As I was part of the Doctor Who audience growing up in the ’70s, it was great to have the opportunity to write a short story featuring a fantastic character such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. For me it was exciting to adapt my writing style to integrate with a pre-existing universe.

I chose to include pirates in the adventure, because for me, they represent enigmatic and shadowy characters from the murky past of history, epitomising working class entrepreneurs; forging fortunes in life, by their own sweat and guile, not afraid to operate outside of the establishment. Plus, when writing I like to get into character, and who doesn’t like dressing as a pirate for the day?

A word of warning for the unwary, ill prepared traveller of adventures. Never upset a pirate. A scallywag will find themselves dancing the hempen jig soon enough.

It’s been hard work for everybody but I’m beyond delighted to be bringing this out, especially as 2019 is the centenary year of Jon Pertwee’s birth. The annual means a great deal to me. I was particularly thrilled to get all the surviving UNIT family on board for the annual, and I’ve been knocked out by the enthusiasm and talent of the contributors.

In 1971, when the official annual would have been published, the Doctor had been forced into exile on Earth by his people, the Time Lords, but the series’ production team still managed to take the show away from the confines of this planet and I was keen to do the same in the annual. The challenge was laid down and the contributors rose to it in style, so we’ve got a great balance of adventures in space and time.

The official 1972 annual may well have been lost in the time vortex – like the Doctor himself has been known to – but we hope fans agree that our version makes up for it and is worth the long wait.

Well, what’s 47 years to a Time Lord anyway . . . ?

There’s been a terrific amount of interest in this project, including a great many calls to complete the run of annuals for the classic era, so I’m pleased to say that I’m now going to be turning my attention to an unofficial annual for 1987. After that, who knows?!

Ever since The Lucy Wilson Mysteries was devised, Shaun (Russell) and I had in a mind an adventure that would see Lucy team up with the Bledoe Cadets. We knew there was much fun to be had in having a mixed-race teenage girl interacting with children from 1937. We sowed the seeds in the very first novel in The Lucy Wilson Mysteries range by having her see a photograph of herself and her grandfather as a child, this was built upon in my own novel, Night of the Intelligence, in which it is revealed that James has memories of Lucy and Hobo. So, it’s been a lot of fun exploring those plot points and finally revealing the truth behind them.

After my short story was published, I pitched another story idea which Andy asked me to develop into a novel proposal. I very much felt, from that point on, that Andy was keeping me on his reserve bench, waiting for the right position to ‘play’ me in. The creative process has been pretty fluid ever since the first writers’ meeting in Cardiff, with a strong sense of collaboration and mutual support between Andy and all of the writers. That’s certainly been appreciated by me, with this being my first published novel. Each of our slots came with a character to focus on, but otherwise we were pretty free to tell the sort of story we wanted to tell. However, my slot came with a shopping list. I was given the title, Lucy Wilson & The Bledoe Cadets, so I knew from the start it would be a cross-franchise book. Some of the book needed to take place in 2018 to mark the 50th anniversary of Lethbridge-Stewart. Added to that, the story would have to feature time travel so that Lucy, Hobo and the Bledoe Cadets could meet. And it couldn’t contradict anything already established regarding the Bledoe Cadets and alien encounters. Finally, it had to be set before the events of 1938 in The Forgotten Son, so that Sir Alistair could spend time with his brother James. That might sound like a whole lot of limitations, but I found it really liberating. It focuses the mind, being given restrictions like that.

From the moment I first read that short story, I knew Tim would get it right. He has a great handle on the Bledoe Cadets, who I created for my novel, The Forgotten Son, and I’m rather protective of them. But Tim ‘got’ them. Of course, the only risk was trusting a first-time novelist with this story. I’m happy to say, it’s a risk that paid off!

Once the story was decided, Andy and I bounced back and forth the idea of having the story told from both the Brigadier’s point of view, and Lucy’s. Telling the adventure for the more mature readers in the Lethbridge-Stewart range, and then retelling it for a younger reader as part of The Lucy Wilson Mysteries. We had hoped to release both books simultaneously, but the logistics didn’t make that feasible, especially as, for Tim, it would essentially mean writing two novels at the same time! So, it was decided that Tim would write the Lethbridge-Stewart version first, and then we would sit down to discuss how to approach The Lucy Wilson Mysteries version. Lucy’s own perspective brings with it some unique things, not least a different opening before the Brigadier turns up. Although it’s essentially the same story, both books can be read independently, however reading both version will provide a more fuller take on the story.

STRONG FEMALE VOICES AT THE COMIC GURU: MEET THE AUTHORS!

As we approach the end of this turbulent decade strong female characters have begun to take centre stage across all film, comics and TV drama, most especially sci-fi. Both DC and Marvel have had enormous successes with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel respectively.

One such organisation to embrace this change is the Comic Guru, now located in the Queen Street arcade. And to celebrate this, the Comic Guru is partnering with another staple of Cardiff’s sci-fi scene, award-winning independent publisher Candy Jar Books.

To coincide with the recent release of Captain Marvel, the first woman-led instalment in Marvel’s cinematic universe, the Comic Guru is hosting its first collaborative event with Candy Jar, an author meet and greet showcasing just a few of Candy Jar’s strong female authors. Fans will get a chance to meet Alyson Leeds, an author from the Doctor Who spin-off Lethbridge-Stewart series, as well as children’s sci-fi authors Cherry Cobb and Michelle Briscombe.

Owner of the Comic Guru, Kristian Barry, says: “Both the DC and Marvel comic and film franchises have been at the catalyst of change. They have always embraced diversity and championed equal rights. Captain Marvel shows that women can be superheroes too. At the Comic Guru we want to celebrate this, and with Mother’s Day coming up we thought it was an ideal opportunity.”

Candy Jar’s range of titles spans everything from children’s fiction to war memoirs. It is perhaps best known, however, for its Lethbridge-Stewart series, a fully licensed collection of novels about the adventures of the classic Doctor Who character Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. As one of the only non-BBC official Doctor Who products out there, the series has attracted an international readership, and it is currently in its sixth series.

Alyson Leeds, whose debut novel entitled Fear of the Web is based on old Doctor Who story, The Web of Fear, states: “The one thing I always disliked about The Web of Fear was how male dominated the storyline was, and being a part of the Lethbridge-Stewart series has given me a chance to make sure the females are given their platform to speak.”

Michelle Briscombe’s novel, The House on March Lane, contains two brave female protagonists, one from the modern day and the other from the Victorian era. Both characters are free thinkers and despite being separated by one hundred years they become unlikely friends.

Cherry Cobb, author of Will’s War, a book about a boy who time travels back to World War Two London, focuses mainly on male characters. Cherry says: ”My dad was eleven when he was evacuated from Plymouth. He often used to tell me stories about how they lived and I think this is why it felt more natural to me to write about the experience of a boy. Although Will’s War has a lot of male characters, I did not aim it at boys, but as something to be enjoyed by everyone.”

Shaun Russell continues: “We’re proud of the stand sci-fi has been taking recently. We’ve tried to make our statement with our authors, as well as our Lethbridge-Stewart spinoff, The Lucy Wilson Mysteries. Sci-fi is for everyone, boys and girls, and this event has something for the whole family. Not to mention, as it takes place the day before Mother’s Day, it might be just be the perfect opportunity to pick up a last minute gift.”

Publishing Co-ordinator, Keren Williams, elaborates: “Alongside author meet and greets, there will be a chance to get your hands on some free books, and if you are interested in becoming an author yourself, Candy Jar’s team will be available to chat throughout the day.”

And just for balance, Terry Cooper, author of the sci-fi comedy Kangazang! Small Cosmos, and director of the Welsh independent film, Offworld, will also be signing at the Comic Guru. He says: “I have two daughters myself and do recognise the importance of strong role models for girls. Despite my book being a laddish adventure story, it is the female character that ultimately saves the day. Equally in Offworld it is the female spaceship Captain that takes centre stage in my story.”

Kristian Barry continues: “I’m really looking forward to welcoming this group of talented authors into my shop, it is sure to be a stupendous start to many more Comic Guru events.”

Between Fear of the Web and Rise of the Dominator there are twelve further jumps; that’s twelve time periods in which our heroes find themselves. Three times twelve, in fact, as each of our heroes have an adventure in any given time period. Some of these jumps have been mentioned in the sequence of novels, but by the time of Rise of the Dominator only one of these adventures has been chronicled (the third novel in the sequence, The Danger Men, shows Bill Bishop’s adventure in 1999). This anthology chronicles a further eight adventures covering 1929, 1963, 1986, 1955, 1993 and more!

Finally, The Laughing Gnome gave me an opportunity to paint Nicholas Courtney’s likeness ‘undisguised’ on the cover of a Lethbridge-Stewart book, after a hiatus from the covers, due to working on the BBC Animations for Shada and The Macra Terror over the past couple of years. For this cover I utilised screen-grabs from of both the Brig and Anne Travers, which I then sketched digitally into position. From there I painted them digitally, using my usual technique, whereby I start with mid-skin tones, then add shadowed areas, down to almost black, then return to adding the lighter areas on the portrait up to white to give a nice realistic feel. In the detail areas I tend to zoom-in to a minimum of 250-300 pixels per square inch to ensure a realistic finish to my painting and to achieve the finer detail. I decided to go with a classic military green for the Brigadier’s uniform rather than the awful washed-out khaki/ochre of season seven.

With Anne, I used the same technique, although, when you get a nice likeness/screen grab, it often means that you have areas of the head cropped out of screen-shot, so I looked for other scenes where the rest of her hairstyle can be ascertained; in this case a small 1960s beehive, which she had in the latter episodes of The Web of Fear, although I did exaggerate it slightly to mimic a Gnomes hat. I also did a little bit of a search online to get eye/hair colour, etc, and incorporate those into the artwork. Each Portrait is around one-two days’ work, plus background, so in the end it takes around a week to paint each cover.

One of the things I have always enjoyed with some of the art jobs I’ve had in my career is when I get to create something from the author’s descriptions in the text, and with the Laughing Gnome a nice detailed description was available from Simon a Forward’s Scary Monsters. So I did a few slight alterations from my initial sketch, and ended up with the ‘cheery/sinister fellow’ featured on the final art, complete with a weathered look of an old Ornament with moss/lichen decorating his visage. This is probably the part of doing these books I enjoy the most, when your creative side is challenged, and you get to design your own creature from a brief, and you aren’t just copying a design or just adding effects/filters to a photograph. Like most of the other covers out there these days.

The plan was to release a book about the Brigadier in all his many iterations, but sadly due to some behind-the-scenes issues the book had to be delayed. We lost our original editor. I asked Andy (Frankham-Allen) to take over, which meant trying to fit it into his busy schedule. Andy also had to start more or less from scratch, which meant seeking out new contributors.

It’s been enjoyable process, although somewhat long-winded. I wanted to get as much variety as possible, with articles looking at not only the Brigadier’s television adventures, but also his other media appearances, including his time with Big Finish and our very own Lethbridge-Stewart range of novels. The result is, I hope, a nice mixed bag, which a little something to interest every fan of the Brigadier. I am pleased to say that the book is nearly finished and should be released very soon.

He has had a few names during his many lives, but the one for which he is best known is John Levene, the self-taught actor who brought to life the much-loved Benton in Doctor Who. Yet, his journey to our TV screens was hard and frequently painful, and what came afterwards was just as traumatic.

This is the emotional and truthful account of a life that should not have been lived. We follow the pure highs and brutal lows of a working-class Salisbury lad, and his struggle to get away from his origins as an ill, under-educated and misunderstood boy with no genuine prospects in a world in which he did not fit. His journey takes him to places like London’s West End as a private detective; Paris, Spain and Africa where he organised spectacular events. Then crossing the globe to South America to witness the enormous gulf between rich and poor, before moving to Hollywood and daring to dream of success.

Run the Shadows, Walk the Sun demonstrates that your life is not automatically set out for you when you are born. There are opportunities to be grasped if only you have the courage to take them.

We have often been asked by those who missed The HAVOC Files 2 the first time around if we’d ever reprint it. After much discussion, we decided doing so would present us with a couple of challenges and opportunities. One, at least one story in the original collection was set in the ‘future’ (Ashes of the Inferno), with information that, at the time, hadn’t been locked down. The author of the story in question, Andy Frankham-Allen, realised it would be the perfect chance to update that story so it better fit the narrative revealed since early 2016. Two, another story has since been released as part of a full-length novella, and thus it seemed redundant to print it again in this format. So, faced with this, I made the decision to instead replace it with a couple of short stories only previously available in digital format.

We have a few digital-only stories, plus some still unreleased short stories, so we had a fair few to pick from. We decided on James Middleditch’s Piece of Mind, and Chris Thomas’ Vampires of the Night (both originally planned for the cancelled HAVOC Files 5), two vastly different stories, one dealing with Professor Edward Travers, and one dealing with the Brigadier and Sally Wright. Coupled with the chance to fix previous errors that crept into the other stories, The HAVOC Files 2 is quite a different experience now. Still contains everything in the original, but with bonus material for those wishing to double-dip, and loads of fresh material for those who missed the original version. All wrapped up in the wonderful new cover design, with, once again, Adrian Salmon’s brilliant artwork!

When Lethbridge-Stewart range editor Andy Frankham-Allan reached out to me and asked if I was interested in being a part of the latest run of Lethbridge-Stewart books, I was, of course, surprised, ecstatic and to be honest, a little daunted. Writing my Travers & Wells novella had been a relatively smooth affair, but a 40,000 word novella is a different beast to a full novel. There were a few times during the writing process where I wondered whether I had bitten off more than I could chew but, thankfully, Andy talked me off the ledge and here we are!

The Dominators, in particular Vaar, was originally planned to return in 2017 but sadly that novel fell through, and then it was planned for 2018 with a different author, but the cessation of the ongoing narrative put it on hold once again. The Dominators are, of course, the main antagonists behind the Travers & Wells range, as seen in the short story, Time and Again. But the idea of bringing Vaar back as a gangster in 1970s London has been on the backburner for a couple of years, and when it was decided that The Laughing Gnome would be set in the various decades of Lethbridge-Stewart’s association with Doctor Who, it seemed the time was right to finally do a Gangster Dominator story.

I’d long had a story idea lurking around in the back of my head for a while about alien knowledge that looks like black magic, with Nazis thrown into the mix, which I readily adapted to this new storyline. The setting was the key for me, and early ‘70s Britain, with its Satanic rituals in cemeteries, and the tabloid coverage of it, seemed the place to be. There’s something about the grit and grime of the 1970s that is inherently appealing, against the rather slick and superficial modern day we’re forced to endure. 1970s London is set, is a case in point. I’ve strived for verisimilitude for the most part – sideburns, flares, corduroy, The Sweeney, end of empire ennui, three-day weeks, uncollected rubbish, criminal gangs, Soho are all there, but so are an alien warlord on the make and a lurking Nazi.

I really enjoyed writing for Anne Travers and Bill Bishop in my short story for Candy Jar, Eve of the Fomorians, so it was a pleasure to return to them in far different circumstances. And the chance to have Lethbridge-Stewart front and centre in the novel was something I could barely have thought possible. He was a lot of fun to write, in what is effectively a dual role. I hope that in my hands, the stoic, upright soldier with a twinkle in his eye still shines strongly through.

As this range is a journey through the Brigadier’s association with Doctor Who (each book is set in a decade that featured him on the television series), setting a book during the UNIT era was a forgone conclusion. Of course, UNIT and the Doctor do not appear, but there are plenty of fan-pleasing nods to that era.

Illustrating Dominator Vaar as a cross between Al Capone and Reggie Kray was probably the best thing I’ve ever been asked to do by Candy Jar Books; I mean how can you go wrong? Once I’d settled on the central image, which included a menacing Golem from the story, I worked out the car chase. This being the ‘action scene’ of the cover, it needed to be dramatic and exciting, breaking out of the design template. Finally, I created a suitably seedy London street at night (think Soho), resplendent with neon lights and noir shadows. Eagle-eyed viewers might even spot that a certain film, which was doing the rounds at the time the book is set, is showing at the private cinema club.

‘Let me tell you something about those who get left behind.’

Russell T Davies’ tale of regular people searching for the Doctor has become one of the most divisive episodes in Doctor Who history. Diving into the narrative theories of Bertolt Brecht, Viktor Shklovsky, Henry Jenkins, Stuart Hall and many others, this Black Archive on Love & Monsters explores how one profoundly alienating story made us see our favourite alien time traveller in a whole new light.