AV: How did you come to write for Doctor Who Weekly?

SM: First off, I should say that everything we’re talking about here happened nearly thirty years ago, and my memory’s pretty awful! But I’ll do my best…

I’d known Dez Skinn since my days at IPC, and written for him when he was editing House of Hammer and Hulk Weekly, so when he began Doctor Who Weekly at Marvel UK we already had a track record together. Originally, he talked about me writing the Doctor Who story, but then I suddenly found he’d given it to Pat Mills and John Wagner… I can only imagine because he thought they were bigger names than me… so I got the back-up strips instead. That suited me, because I’ve always been more of a short-story than a series writer and, if I had to use specific Doctor Who races like Sontarans or Cybermen, it still gave me more freedom to come up with my own characters and situations.

AV: How familiar were you with Doctor Who and its long history when you came to work on the magazine?

SM: I wasn’t, really. I watched the programme while I was writing for the magazine, and did what research I could, as I wanted to do a good, professional job. But I didn’t watch it before, and I stopped watching it after I finished writing the stories. That’s nothing against Doctor Who… I’m just not much of a television watcher.

SM: I suspect “Tell the judge, I’ll be back” was more intended to just be bravado on Daak’s part, but yes, we’d decided from the outset that Daak would be a continuing, occasional character. When I was writing the first story I don’t think I really had any very clear idea of where the continuation would go… you don’t get a lot of time to think ahead when you’re working for a weekly magazine and doing other work besides … so when I returned to Daak with Star Tigers, a lot of new thought went into the story. That was originally intended to run straight through as a seven-part series, rather than be split in half, and was obviously setting up the team ready for further adventures. But again, when I was writing Star Tigers, I don’t think at the time I really had any clear idea of what might happen in those future stories. I would have just got back to it when the time came.

AV: How influential was 2000AD on the development of Daak and Star Tigers?

SM: I’d like to think it didn’t really influence it at all. I’d worked for 2000AD, mainly writing “Future Shocks”, and I’d write for it again at various times later, but it’s never been a magazine I particularly liked or felt very comfortable working for, mainly because the SF I grew up reading was much more “ripping yarn space-opera” than the sort of stuff 2000AD usually does. And before you ask, no, Blake’s 7 wasn’t an influence on Star Tigers, as I wasn’t watching that at the time either. I saw some episodes later and realised there were a few parallels, but they were completely coincidental. I think the reason people imagine a 2000AD influence on Daak is simply that the story’s much darker and more savage than the usual run of Doctor Who material, which is just one of those things that happened. But we never sat down and said: “Let’s do a story in the 2000AD style.”

There were influences, of course. One was Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, of which I’d been writing a British version for Hulk Weekly, illustrated by Steve Dillon; Fury influenced the wisecracking dialogue and tough attitude of Daak. Another one was Pressbutton…

AV: Hold on, I thought Pressbutton came later, and was the story you did for Warrior when you couldn’t take Daak there from Doctor Who Monthly.

SM: No, Pressbutton came first. I originally had the idea for Pressbutton in 1976, but couldn’t figure out what to do with him at the time; there just wasn’t anything on the market that would have taken him. So at the beginning of 1979 I included Pressbutton in a comedy underground strip, as one of the team in Three-Eyes McGurk and his Death-Planet Commandos, which I wrote and Alan Moore and I drew together for a rock magazine called Dark Star. It took us 18 months to finish four one-page episodes, so it was well underway when I started thinking about Daak, and I killed Pressbutton at the end of it. That’s what the reference in Daak to “Curtis Henry Foobl” is all about… it’s an in-joke, as Alan and I were doing McGurk under the pen-names of Curt Vile and Pedro Henry, respectively (“Foobl” was the nonsense-title to a short wordless strip I’d done for another underground magazine around the same time). So, having killed Pressbutton off, I thought I’d never use him again. That’s why I decided to cannibalise a couple of things for Daak. Pressbutton’s cleaver-arm became Daak’s chainsword. I’d also come up with a Pleasure-World called “Depravity” in McGurk, which seemed like too good an idea to let go of, so that was toned down to become “Paradise” in Star Tigers. When Star Tigers was over with and I was doing Pressbutton as a straight strip for Warrior, I used “Depravity” again. In the meantime, though, Alan had started another comedy SF strip for Sounds, the music magazine, called The Stars My Degradation, and asked if he could use Pressbutton in that, so I said yes. Mind you, in the third episode of Stars I suddenly found he’d parodied the courtroom scene from Abslom Daak [Click here to read this episode]. Well, you can imagine how outraged I was by the fact that later, when he asked me to write Stars for him, I said “yes” straight away. He was paying me £10 a week, after all!

I’m not really sure how this idea started that I tried to take Daak from Marvel to Warrior, because it simply never happened, and wouldn’t have been possible anyway. Back in the days before Warrior, no one in mainstream British comics owned the characters they created, and Daak and the Star Tigers were always going to belong to Marvel/Doctor Who. I never even thought of taking Daak away. The nearest thing to this that happened was that when Dez Skinn and I were discussing what sort of “genre-slots” we wanted to fill in Warrior to make it a balanced anthology title (for example, a super-hero story, a horror story, a fantasy-adventure, and so on) we decided we wanted an SF-adventure story “like the sort of thing we’d done with Abslom Daak at Doctor Who”. That’s when I suggested using Pressbutton, as I still owned the character… and I got to write him straight, the way I’d originally intended. Steve Dillon was the artist on Laser-Eraser & Pressbutton, as he had been on Daak, so we included a “guest appearance” of Daak in one episode as another in-joke, but we made sure we didn’t identify him by name, in case there was trouble with Marvel… which there wasn’t. They probably never even realised.

Taiyin (“The Great Yin”) was a title of the moon in Chinese… the moon, being beautiful but out of reach, symbolised the woman I’d lost. The name Daak obviously represented the dark mood I was in, though I don’t think there was any particular significance in Abslom. I think I started off thinking I needed a three-syllable name to go with the single-syllable Daak… it was a matter of rhythm… and came up with Absalom, but then shortened it to make it sound weirder and more futuristic, and to hell with the rhythm!

AV: "Forgive me, Abslom Daak... but you're only useful to me alive," says Taiyin just before she slugs Daak across the back of the head in the original Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer strip. This line always troubles me, as it suggests she has some other agenda... perhaps one that falling in love with Daak gets in the way of. Or am I reading too much into it?!

SM: I think you probably are! As far as I can remember, all I really meant to imply was that she thought Daak might be able to save her and her planet from the Daleks, and he obviously wasn’t going to be able to do that if he stayed where he was and allowed himself to be shot to pieces by them.

AV: By all accounts, the final weeks of Doctor Who Weekly was a fairly lean time for the publication, with the editor trying for a younger readership, bringing in cartoon covers, reducing the length of the main strip, introducing reheated filler strips from the 1950s and reducing the number of articles. Did any of this impact on you and on the Daak strip before the publication went monthly?

SM: I don’t recall it really having much impact on me at all. All of Star Tigers had been written with the idea that they’d just run on continuously from issues 27 to 33, and since issue 35 I’d been mainly writing the lead Doctor Who strip, which wasn’t affected by changes to the rest of the magazine. So I just got on and delivered my scripts and, as is usually my way, tried to avoid going to the office if I could possibly help it!

AV: The last episode of Star Tigers finishes with: “The end… for now.” You were obviously intending to continue the series, so what   happened?

SM: Well, the first thing that happened was that Pat Mills and John Wagner left the main Doctor Who strip early in 1980… I don’t know why… and I took it over instead. As a result it was decided that when they’d used up all the back-up strips I’d written, they’d hand that slot to other writers, such as Alan Moore, while I was concentrating mainly on Doctor Who. We still intended to bring Star Tigers back and it was agreed that I’d write it when we did. So time passed away, and editors changed, from Dez Skinn to Paul Neary to Alan McKenzie, and…

And here I have to break off in embarrassment. I’d thought I’d got a fairly clear idea of what happened, but I’ve just been going through the old Abslom Daak/Star Tigers file checking stuff, and I’ve found a script for a 4-page complete Star Tigers… a single-episode tale which would have followed on directly from the last published Star Tigers story… and I can’t remember a single thing about it. I’m tempted to imagine that elves and fairies have placed the manuscript in my filing cabinet while I slept, but I rather suspect that I actually wrote it in 1980 and have completely forgotten doing so. It was written when Paul Neary was editor, as he’s mentioned in the script, although it seems I didn’t know who was going to be drawing it when I wrote it, and it’s called “World of the War-King.”

It starts with the Kill-wagon in space, with the voice of Taiyin resonating through the ship. The cooling unit on her cryo-capsule is  malfunctioning, and the only world near enough for them to get a replacement in time is the world of the War-King. The latter is an armoured figure, accompanied by a robot called Napoleon, who is intent on playing a deadly game with Daak, the apparent prize being the cooling units. The Star Tigers land on the planet and split into two teams: Daak and Harma set off in search of the cooling units, which they find too easily to feel comfortable about, with the result that they return to the Kill-wagon. Salander, accompanying Mercurius, is shot dead by the War-king’s defenders and his team-mate disappears from view. The War-king admits to disappointment in Daak, because he should have known that a much greater prize lay within his reach: the head of the Napoleon robot is the finest tactical computer in the universe. Remarking on this, the War-king glances round to see that the head of the robot has already been stolen by Mercurius during the conversation. Mercurius returns to the ship without Salander (but we would have had a talking head on the bridge of the Kill-wagon in future episodes instead), while the War-king suggests that Daak has missed a still greater mystery yet. Removing the face-plate of her armour, the war-king is revealed as having the face of Taiyin. And before you ask, I have absolutely no idea where the story was going to go after that! I’ve also got no idea why it wasn’t published, because even now I’ve read it I still can’t remember writing it or anything about the circumstances.

AV: So, was that the end of your involvement with Daak?

SM: No, there was one further attempt to get Daak back in print in 1990, not long after the paperback came out. If I remember right, it was a time when Marvel UK were dabbling in American-style colour comic-books, and again the idea was to take Daak away from the Doctor Who universe and make him more of an independent Marvel Comics hero. John Freeman was the editor at the time.

Unfortunately, I can’t really remember the sequence of events properly, but in the file here I have a copy of a proposal by Dan Abnett and John Freeman for a story that would bring back Daak and sort out the continuity problems left by Nemesis of the Daleks with a complicated tale of clones that left a clone Daak contentedly matched up with a clone Taiyin. I’ve a feeling they may have sent this to me to take a look at and comment on. I’m really not sure what happened next, but it seems that story was put aside, and I then found myself writing a proposal for a  ten-issue mini-series called After Daak that also took into account the Nemesis of the Daleks continuity. I guess my major mistake was in deciding I wanted to do a more grown-up, sophisticated type of story that combined a ripping yarn of Daak and Mercurius in their Star Tiger days with a much bleaker mystery story set fifty years later, where two scholars try to uncover the truth behind the Daak legends. For the ripping yarn part, I cannibalised a lot of the stuff I’d come up with when thinking about the Daak/Valkac crossover story. Valkac became “Dagro Zarn” in the new story, while Komorkis was carried over unaltered from the earlier proposal. Anyway, it was probably the most complex plot I’d ever come up with, and the outline was written in minute detail. I was immensely pleased with it, and I really regret that it was never written… I’d write it today, either as a strip or a novel, if I could find someone who’d pay me to do it. Unlikely as that is, though, I’m just glad to have the outline “published” here on the website, so it gets out somehow, rather than just being neglected. At least it gives some idea of where the story would have gone if I’d been able to do what I liked with it. [To read ‘After Daak’, click here.]

series Marvel UK projects.  We shared the same office space at the time (and a very kranky office person I often was, too, to my chagrin these days).

The word came down from Marvel US - probably from either Tom de Falco or top sales person Carol Kalish - that ten issue mini series were no longer favoured for costs reasons, and Marvel was seeking to publish four-issue mini series instead to try out new characters. (Proposed projects included a Death's Head revival and a try out for Rourke, a character created by Freeman and Liam Sharp for the Strip comic magazine). The emphasis for these projects also had to be very much on the action, rather than what might have been described as the cereberal.

Four issues were the minimum Marvel could publish - there was some legal or distribution restriction in the US on publishing three-part mini series, which the company would have preferred.

In the end, of course, neither Steve's ten-part or four-part proposal was ever taken up, although both treatments would almost certainly have been seen by Paul Neary when he took up the reins as Editorial Director at Marvel UK in the 1990s. By that time, Marvel US considered Doctor Who a 'dead' franchise and there was no value to Marvel in seeking to extend a brand they did not themselves own. Instead, Paul developed a range of new characters for the company while also revamping Death's Head, drawn by Liam Sharp.

While Steve's project unfortunately went nowhere, this didn't dampen my enthusiasm for trying to get spin-off Doctor Who projects off the ground. That included  the Doctor Who newspaper strip pitched at the Express, and a story by Andrew Cartmel featuring a Doctor Who and Doctor Strange corssover, for example, although that proposal would have been pitched much later, and it was then I learnt of Who's disfavour by Marvel US, even though Tom deFalco was a fan of the show. - Many thanks to John for the additional information.]

SM: So after that, the rest was silence as far as I was concerned… until I just happened to Google “Abslom Daak” and suddenly found you’d made a movie of the ol’ bozo. As I said, it never occurred to me that there’d still be so much interest.

AV: So, looking back, any regrets?

SM: I don’t regret quitting Doctor Who on a point of principle, nor do I regret refusing to cut After Daak from ten issues to four. But it’s a shame that all the stuff I would have liked to do with the characters never quite made it into print. I’ll just have to look forward to your Star Tigers movie!

AV: Thank you very much, Steve, for your time and assistance with this interview and the accompanying materials.