By the end of the 1980s, the magazine generally ran only the main Doctor Who strip. These backups, however, dried up at about the time the Sixth Doctor debuted. But the non-Doctor original back-ups remained well past the time the magazine became Doctor Who Monthly. Skinn's successors rather quickly ended the non-Whoniverse material, and made reprints of 1960s material increasingly sporadic. For a time, Doctor Who Weekly regularly had three or four different strips in each issue. Skinn also resurrected the long-out-of-print Dalek Tapes stories that had originally appeared in TV Century 21. Borrowed as they were from Marvel US, they featured the talents of Marvel legends Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, and even Stan Lee himself. Called variously Tales from the TARDIS and Dr Who's Time Tales, the non-Whoniverse backup strips of those early issues involved a few panels of the Fourth Doctor framing a Marvel US adaptation of a classic science fiction story or an original strip taken from a Marvel US science fiction anthology of the 1950s or 1960s.

With soon-to-be-luminaries like Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills and John Wagner working on the main strip and Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Steve Dillon and Steve Parkhouse initially handling the back-ups, Skinn instantly brought modern - and more American - sensibilities to the comic Doctor Who world.Īt the same time, those early issues of Doctor Who Weekly brought American comic strips in front of British eyes by having a long series of reprints taken straight from Marvel's long line of American science fiction anthologies. Editor Dez Skinn immediately changed the style of the comic strip by hiring youngsters who were principally comic book artists, rather than the cartoonists and illustrators who had been in charge of Polystyle's output. In 1979, Marvel UK wrested control of the license to produce Doctor Who comics from Polystyle.

Dragon magazine comics