Telos Publishing has recently announced that they are publishing The Who Adventures, a look back at the fiction ranges run by Virgin Publishing during the 1990s at a time when most fans did not expect Doctor Who to return. Its author, noted Doctor Who historian David J. Howe, explains the book’s genesis…

 

What made you want to do a book on the Virgin fiction ranges?

After I had finished The Target Book, I was somewhat amazed at its reception. People loved it, and it just kept on selling copies, even after all the print runs had sold out and we moved it to Print on Demand systems. As The Target Book had first started life as a series of articles for Doctor Who Magazine, so did this book. I covered the history of the New Adventures, and Missing Adventures for DWM in later issues, and so still had all that material available. Plus, when Virgin closed their doors to Doctor Who and fiction generally towards the end of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to get to go through their Who files and to pull out and copy anything which seemed interesting, and so I had a pile of sketches and other information just begging to be compiled together in a book!

So last year, in lockdown, and with the absence of anything else to do, I started going through and organising all the material, reviewing the text, and generally pulling it all together into something which could be released as a new book!

What sort of things will it contain?

As I mentioned, it’s thematically similar to The Target Book, but this time we are taking the opportunity of having access to most of the original artwork, either in transparency or digital forms, to present full pages of the art as we go through. In addition there are work-in-progress sketches of some of the pieces, and unused sketches and ideas… all sorts of things which the various artists concerned have been gracious enough to allow us to reprint and use in the book. Plus there’s the main text of course, plus short biogs of all the authors and artists and other key people behind the ranges of books… plus photos of many of the same people… as much as we can cram in basically!

There have been other books which look at these ranges of fiction. How does this book differ?

The other books have been more review/critical analysis type works. This is a factual book looking at the actual production of the titles. As with The Target Book, there are some critical comments pulled from contemporary reviews of the titles, but these are very much ‘in passing’ and don’t form the ‘meat’ of the book. The main difference is that this is a large format, full colour celebration of the art and the books themselves.

Do you cover any of the other titles published?

We’re focussing on the Virgin NAs and MAs, and of those titles, I do go on to chronicle their ‘life after Virgin’ where some have been reprinted on the BBC Website and by BBC Books themselves, some have had audios made of them, and some have been translated into foreign editions! We also briefly cover David Bishop’s Who Killed Kennedy title as it’s an NA/MA in all but name!

What about Bernice Summerfield? Do her books get mentioned?

The focus here is the Doctor Who ranges, and so obviously the Doctor Who books in which she appeared are covered. However we stop at the end of the Doctor Who ranges – so the continued New Adventures which starred Bernice but which were not Doctor Who books are only listed and not mentioned in any detail. There are other excellent reference books you can track down which cover all of Bernice’s life outside and beyond her Doctor Who titles.

Will the artwork for Birthright be the right way round?

(laughs) This refers to the hardback edition of Timeframe where that wonderful piece of Peter Elson art was ‘flipped’ during the production process and ended up being printed the wrong way round. We corrected that for the paperback edition!  And yes, barring any horrendous accidents, all the images in this book should be printed the correct way round!

What about other materials? Will the various Preludes to the novels which were printed in DWM be reproduced?

Those are marvellous pieces of writing, but unfortunately are the copyright of the various authors. Plus of course the Doctor and Ace and the TARDIS and so on are all owned by the BBC. So getting permission to reproduce them in the book would be a logistical nightmare – as well as taking up loads of space!

What we have done, however, is to reach out to and gain permission from the Estate of the artist Phil Bevan to use some of his illustrations which accompanied the Preludes in DWM in the book. So it will be great to see those in print again.

How did you decide on the cover image?

When I was deciding on the cover, I looked through all the artwork, and felt that Tony Masero’s wonderful image of the Doctor, sitting in an armchair and sipping tea, while some sort of space battle takes place around him, really summed up the whole of the range of books for me. It’s the sort of off-beat, eclectic unpredictability of the seventh Doctor all summed up in one image … I love it! I also think it works really well in the slightly different format of this hardback book, as opposed to the A format paperback size of the original ranges.

 

The Who Book is available to pre-order now from Telos Publishing.