The Nethersphere Vol 2 No 4

FIVE HUNDR Five hundred issues is a long time in publishing. Very few titles last more than a few years, never mind a comic / magazine devoted to a TV show that wasn’t even on air for fourteen of its thirty-seven years! But, in July 2016, Doctor Who Magazine (née Doctor Who Monthly, née Doctor Who Weekly) reached its quincentennial issue.

As context is everything, it would be impossible to convey the importance of this 500th issue without first looking back at the 499 that preceded it.

December 1979: I’m back in the UK for a two-week Christmas holiday. My granddad takes me to the newsagents where I’m surprised to see a Silurian staring out at me from between The Beano and Spectacular Spider-Man Weekly. It was issue 11 of Doctor Who Weekly and it changed… everything.

That afternoon, I read the entire magazine in a single sitting. I think the most exciting part for me was the archive feature on 'Planet of Giants'. Until then, the only window onto the earlier years of the series available to most fans was the one-paragraph descriptions in The Making of Doctor Who or the Radio Times 1 0th Anniversary Special – and even they couldn’t agree on the story titles! But here I was, sat on my grandparent’s upstairs loo, reading a complete episode-by-episode synopsis of a story not broadcast since 1964 that, as far as I knew, I would never have an opportunity to see. Back then, repeats were exceedingly rare and never black-and white, while the idea of someday being able to buy a home video copy of old adventures was sheer fantasy. Even the Target novelization was still a good decade away.

Of course, that wasn’t all that melted my young brain. Finally, here was a Doctor Who comic strip that genuinely captured the experience of watching the show on telly.

Despite being a huge fan of the show, I’d never enjoyed the previous comic strips in TV Action or TV Comic. But this was Doctor Who as written and illustrated by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons – two legends of my other favourite comic, 2000AD. A few months later, four weekly releases became one monthly magazine with issue 44. I didn’t care. The new Doctor Who Monthly had fewer pages of comic but more articles – and by this stage the articles were what I wanted, hungry to learn more about the show’s history.

I’m convinced that DWM is responsible for turning so many viewers into life-long fans. Originally aimed at the same core eight to 12 year old audience as the series, DWM grew with us, gradually putting away ‘childish things’ like the "UNIT Club" and introducing more detailed articles.

I can’t stress enough the impact the Weekly / Monthly had on young fans like myself.

Newer fans may only know the series as something always available on disc or download, with every minute detail documented, analysed and debated on a million