Doctor Who Magazine #268
I have been tempted to write up my thoughts on Doctor Who Magazine for a while; a third of my Doctor Who printed material budget goes to the magazine every month, so a look at what it contains is interesting. It's taken me a little longer to write up these comments than I would have liked -- I've had a really bizzare virus (or something) since about the time I picked up this issue of the magazine, but such is life.
It took 267 issues, but we finally have "SEX" on the cover of DWM.
The intro starts with Gary Gillatt doing his best Jackie Jenkins impersonation. It would be tempting to go into my own confession of Doctor Who based dreams, but that would require admitting that I have had them, which of course I don't.
Gallifrey Guardian is always something to skim -- of course, in the Internet era, there is rarely "news" to cover, but Stephen Cole's column about the upcoming Paul McGann short story audio tape makes it something that I will definitely pick up. Sounds very promising. I note that they clearly didn't get a cover in for Collector's Heaven.
As I read Sex and the Single Gallifreyan, I realize who Raycate really is -- he is DWM assistant editor Alan Barnes! Despite obviously not following the books in general to closely -- mentioning Lungbarrow but ignoring some of the evidence in Cold Fusion with all of the hints of Patience and pre-Hartnell Doctors that makes it clear that there is more than just the simple Looms going on, puts the column a bit to anti-New Adventures for my taste. I'm not a big fan of the Looms either, and think that we can manage to leave it or see what else happens with it in the future books... And can we ban "Occam's Razor" from all fantasy fiction columns and usenet postings from now on please!
Despite those complaints, I found myself enjoying the article a great deal -- lots of interesting connections are made, and the DWM SPOTS are quite fun. This column pulled from a lot of diverse, different source; not limiting itself just to the TV series, but on all sorts of different pieces of DW fiction. This is exactly the sort of column DWM should have in order to be relevant to Doctor Who fans today -- not just celebrating the corpse of a dead program, but pulling from the books, Nth Doctor scripts -- anything really, as long as it's all tied together. And there are some fab photos: the Lalla photo leading off the article, and the seventh Doctor / Ray photo from Delta and the Bannermen.
Timelines -- so the UK finally discovered that the real "Doctor Who of the 90s" is called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. :)
I don't usually read the Archive that closely; certainly not the episode-by-episode guide (after all, I can grab the video if I want to) -- and I'm not the sort of fan that cares which studio was used on which day, or whatever. However, the Archive is certainly a valuable piece of the magazine for fans that like this sort of thing. Even stories that are hardly classics -- and The Time Monster is certainly not a classic Who story -- can have archives filled with interesting pieces of information and trivia. [I hadn't really thought about this story featuring the last scene with the whole "UNIT family", for example -- and the date and time makes for your hardest core trivia contests...]
Out of the TARDIS turns out to be one of the better ways to interview people that have been interviewed 1000 times before -- as they aren't really Doctor Who questions at all, really? It's not one of the first pieces of the magazine I turn to, but there are usually a few funny questions and answers. (The Richard Franklin one, of course, was the funniest in simply ages.)
One of the better installments of the comic strip; I feel the ghost of Grant Morrisson through some of the surprise conclusions. I think that the DWM Doctor (I'd like to find a way to call him something that isn't the Ninth Doctor -- because when & if a new TV or movie series is on, we know he'll be called the Ninth Doctor by almost everyone) is working out alright; of course he isn't in that much of this issue, instead of it being given over to the origin of the Threshold, which meant, for the first time, I actually found the Threshold to be rather interesting. I'm not as excited by the comic strip as I'd like to be -- it's not that I think Doctor Who isn't suited for a comic strip (of course it is). The potential is there however...
I usually love Jackie Jenkins, as I can often relate to the situations described. This wasn't one of the funniest columns...but I've often found the "trying to hide that you are a fan but failing" bit is one of the usual column themes. Of course, I can't pretend to be "from PR and Advertising" -- computer programmers already are pegged as being Star Trek geeks anyways, so why bother?
Shelf Life is a favorite of mine, since I'm a regular Doctor Who book reader and often Shelf Life is the only section of the magazine that mentions the books at all. I haven't seen or read either of the two books yet -- but my interest in Vanderdeken's Children has been high (and I think the cover is excellent). There's been a habit of typos in recent Shelf Lives, however, as Walking to Babylon is now written by Justin Richards. Perhaps they are just modeling themselves on the books they are reviewing? :) Dave's reviews are always interesting -- as they pull together a variety of references, and aren't just boring "buy this", "don't buy this" types of reviews.
Interviews with cast and crew are either some of the best -- or the worst -- bits of the magazine. Mervyn Haisman and Rodney Bennett focus on one writer and one director of the series. It is always interesting to see how the crew involved behind the scenes react to their stories in retrospect -- I wouldn't be a Doctor Who fan if it wasn't for Ark in Space, so comments on that story particularly interest me. You get an interesting feel about how much the director influenced those early stories in his interview. The Mervyn Haisman interview was good because -- by digging out old Quark artwork -- you get to see less common Doctor Who images.
In my mind, Doctor Who Magazine should celebrate -- as much as possible, everything that we can possibily connect to Doctor Who -- not just why it is a great tv program, but why it is great concept for comics, or books, or movies. It isn't perfect in my mind -- I'd like to see more, not less, coverage of the books and other "90s" Doctor Who. I don't just want DWM to be a nostalgia magazine, to be read by twenty and thirty somethings pining for the TV show of their childhood. Fortunately, the main feature columns have rarely been more interesting than the recent ones, providing a differing vantage point than what you would get online or by just reading the books.