Doctor Who thing of the day: “Doctor Who in Comics: 1964-2011”

A new exhibit exploring Doctor Who in comic book form has just opened at The Cartoon Museum in London.

I haven’t seen the exhibit -- and honestly, I probably won’t, since comics are not my favorite medium for storytelling -- but the blog IanVisits has a nice look at it. A taste:

The exhibition is basically a display of some of the more interesting pages from the various Dr Who comics, with small text descriptions explaining why that particular storyline is significant to the fans and collectors. A few larger boards give more history about the artists and magazines themselves.

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Looking around the displays, one comic caught my eye, as Operation Protus from Doctor Who Magazine in 1995 featured a tube train carriage. Despite being produced in 1995, it still showed a character smoking on the tube – which had been banned 11 years earlier. Or, maybe the story was sent in the past, and judging by the wide, slightly luxurious seating on the tube train, in an alternative reality.

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The exhibition will delight any Dr Who fan, and it was slightly amusing to overhear several children being mystified about the existence of the earlier Doctors – which supports my suspicion that the BBC (and satellite TV channels) would like to pretend Dr Who didn’t exist before 2005. That was offset by overhearing adults seeing the older characters and commenting on which one was the doctor they grew up with.