksuit to play football in the park, a compulsory school activity which I detested. My abiding memory is of a double-page spread of black and white snaps: The Silurians! The Fish People! The Monoids! Alongside a text feature which spoke of Moroks and Drahvins, I was discovering that there was an entire era of Tardis travels of which I knew virtually nothing.
Another piece of the jigsaw puzzle of Who's history was the High Adventure movie slot on Saturday evenings. At some point in 72 or 73, I first saw the two Cushing movies, which adapted tv episodes I'd yet to see but also created a parallel narrative: the human Doctor Who and his nubile relatives Barbara and Louise and the plucky nipper Susie. I actually prefer Daleks:2150 AD to the b/w Dalek Invasion of Earth- even without the Slyther, the screeching bobble-headed duvet monster.
A family holiday in Sandhead in July-August of 1973 had already netted this lurid copy of the Thomas/ Buscema Conan:
It also led to my discovery of 1965's geodesic juggernauts, the Mechonoids -in the Arches restaurant in Stranraer- through a b/w picture in TV Action.
The strip that week was The Vortex, which referenced some of the imagery of The Claws of Axos.
In a future post, we'll look at the first Target Books and the sine qua non of Doctor Who magazines in the early Seventies: the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special.
All images presumed copyright of their respective owners.
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