Offworld Vegas

Fan fiction. This is certainly not unique to Doctor Who, as fans of many series have often put pen to paper to create their own adventures just as readily as one would create new ones with action figures, or even shoot those action figures on film and make a small movie just to see how it felt to be in control of something they enjoy. Offworld Vegas is a piece of fan fiction I am going to mention here because, well, it's mine.

I wrote the story on paper back in 1988 when I was bored in chemistry class. It didn't amount to much really, just me playing around with the adventures of the first Doctor, Steven Taylor and Vicki, and for kicks I threw in a villan named Sil who was not actually in the televised series until 1985's Vengeance on Varos. I also borrowed the idea of a casino/resort in space from the original premise of Revenge of the Cybermen from 1975, and had Sil's people, the Mentors, running it and bilking tourists out of all their money until the Doctor and his companions came along and started getting in the way. I think it came out to maybe 26 pages handwritten, and that was that.

Later on in years I was working for Penguin Books and mentioned my writing to a lady I worked with, and she in turn said her son was an aspiring comic artist and we should collaborate. I spoke with her son, Robert Armstrong (who did some work with the ill-fated Dreamwave Productions on Transformers) and we decided to give it a go. I handed him my original Offworld Vegas draft plus a heap of Doctor Who Magazine backissues for reference and away he went. I was blown away with what he handed back to me, and sometime I am going to scan and post a few pages so more people can see this. Rob brought a "superhero" edge to the story with his visuals, one that I found a lot of fun to look at; we caught a lot of flack from some people who read the strip but in the end I stand by Rob's vision of the "alterna-Doctor". Offworld Vegas appeared in Chameleon Circuit, which was the bi-monthly 'zine of the Doctor Who fan club I was in, The Faceless Ones of Southern York Region (until we embraced early 20's alcoholism and became known as The Temporal Pubcrawlers). Back issues are probably out there somewhere and can be obtained by getting hold of Mike Doran through the DWIN Website listed at the side here. Mike and I were talking recently and he mentioned the possibility of republishing the strip in a new 'zine, which I am all for.

How do I feel about Offworld Vegas as a story? Well I love it, of course. It's a bit rough still as I did no revisions over the years it sat unattended in a binder between chemistry class and Rob's interpretation, but as far as I'm concerned it's fantastic. But I would say that, wouldn't I? And as for the collaboration, Rob and I did another story later on that I wrote specifically for him to turn into a strip, but it'll be a while before it gets mentioned here at this rate. But fear not, it's out there.

And now that this brief moment of sulf-indulgence is over, on with season three...

NEXT EPISODE : GALAXY FOUR