Comic book writer Dan Slott is known for his long-running work on Spider-Man and for an Eisner-winning run on Silver Surfer inspired by a particular Time Lord. With his new graphic novel, he’s finally getting to write for the original, you might say – the Doctor. We caught up with Dan to talk all things Who and find out what to expect from Once Upon a Time Lord.
STARBURST: So, Dan, you’re best known as a Marvel writer, but I hear you’re a massive Doctor Who fan?
Dan Slott: It is my favourite TV show of all time. Whenever there’s a convention, I ask, “Who’s going to be your guest from Doctor Who?” before I decide to do the convention or not. I don’t abuse my Spider-Man status for anything else really, other than Doctor Who.
When did you first get into Who?
I started watching in the seventies, on PBS. They would show whole adventures in one night, starting at 10 or 11. This was before VCRs, so once you started, you were going to watch an entire adventure all the way through, and that took amazing stamina for a small Whovian. So I started out at the beginning of Tom Baker’s era with chunks of episodes, because I kept falling asleep – but I’m pretty sure I made it all through Robot and Genesis of the Daleks.
And when I was a teenager, my family moved to the UK, and I was like, oh my God, I get to watch this for real now, the way it should be seen, serialised once a week. And I would go to Forbidden Planet and buy all the Target novelisations. I started with the First Doctor and An Unearthly Child and worked all the way through until I got to The Key to Time and I was all caught up.
And once the show relaunched in 2005, it was the greatest thing ever. Everything about it just got better. There are all these very clever things they did – I love the psychic paper. The special effects were better. The idea that he was the last of the Time Lords was really good; it gave him that kind of fun Superman: Last Son of Krypton feel.
And how exciting is the new era of the show looking, right?
You get to have your cake and eat it too! We have the return of David Tennant, and by the end of the specials, we get Ncuti Gatwa as well. When this thing goes onto Disney Plus and people meet the Fifteenth Doctor, he is going to be the Doctor for people around the world on a level that I don’t think Doctor Whofandom has seen before.
So, let’s talk about your new comic. How did Once Upon a Time Lord come about?
This has been one of my greatest frustrations of my career. I’ve been writing comics for thirty years, and the last twenty I’ve been exclusive to Marvel. And whenever I’d pop back into the UK to visit friends or family or do a convention, the lovely people at Titan Comics would take me out to dinner and say, “We know you’re a huge Doctor Who fan, would you like to write some Doctor Who?” I’d be like, “I can’t, I’m exclusive to Marvel.” It was absolute torture, cos I would kill to write Doctor Who.
But there was a time when my contract was up for renegotiation, I had a surprising amount of leverage, and they went, “Fine, you can do one Doctor Who comic a year.” And I ran to Titan. I was like, “I can do one a year. They didn’t say how big it was. So let’s do a giant issue. Let’s do a graphic novel.”
There really is a lot packed into this book – a 48-page main strip with the Tenth Doctor and Martha, followed by a ‘backup’ strip with the Ninth Doctor and Rose. And this takes place across alien planets, Earth history, and even a strange hell-like dimension. How did you go about plotting all that and choosing what to throw in?
It all felt very surreal to me finally getting a chance. I was like a can of soda being shaken for thirty years. When I finally got to tell a Doctor Who story, I wasn’t going to hold anything back. All my Whovian love was going to go all over the page. What if this is the only one I ever get to do?
So this is a big story that encompasses so much of Who lore – classic and new. But hopefully, even though it’s a very overstuffed sandwich, it all flows well, and so if you’ve never read or seen any Doctor Who before, you can follow it. It’s very new reader-friendly.
The main part of the comic is a series of adventures the Tenth Doctor goes on alone, and then there’s a framing story in which Martha tells these tales to the Pyromeths, aliens who feed on fiction. How did you decide to focus on the Tenth Doctor and Martha for this tale?
The main threat in this story is the storyteller’s dilemma, the Shahrazad problem. Something that every writer can relate to is that you have to keep telling stories, and if the next one isn’t as good as the last, you’re dead. That’s really what it feels like writing a comic book every month! So I wanted the companion who was the best storyteller, and that’s got to be Martha Jones, who walked the Earth telling stories of the Doctor.
So you’ve written for the Ninth and Tenth Doctors – how do you give each of the Doctors different voices?
The way I hear from talking to writers for the TV show is that they have a standard Doctor voice and they write the first season of any new Doctor like that. And inevitably, as the show progresses, mannerisms that are unique to that actor get folded in. The benefit I have is that all these seasons are already done, so I walk in with all these voices of these characters firmly set. And there are easy tricks – your allons-ys and your fantastics and your geronimos – things that, the minute you hear it, you’re going to hear the actor’s voice.
Can you talk about the three different artists who’ve illustrated the book?
The story with the Tenth Doctor and Martha has art by Christopher Jones, who has a longstanding history with Doctor Who and is amazing at likenesses, and Matthew Dow Smith, who has also been a legacy Doctor Who comic artist. Chris is the artist for the framing story, and Matthew is the artist for the stories within the story.
And the backup with the Ninth Doctor and Rose is being drawn by Mike Collins, who not only has the history of writing Doctor Who comics, he’s also a storyboard artist on the show. So he’s got some serious Who cred.
You’re slated to write two more Doctor Who graphic novels – was that always the plan, to do three?
I think once I do three, I can rest. There are many authors who just do their two or three episodes of the Doctor and then they leave. We’ve got all these big plans, so I hope this first one does really well, because boy, I want to do those two.
Doctor Who: Once Upon a Time Lord is released on November 7th from Titan Comics, via book shops, comic shops, and digital platforms.
And, buy STARBURST 484, available from November 30th, to read the extended version of this interview, in which Dan tells us about creating alien baddies the Pyromeths and his long-planned Doctor Who/Spider-Man crossover!