It was a seismic moment that sent ripples through the collective psyche of a generation. On Wednesday 6th December 1989, at approximately 7.59pm, the closing credits rolled on Part 3 of Survival, the concluding episode of Doctor Who‘s 26th series. And, as Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred walked arm-in-arm into a decidedly ominous sunset, one long-running tradition of BBC continuity was conspicuous by its absence: the gravelly-voiced reassurance that “Doctor Who will be back for more adventures this time next year…”

With good reason, of course. The regular series, it transpired, would be off air for the ensuing 16 years, until Russell T Davies’ barnstorming 2005 revival rightly reinstated it as the BBC’s flagship science fiction show. For some young fans, however, the ongoing trauma of this cold turkey TARDIS treatment would prove the inspiration for a wave of prolific creativity. Certainly the ripples were felt in Keighley, West Yorkshire, where 13-year-old Patrick Wray swiftly began to pine for the adventures of his favourite Time Lord.

Patrick was no stranger to the world of DIY publishing. In 1987, aged ten, he had already produced his first home-made comic – the charming Flash Gordon-influenced The Adventures Of Captain Pod…

However, as a 13-year-old in 1990, his passion for Doctor Who – and his disappointment at the show’s disappearance from the TV schedules – began to dominate his artistic endeavours. Over to you, Patrick…

“It was in the dark days of 1990, the year after the show’s original run had ended, that I decided to create my own Doctor Who comic strip. The fact that this was the first year the show had not been on TV since the 1985 hiatus was surely no coincidence.  If I was unable to watch new episodes of Doctor Who then I’d have to make my own!

The audience for my comic was mainly my mother and sister who, it has to be said, were pretty indifferent to it… and to Doctor Who in general. Though mum was polite and encouraging. Attempts to show it to school friends proved disastrous, and the strip was met with ridicule. By 1990, Doctor Who was not a hip proposition amongst Britain’s youth (not at my school anyway) and one could argue that the show was at its lowest ebb of popularity… though this was unjustified based on the quality of Sylvester McCoy’s excellent last season. A few copies of my comic were run off, priced 10p each.

My Doctor Who comic strip featured my own self-created incarnation of the Doctor. My idea being that this was who the Seventh Doctor might have regenerated into. My Doctor wears a red bow tie and stripy trousers, reminiscent of those you might see on Cambridge punters of the 1920s. And a purple velvet dinner jacket with question marks on the lapel. He is good-natured, stoical and has a friendly, grandfatherly manner about him. He is old-looking with grey hair and a moustache. His assistant is Adrian, a tank top-wearing fop from the fictional town of Pennyworth.

My comic strip Doctor met various derivative monsters, including Kill Droids and Insectacides, as well as Daleks, Cybermen, The Master and The Rani… all in a story that was very similar to Time and the Rani. Story titles included The Factory of Fear, Revolt on Castle Zynak and Faceless People. He had eleven adventures in total, spread across nine one-off issues, plus two more included in the 1991 Annual.  Most of them were created in 1990 with two more and a few unfinished stories being produced in 1991 but by then, with the show still off our screens, my interest was waning and the comic fizzled out after the completion of a spin-off magazine. An attempt to revive it in 1993 with a second incarnation of my comic strip Doctor was spurred by some re-runs on BBC2 but was not completed.

With the show largely AWOL from our screens for most of the 1990s, my enthusiasm for all things Doctor Who went with it to some degree. It was the 2005 revival that reignited my interest. The viewing of some vintage classic era DVDs, including The Dalek Invasion of Earth – a masterpiece of dystopian sci-fi by any measure – also got me thinking about my childhood fascination with the show and about my own Doctor Who comic.

I dug out the original strips and decided to make an all new story for old times’ sake. In 2012, this resulted in the spoofy The Dalek Invasion of Keighley. The story was a kind of meta-Doctor Who story featuring me and my family members as characters visited by the Doctor and Adrian, just in time for a Dalek invasion. I made the comic at a time when I was getting back into making comics, partly as a fun exercise that would serve to re-familiarise myself with the process of creating sequential narratives.

It was a lot of fun to make but ended up taking much longer than I originally planned. It was also created partly as a nostalgic Christmas gift to my sister who was once again pretty nonplussed by the whole thing! I still have all the original drawings from my original run of home-made Doctor Who and I cherish them… though they reek of my parents’ cigarette smoke. The show clearly has the power to spark the imagination in all kind of ways. For writers and artists it provides an open circuit platform from which to operate. A place where any idea, no matter how idiosyncratic. can be explored within the framework of  Doctor Who.

Every fan has their own personal history with Doctor Who, their favourite Doctor, favourite companion. My formative memories of watching the show (beginning with early 1980s Tom Baker) are mixed with the ideas it sparked in my imagination and ultimately with my own version of the Doctor.  Though he is known only to me, he is in a strange way as much a part of my relationship with Doctor Who as the character depicted on television – he is truly ‘My Doctor’.”

Patrick also sent over a collection of his somewhat darker comic strips from his later teenage years, with my favourite being 1992’s bloody The Texas Worm Invasion…

Thanks so much to Patrick for allowing me to replicate his own original blog entries on the Haunted Generation website. The full story of Patrick’s 1990s Doctor Who comics, with further scans, can be found here:

http://www.patrickwray.com/2018/10/the-comic-strip-doctor-who.html

There are further examples of his work here:

http://www.patrickwray.com/p/biography.html

And Patrick is also the author of Ghost Stories I Remember, a new book of supernatural memories published by Collosive Press. To quote:

“A series of half-recalled encounters with the supernatural that invoke a sense of shared memory about the ghosts that haunt all our lives. Borrowing the autobiographical format of I Remember, by the late experimental artist and writer Joe Brainard, Patrick Wray recalls and illustrates various episodes from his life where the supernatural may (or may not) have brushed against the everyday – from Rick Astley to the Holy Ghost.”

It’s available here:

https://colossive.com/product/ghost-stories-i-remember-patrick-wray-zine/

Felt Trips is a collaborative effort. If anyone wants to contribute their own childhood drawings from the era, I would be utterly delighted – please drop me a line using the “Contact” link at the top of the page. A good quality scan would be perfect, but – if not – then a clear photo of your artwork, lying flat, is fine. And maybe a few words of explanation, too: when the drawings were done, how old you were, what inspired you to tackle those particular subjects? Thanks so much.

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