All the saved, war zombies and the Brigadier's rebirth: My big Doctor Who ideas

There is no new Doctor Who Christmas special this year, but that's all right - I got lots of Doctor Who stories inside me.

I've been coming up with them since I was six years old, although the first decade or so it was always something like 'Return of the Daleks', which had the Daleks, and they were returning from somewhere, and all of these were absolute rip-offs of the Dalek Invasion of Earth.

I've never had any real hopes of actually writing some proper Doctor Who somewhere, partly due to the tyranny of distance, and mostly due to my own cowardice and lack of ambition. But I can still daydream about what kind of Who story I would tell, and these are my top five ideas for Doctor Who stories that I always wanted to write. 

They are in no particular order, and they all feature the current Doctor, because my favourite doctor is always the current Doctor.

Doctor Who and the Planet of the Saved

This was born out of the classic Adric Conundrum - why couldn't the TARDIS just materialise next to Adric when his spaceship is about to crash into Earth and kill the dinosaurs, drag him on board and go on his merry way?

But if if he could do that, there were probably a lot of people across the universe he could save. Passengers on planes that went down in the cold ocean and were never found, or more than just one family in Pompeii. He could pick them up and take them away.

That meant he would have to set up a new world where they have no further impact on history, and live out long, happy and fulfilling lives in another galaxy or something.

I never had a plot other than the TARDIS crew showing up in a weird community that was a absolute mish-mash of Earth pop culture, but always thought the revelation that the Doctor was behind it would be a third act rug puller, and that it was probably done by a future Doctor, who managed to do it without falling into the usual Time Lord Victorius mode.

Doctor Who and the Second Life of Alistair

So if the Brigadier's consciousness was possibly still out there in a Cyberman, then his daughter Kate would definitely do everything she could to sort that out, and would have access to some kind of cloning technology, and could reboot Alistair as a badass super warrior for the 21st century.

The twist would be that Alistair is a bloodthirsty maniac who just wants to kill everybody, because death means nothing to him, and he'd have to be talked around to being the ultimate warrior for peace, which he always was in a strange way, before being let loose on the universe again. 

All I know is that I'd watch a series that had a super-hot young Brigadier Lethbridge-Stuart bombing around time and space with the Doctor for a while. 

Doctor Who and the One Where He Gets Chased By a Corridor

Everybody who read a New Adventure in the 90s thought they had one in them, because people had been invited to send in blind submissions, and they found some astonishing talent. They had an Australian, for goodness sake! 

Trying to be as clever as all the hot young writers in that series, my story would have started at the first Ashes test after the Dalek Invasion, with an older Tegan and Bernice getting absolute shitfaced before everyone is called to a hidden bunker that has gone crazy. Of course it turned out to be built from a bit of TARDIS from the 70s that was alive, and the new and very clever idea I had was to have the TARDIS crew running from a corridor, rather than down a corridor.

That's it, that's all I had. I was very drunk at the time.

Doctor Who and the War Zombies

When the rumour that Sir Lord Peter Jackson wanted to do a Doctor Who story was running about, it was impossible not to consider what we'd all like to see from the big man.

My own daydream involved a time travel experiment from the 30th century going wrong - because for a while every Doctor Who story was about future tech going berzerk - and bringing the dead of the Somme back to life. I've seen Jackson's collection of WW1 war planes in the flesh, and can't help but imagine a scene of the Doctor flying over a battlefield filled with the advancing living dead in a biplane that the Doctor is holding together with string and sheer force of will. 

Doctor Who and the Secret of the Curator

I thought I was being so clever.

I had this idea that that explained both the Curator from Day of the Doctor, Susan, and the Brain of Morbius pre-Doctors, and it was that was there were 13 incarnations before William Hartnell, but he was always the first Doctor, because he tried on other personas throughout his regenerations, including as the Architect, and the Explorer, and yes, the Curator, before settling on The Doctor, but that something happened in that final reckoning that wiped the memory all his previous lives.  

And then Chris Chibnill did almost exactly that, and it was actually not that good an idea at all.

Which is a better metaphor for what happened to these who ideas of mine that anything else I can think of, so I'll leave the stage now - and incidentally, a happy Christmas, to all of you at home!

Inside Judge Dredd: You know why I keep coming back here?

It has felt like I've been in a slightly abusive relationship with 2000ad this year, so I'm taking a break from the regular prog for now, and will undoubtedly catch up later. But I still get the Dredd Megazine every month, because it's been the best value for money comic book I have access to. And I'm glad I do, because the single best comic story I read all year was 'Old Man Joe' by Ken Niemand, Dan Cornwall, Matt Soffe and Annie Parkhouse in Judge Dredd Megazine #470

Niemand has been a reliable Dredd writer for the past decade or so - he captures the absurdity of life in Mega City-One better than any current regular writer, and that absurdity is the key factor for the strip's success (Dredd isn't the main character in his own story, the city and its citizens is). And Cornwall has become one of the great Dredd artists in recent years, (while also killing it on Rok of the Reds, also running in the Meg).

Niemand's work is often humourous, and can sometimes feel like a gimmick that has got slightly out of hand, and Old Man Joe really should feel like that. It's a semi-sequel to a story where Dredd teamed up with his Stallone movie counterpart to take down a bunch of clones who are clearly Rambo, Rocky, Cobra and Demolition Man, with a retired Dredd from another dimension unexpectedly falling into this particular existence at the end, and this follows his journey. It should be some dumb fun.

But it also says some very interesting things about how Mega City-One has become so fucked up, and how regular citizens get by in the daily life in the Big Meg, and how things could have been so very, very different. 

And then it ends on a note of grace that rarely appears in Dredd tales. Just a simple piece of information that actually make you feel sorry for Old Stoney-face, because it gives him a glimpse of something he never knew he needed, and can never have, and the man who can do anything realsies there's nothing he can do about. All he can do is sit and think about it.

The city might be the real character, but it's a rare story that really gets inside Dredd's helmet, and these 10 pages of comics do just that. It still had a dose of the usual ultra-violence and wicked humour, but sometimes you get a story like this, where you can see the man buried deep within the legend of Dredd. 

Only Wagner does it better - and he's coming back with a story called Death of a Judge in the new year, which might draw me back into the orbit of the galaxy's greatest again - but it's genuinely nice to see there are always new creators out there, ready to pick up the emotional nightstick of Dredd and smack you around the skull with it.

I listen to the voice of truth

Our children have reached the age when they can be emotionally brutal - we are often told how fat we are, and how we are such big failures for not having dinner ready on time or something, which ain't exactly a thrill.

But it does mean I listen to them when they inadvertently pay a huge compliment, because I will grasp onto that truth like a man who is drowning in the world. 

I was going to get a haircut the other day, but the six-year-old came into the room when I was watching Two-Lane Blacktop and she said the two guys in that looked just like me, 'except for the glasses', and considering those two guys were James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, the prettiest of all the 70s soft rock scene - and there was some stuff competition there - I can put off that haircut for a couple of weeks.

The child has spoken. I listen to the voice of truth. I don't need a haircut.

You could not shut me up

If I ever have to do a filibuster speech - and I truly hope I never do, because it is definitely one of the most ridiculous mechanisms in all of politics - I know exactly how I'd do it. 

If I had to talk about one subject for 24 hours, completely off the top of my head, I'd talk about 2000ad or Doctor Who.

There is a serious chance I could run out of puff if I had to talk about a lot of the other great entertainments I've enjoyed - I could probably do an 18-hour lecture of the merits of Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez - but something like 2000ad had thousands of issues, and hundreds of stories, creators and themes to dig into.

There is a straight overall history of the galaxy's greatest comic over the past five decades I could explain, getting into the various creators and the various careers, all the background production stuff, the themes of the stories, the art styles that come in and out of fashion.

I'm sure I would start rambling nonsensically after a day or so, and might even resort to slagging off some of the creators. There are a couple of current writers and artists working for 2000ad whose work I really dislike, but I never really mention it here on the blog, because they seem like nice people, and there is a far greater than zero chance they could see anything nasty I say about them, and I always want to concentrate on the finer things in life, rather than spend all day moaning abut the crap - but I couldn't guarantee I won't start running my mouth off several hours into an unbroken speech about it.

I've read every issue of the first 2400 progs, and 95 percent of the spinoffs, and have probably read them multiple times. I've read almost every behind the scenes book by editors, writers and editors, and all that information is pent up inside my head, just waiting to spill out.

It's the same thing with the Who. There is just such a wide spread of it, and even though I haven't come close to consuming every Doctor Who story ever written - I'm hundreds of stories behind on Big Finish alone - I have been watching it and reading books about it my whole life, and have enormous amounts of trivia and opinions locked away. There's an hour's worth of blather about how Patrick Troughton is the most important Doctor, or why Bernice Summerfield is the best companion, or which Dalek story is the best, or a thousand other subjects. I think I could talk about Doctor Who until I keeled over.

I remain absolutely astounded by the human mind's ability to retain information, especially when it's mostly useless. All this information stuck in my head, millions of bits of data. There are thousands upon thousands of individual comics panels seared into my head.

I probably won't ever have to do any kind of filibuster, and will never be required to unload all the information I have on a British sci-fi comic or a very silly and extremely moving  TV show. At least I have the Tearoom to get rid of it, and if I could talk for days about one thing, I could get a few more years out of this thing.

Dice Man: I got too much at stake!

- Dice Man #5: You are Dice Man in Murder One

Art by Steve Dillon 

Story/game by Pat Mills 

Letters by Tom Frame

When you know it's all over

The look on Sterling Hayden's face at the end of The Killers is truly one of the great moments in Kubrick films. After all the plans, after all the betrayals, it's a cheap suitcase that ultimately undoes anything, and all Hayden can do is watch the money blow away in the wind.

He doesn't rage or cry or scream, he just watches it all blow away, numb at the idea that it was all for nothing, and he's going to get caught and it doesn't matter, nothing matters.

People who say Kubrick was all brain and no heart always ignore the innumerable touches of humanity in his work, including the despair on the tarmac. 

I'm still playing Rastan on a Friday night

For a couple of years as a teenager, every Friday night was spent in the back of the Temuka Fish Supply, playing the Rastan video game, and rarely getting past the second stage.

The games in the back of Lester's place were coated in grease, but also full of bright lights and noise and violence, I would spend hours and any small change I had there. I never had the time or money to get really, really good at something, but I was an extremely enthusiastic amateur.

The kids that I have somehow helped bring into the world haven't really played any modern games, but they love the old, simple stuff - which is fair enough, since their dad is both old and simple - and it's easy enough to find arcade emulators online, and play the old games.

They have both gone hardcore on the early Sonic games - they're really not very good at them, but are getting visibly better - and they do spend an inordinate amount of time watching game walkthroughs on Youtube, which is a step above me. I was always impressed by how far Kerri Benson could get in Rastan in the Fish Supply days, but never felt the urge to watch him go through level after level.

So I've been inspired to find the old games I used to love, and spent so much time on. I guess I don't have to pay 20c a pop anymore, so can get some good time in and the lovely wife was out on a Friday night recently and I didn't have anything better to do, so I played Rastan nonstop for a couple of hours. I even got up to the third level.

Thirty something years on, and I'm still playing the old games, and they're still so much fun. I don't need the modern thrills when I've got a basic platform game to get through.

A moment of Zenith

- Art by the mighty Steve Yeowell, commissioned by some magnificent bastards who know what the world needs - more pics of sixties super group supreme Cloud 9! And Miss Wonderstarr!

The Also People: Do what you want with him

After getting through nearly 50 novels in the Doctor Who New Adventures series in the past couple of years, I can categorically state that the best gag is in the non-aggression pact between the People and the Time Lords that is printed in The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch, where they definitely declare that they will not mess with each other in any way - with the single exception of the Doctor, and the People are allowed to do whatever they want with him, including and not limited to execution, and the Time Lords are cool with that.

These books did get very grim sometimes, with the Doctor's companions often tortured and hurt, but there are still some laughs on the far side of the next galaxy. 

Getting in early with the Knives

Even though it was heading to streaming in a couple of weeks, I still went and saw the new Knives Out film at the cinema the other week, and I did it for three distinct reasons:

1) Seeing movies in a theatre is rad. I love the popcorn, I love the big screen, I love making the effort.

2) I can concentrate more on what is happening on screen, because like everybody else in the world, I get easily distracted when watching anything at home. The phone goes in the pocket as soon as I'm in the theatre, and my full attention is devoted to the events of the film, which makes things a lot easier when a film has a lot of plot.

3) It's just nice to sit with a movie for a while, before everybody else in the world has seen it, and the endless hot takes begin. I can have a think about it, before the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash. Before all the endless think-pieces about What It all Means. They'll be unavoidable for a while, in news headlines and constant notifications, so it was nice to take a breath before it all kicked off. 

There are huge benefits in cutting yourself off from the wider discourse. I still see a lot of people writing off the Avatar movies because they don't leave a cultural footprint, but that's a feature, not a bug, for me, because I'll go and see some extraordinary imagery directed by one of the greatest action action of all time, and have a blast for three hours and never have to think about it again, and that sounds about right to me. 

I also just gave up all social media for a few days recently, because Quentin Tarantino said something fucking stupid in an interview, and even though Quentin Tarantino has been saying fucking stupid things in interviews for 30 years, my feeds were almost nothing but people saying how fucking stupid it was, and that they were never into his films anyway, and it was coming from everyone, including a lot of smart people who I love and respect, so I just tuned out of it altogether, just until everybody got it out of their system. (And if they were not on about that, they were pointing out that R Crumb is deeply, deeply problematic in nearly every way - no shit, Sherlock - and also that they were never into his comics anyway.)

Anyway, just to add to all the noise, I thought Wake Up Dead Man was terrific, with a mediocre mystery - the confessional scene early on gave everything away - some strong character work, and a handling of massive religious issues with a deft and deeply human approach.  

It might have taken me two weeks to come to that conclusion, but at least it's one I'm sure of now.

A small taste of immortality in the letter columns

While there are still plenty of regular comics that feature letter pages full of missives from readers, they're not the ubiquitous experience they once were. There was the general idea that when the internet came along, there was no need to print letters in the actual comics, and they could be filled with 'backmatter' instead.

But I still miss them, and always got a lot more out of them than I ever did from any message board rant or social media post. That move away from regular letters did shatter a fragile community of regular hacks, and the hundreds of thousands of other readers who saw these comments and criticisms.

They were an insight into a world that is terribly diluted now, and sometimes I read reprints and old comics and feel like I'm missing something without the letter columns, like the Zap Goes the Legion trade paperback put out by DC recently. 

It's hundreds of pages of Legion of Super-Heroes comics from the 60s and 70s,  and it's a book that covers some monumental changes in the super-teens, but sometimes it only feels like you're getting half the story. It's hard to keep track of who the leader is, or what is driving the sudden moves to restyle many of the main characters. There is some kind of distinct point where Shrinking Violet and Phantom Girl suddenly look radically different, and there is obviously a lot of talk about it going on, but it's all hidden away behind the comics.

But I also do miss the letters columns as something I can experience, without actually taking part in them. The very idea of sending a letter to a comic as a kid was prohibitively expensive, sending from the arse end of the world, and I was always so far behind - it would take months for the comics to show up in my local stores, so anything I had to say would be hopelessly dated. I still read all the letters, and felt a connection with all these fellow dorks, all over the world, but didn't really participate.

I made some feeble efforts over the years. I got my name in the late, lamented Neon movie magazine and even in an issue of Love and Rockets, because I entered competitions. I didn't win anything, except the pleasure of seeing my name there.

It's obviously a lot easier to send letters now that it can be done digitally, although the only time I really tried was when I wrote to Back Issue Magazine, and got in there. And just this year, 2000ad published a letter of mine. It was, of course, a complaint that I had to give it up, which was a little extraordinary - I just wanted Tharg to know that they were losing the loyal of readers for the most capitalist of reasons, and they put it in the prog.  

It's a tiny mark of immortality, and I see that when I can read the letters in old issues of Fantastic Four, and see a lot of familiar names. TM Maple and his ilk are long gone, but his name is there in print forever, and so is mine, in the tiniest of places.

Sergio Aragonés' Solo: Nobody stole my coat.

- Sergio Aragonés Solo 

Written and drawn by Sergio Aragonés 

Assistance from Mark Evanier, Stan Sakai, Tom Luth, Lee Loughridge

Don't do Whamageddon wrong

I saw some people in real life get genuinely upset when someone played Last Christmas within earshot the other day, and I didn't say anything at the time because they didn't want to hear it, but I was definitely thinking it - man, you're doing it wrong.

Whamageddon is just a piece of dumb fun, and getting agitated by dumb fun defeats the whole point of it. If something as silly as that gets your goat, maybe your goat deserves to be got. I'm not going to intentionally ruin the fun for anybody else, and I'm still playing the game, but it's just a game.

It would like getting upset when you get Rick-rolled. This still happens to me a couple of times a year and I am always abso-fucking-lutely delighted when it gets me. I never think it's not funny, and admire that I can still get fooled, even when I've been on full alert for it for more than a decade.

It's a grim world out there, children. Get your dumb fun where you can, and don't cry about it.

Bookcases of the Damned (part five of five): The most precious

My lovely wife has bought me a few bookcases over the years, but this was the first, in the first few years of our relationship. It's held a few different things over the years, but now it's where my absolute favourite books all live, safe behind a solid wood door.

This is where all the Love and Rockets are, and my Dorkin and Bagge books. All the regular 2000ads are boxed up down below, but those big beautiful hardback annuals, especially with the McMahon craziness, need to be at hand.

Last year I went through all the Big Book series that Paradox put out, and they're still absolute bangers, so they stay here too.

These are my favourite comics, these are the ones I would try to save if the house was burning down (and I'd got the kids to safety, I guess). I almost certainly wouldn't be able to pick up this whole bookcase and get it out the door with flames around me, but I'd probably still try.  

Bookcases of the Damned (part four of five): Keeping it in the closest

I can never resist a Criterion Closet video when I see them - some completely random cinematic creative getting to rave about the films that mean the most to them is something that will always grab my attention.

But I also think that closest looks so damn good, that I've gone and made my own mini version of the thing.

I'm definitely on Team Physical Media and still have hundreds and hundreds of DVDs. They used to live in bookcases out in the open, but now I've claimed some closet space for them, and have them lining the walls of that space. They also used to be in alphabetical order, but now they're all shoved in there randomly.

For the past couple of years I've been largely working from home, and have had DVDs playing in the background whole I work with distinct triple features in the background. The ones up in the cupboard are the films I've had playing this year, cinematic brilliance in the air as I do the job.

Down on the floor are all the movies I still have to watch, and the TV shows that I'm going to go through next year. That's a lot of hours. They might not be on a bookcase, and just piled up in the corner, but they probably deserve one. 

I'll never get to the Criterion closet, I barely see any Criterion DVDs or Blu Rays around these parts, but I can be happy with my own little version of it.

Bookcases of the Damned (part three of five): They're not all mine

My wife doesn't have the same hoarding habits as me, and only needs a couple of shelves for her books, although there are a considerable amount of cookbooks and such scattered throughout the house.

But this is where she keeps the things that show her own eclectic tastes - more thirst for classic literature than I've managed, although I feel like she's somehow stolen Joe R Lansdale from me. 

We do read some of the same books - we've both devoured all the Slow Horses books and obviously the Lansdale - but she's also has a taste for the Penguin editions of classic books. She also has books on financial literacy and how to win at chess.

There're not my choices, but I like the beauty of of her picks, and the things it says about her personality and priorities in life. Her books are just as sexy as mine.

Bookcases of the Damned (part two of five): Four colours and beyond

Most of the comics I still own are in dark, dry boxes under the bed and beneath the house. A couple of dozen large boxes are stuffed with hundreds and hundreds of individual issues, but all the hardbacks and graphic novels and trade paperbacks live here.

This bookcase was another 40th birthday present, the baby brother of yesterday's leviathan, but now houses nothing but comics. 

Odd gems and massive collections - I can read all the good Charley's War in one go, or indulge in hundreds and hundreds of pages of Eddie Campbell's Alec. The DC Solo book might be my favourite mainstream publication of the 21st century, and was bought in Brisbane for a bargain. 

There's lots and lots of Alan Moore, and a substantial chunk of beloved Marvel that I should probably be more shamed about. Luther Arkwright and Charles Burns and Batman, sharing the shelves. 

There are all my DC Digests tucked up the top, a favourite format that I genuinely find harder to read these days, but they still feel like supreme pop culture artefacts. There's loads and loads of Vertigo, because I'll always be a Vertigo kid.

It's another bookcase that has spilled beyond its borders, with a small space against the wall in the corner, where a substantial stack of Marvel Essential and DC Showcase books have grown, thousands of pages of comics, shoved into the corner. 

There are no comics up on top of this bookcase, just the book club survivors that I haven't given away or pushed onto poor unsuspecting friends.

This is not the biggest bookcase in the house, but there are universes in these shelves, entire histories and continuities. Comics give you so many stories, about all kinds of things, and they're right there, on these shelves heaving with story and art.