L.J. Scott: After a couple of installments drilling in the message that the Doctor is dead, we bring back the Doctor and...! He agrees.
This was a chance to fill in the final bits of character history for Susan and have a little fun watching the Doctor and Ace begin to reemerge from the void.
And did you notice that we didn't have any installment without the Doctor and Ace? They both had cameos in the beginning of installment 12!
Page 1: The very first line from Ace is a hint as to what happened to she and the Doctor. I'd like to say I spent days and months planning all these hints ahead of time, but in reality they most often occurred to me as I was typing. In fact, half the fun of writing for me is finding out what's going to happen next. While I work with a broad outline in mind as to where things are going, many of the details surprise and entertain me as much as, hopefully, they surprise and entertain the readers.
Page 3: In one breath, the Master points out that the Doctor could never understand the true nature of the Universe, and yet in this installment, we show the Doctor beginning to do just that with his own Universe. Someone is in denial, here...
"It could be time for you to retire." This line is not meant as an in joke, even though it plays as one, but I've often found that the human mind has a habit of stating things that the speaker should be aware of even if, consciously, they're not. Such as one might remind their child not to leave their keys in the house on the occasion that the parent has just done that, but hasn't consciously realized it yet.
Page 5: This interpretation of Time Lord society has come from the hints of many Doctor Who episodes as well as conflicting comments from previous production staffs. One past script editor, I think it was Terrance Dicks, had done a little story explaining that Gallifrey had fallen into troubled times and that The Doctor, no relation to Susan, had saved her as the only surviving member of her family and whisked her to safety. But other, earlier producers insisted that Susan definitely was the Doctor's biological grand-daughter.
Further show-based hints explain that not everyone on Gallifrey is a Time Lord, that one becomes a Time Lord when one is granted the gift of regeneration. So our back story for Susan tries to merge and incorporate all of these ideas...
Page 6: "I don't remember seeing any wolves." Is this another subconscious hint from Ace's own mind to remind her of her past adventures? Or the writer just having fun with the traditional association between sheep and wolves...?
Also, have you noticed these little repeated hints of where the Doctor is? As most each moment in the Doctor's world is echoed by the Master's next line in the 'real' world?
Page 7: I just about drooled when studio robb showed me this page. He wonderfully captures both the sweeping mountain vista, AND gets in the personal frames of dialog between The Doctor and Ace. While there are many favorites during the course of this strip, this is by far my most favorite page of the entire series. Yum!
studio robb: I would have to say that Part 13 was
probably my zenith of the series. That’s not to say that my drawing was
professional enough for the comic world --- not by any stretch of the imagination.
But it was with this two part story that I feel my drawing opened up.
Of course, credit
must be given to L. J.’s writing for that.
Basically, there
are four, maybe even five different styles thrown in. the previous Conjured
Visions I was dark and heavy with the "Ian and Barbara" memory being wispy
lines showing they were part of a foggy memory.
The "Uber-Master" scenes were drawn with sharp contrast and an
almost 2-D feel to them...to me, The Master’s world had become a caricature of
the real world and had a 40s comic-book flare to it. This was very evident in
my design of The Uber-Master: I gave him the classic
evil Tuxedo and Monocle. It’s interesting to note that in Alan Moore’s "Tom
Strange" series from the last few years, one of Tom’s arch-villains, a Dr. Sauvin (sp?) dresses and looks very much the same as my "Uber-Master"...which just goes to show how camp and cliché
this type of villain is. And of course, I had to throw a nod to Frank Frazetta by making Susan the cliché slave girl, complete
with chain around her neck. Everything in The Uber-Master’s
world is done like a movie set: it looks grandiose, but if you walk around
you’d see the buildings are incomplete...even the general is faceless.
On the opposite
end of the spectrum is the world of the Doctor and Ace. I wanted their world to
be gray but full of form and substance. Having learned my lesson about ink
washes, I went the Manga route, and used copious amounts of zipatone
to create the grey feel of the "shepherd’s world". Sadly, even zipatone wasn’t impervious to the poor reproductive
techniques DWIS had at its disposal. Tom did try with his scanner to make it
work (being 1992, it probably had a dpi of 10!), but much of the dot quality
was still lost. So this is really the first time that this chapter is published
with the zipatone intact.
The last "style"
that I employed was the First Doctor receiving his Time Lord degree...I drew that
with no shading, just lines to give the conjured memories a ghost-like quality.
And, I’m pleased
to say, I *finally* moved from Jaime Hernandez’s style to something more my
own...
Page 3: And there it is! Fans of my manga work
will recognize my trademark "line through a word to emphasize it". (not that I created the method...others use it, as well)
In
addition to experimenting with styles, one other aspect to this story was that
I allowed myself to get more creative with the lettering...the previous page
shows a lot of that as well, but as I was revisiting the artwork to this story,
I was really pleased to see that line traveling through the word "forbid" as it
showed that, even in the early 90s, I was doing that sort of thing!
I
especially liked the entire panel of Susan’s "Go ROT in the Death Zone!"
complete with drippy word balloon, two lines through the word "Rot" and the way
venom is just dripping from her face...
The
Doctor and Ace dinner scene was fun, two...making the TARDIS control panel as the
dinner table with a vase of flowers as the Time Rotor was neat. And if you look
closely, you’ll see there’s a Dalek for a salt
shaker.
By
the way, the room is patterned on the TARDIS’ auxiliary control room from the
Fourth Doctor’s era.
Page 5: "Filoniuos Fatbury" accepting the title of "The Gourmand" was
something I threw in...L. J. pretty much just rolled her eyes!
Page 6: "I don’t remember seeing any wolves..."
I believe this was a reference to an episode from the 26th (and
final) Season of The Seventh Doctor. I remember when it aired, L. J. was saying
how much she liked that episode, so I’m guessing that’s why the "wolves" line
is in here...but I could be wrong.
The
"Doctor Role Call" was at a request from me...I thought it would be nice to throw
in all of the various incarnations of The Doctor at least once as kind of a
"fan service". L. J. did it in a really cool way. For those unfamiliar with
them, their order of appearance is: The Fifth Doctor (played by Peter
Davidson), The Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton), The
Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), The Fourth Doctor (Tom
Baker), The Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker), and the First Doctor (William Hartnell). Looking at this scene, I feel I did a disservice
to the Sixth Doctor...he didn’t need to be that small...
Page 7: Up to this point, I had resisted any
real Photoshop clean-up...but I kind of had to do it here. To do this page, I had
drawn a big old mountain scene and then pasted down the individual frames and
word balloons, then inked around them. Over time, the paste had pulled up
revealing massive ink blobs and drips. So I pretty much redid all the borders
and balloons for this page to get back to its original form...
The "HA! What Acumen!" line was mine...I had read it in some
long forgotten comic and thought it was a really cool line for a campy arch
villain to say...but I recently looked the word up, and it’s really not very
appropriate here! (I still think it sounds cool, though!)
Page 9: as I mentioned earlier, the Third
Doctor used to drive a car that he called "Bessie"...its license plate was "W1".
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