For two years, I saw a comic book publisher at Gallifrey One that I had never seen anywhere else. It did make sense they were there. Located in the UK, Cutaway Comics has a line mandate that might surprise you. As Doctor Who fans, they put out comics that spin off of classic Who episodes, and people, they’re good stuff. More importantly, they’re finally being distributed through Diamond, with books showing up in comic shops in the U.S. this month.
You don’t have to have seen the episodes where these concepts first appeared. Paradise Towers, for example, is a compelling dystopian story where the youth struggle to be free from fascist leadership. Omega spins out of the Doctor Who story “Mindwarp” and features the bonus of legendary actor Brian Blessed letting them use his likeness for the character King Yrcanos. Oh, heck, they even put together an audio drama that Blessed performs! (Who doesn’t love Brian Blessed?)
At this year’s Gallifrey One in February, publisher Gareth Kavanagh and I stepped outside the dealers’ room to talk about Cutaway Comics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Derek McCaw: You mentioned on your panel that what inspired this imprint was the pandemic.
Gareth Kavanagh: I had been working with amazing writers in theatre. I’d worked with amazing artists and writers and thinkers on Vworp Vworp (a Doctor Who-centric magazine) and suddenly we were all stuck at home. It was a horrible time, alright. We were at home and for creative people it was hell. Projects were cancelled, guys had stuff cancelled, so there was never a better time where we were just at home and we could think and we could work and… that’s how it came together, really. And things happened remarkably quickly with the comics.
Derek McCaw: And what drove you towards comics? I mean, for a long time you’d worked on Vworp Vworp, which most people reading Fanboy Planet might not know. I don’t want to call it a fanzine because I think it’s a lot slicker than that.
Gareth Kavanagh: I was on a fanzine panel a couple days ago and I said that I have a strange feeling that Vworp Vworp had not been helpful to the fanzine phenomena in one sense, because we are a fanzine because there is no other category. It is done to production values that are huge and vast, and I would hate people to look at Vworp Vworp and go oh my god, that’s what a fanzine has to look like and it’s just not true. But I think that’s where we probably ended up. So yes, it is lavish and slick and has ridiculous free gifts.
But it has a production value, that I wanted to maintain and carry through to Cutaway Comics. I worked with some of my heroes, you know, John Ridgway, Martin Geraghty, Adrian Salmon. You know, worked with them on proper scripts and give them real creative license and agency. And that was really the ethos. So we’re all about. We’re not. And like I said, we’re not for everyone, but if we are for you, ohh. My goodness, we are for you.
Derek McCaw: It is, as you described it, Doctor Who adjacent. For now. It’s hard for American audiences to really grasp those BBC writers’ rights. No one here would imagine that – you created a location, you kept the rights to that creation.
Gareth Kavanagh: The amazing Beryl Virtue, who was Terry Nation’s agent. I don’t think she was even his agent, she was someone in the agency. And the story as I understand it is the contracts came back from the BBC for the first Dalek story and it would be, yeah, we own everything, you just get paid. And Beryl just crossed it out. Crossed it out, signed it, sent it back, and they signed it.
It set this precedent and the template. Thanks to that incredible woman, fantastic woman. Steven Moffat’s mother-in-law.
Derek McCaw: I didn’t know that.
Gareth Kavanagh: Beryl Virtue. Yeah, yeah. Sue Virtue, Steven’s wife, is an amazing producer in her own right. And her mum was an amazing agent and producer in her own right. They’re a talented lot, the Virtues.
And thanks to that, the writers on the original series, the starting point us that obviously there’s things that the BBC owns and creates so the BBC owns the Doctor, the TARDIS, Sonic Screwdriver, usually the companions, though there’s a few examples where they went, but they own all that, so they own the furniture. But everything else that’s the home, the house, is owned by the writer. So the planet, the characters, the subsidiary characters, the villains, the monsters.
But interestingly, the BBC would still own the design. So Terry Nation owns the Daleks as a concept. Here’s the Daleks, but the BBC owns the design. For instance, when we did Paradise Towers and we’ve got cleaning robots in them, they don’t look like the cleaning robots off the TV because that’s owned by the BBC.
Not a great design anyway. So we we adapt the designs. The concepts remain the same. And those concepts, those ideas as characters, the settings, those are all the writers’. And it’s brilliant. It’s been great for us, a new set of toys.
Derek McCaw: Is there a set of toys that you’d love to be able to go through? Because like when I watch the Seventh Doctor, there are many things I wish were better. I wish the design were better, if there had been a bigger budget. You have that chance with comics because you’re only limited by an artist’s imagination.
Gareth Kavanagh: That’s right. For instance, we are doing the Happiness Patrol comic. Yes. So one thing — ohh slight spoiler – The Kandyman is back, but we have gone back to the original concept. The Kandyman was supposed to be a robot, but clad in sweets but like flesh. So it’s a bit like, you know, the face would be made of marshmallow, You’d poke it but it’s not flesh, you’d have got slightly melty fingers. That was originally the concept that Graham Curry had. So we’ve gone back to that.
There are areas where we just look at the essence of the character and we go, “What can we do with that?” And a lot of the time it is just people, but sometimes there are designs we go back to. And it’s a great opportunity to go, let’s do something different.
So Omega, we’ve got a complete new look for Omega which Bob was very particular about. He liked his creation. So he signed that off and the Omega that’s in the current Gods and Monsters series is in a ceremonial suit of armor. A golden ceremonial suit of armour and we’ve given him wings, a little bit like Milton’s Satan. So we have a lot of fun with that because I also think that when the BBC bring back characters, they update them. So we’re in keeping with it.
Derek McCaw: Have they locked some up? Like obviously New Who, for lack of a better term, has brought many of the monsters forward.
Gareth Kavanagh: Yeah, yeah. There’s lots of things under lock and key and we bake that in. You know, all of Bob Baker’s stuff is off limits, which I think is a shame. Because you know, yes, Bob’s Autons, Sontarans… they’re the big ones. But the BBC are never gonna go back and do Androzani. But I would imagine an amazing techno-crime thriller on Androzani Major. You know, rain-sodden, I would love that. They’ll never do that. I would love to do 24 hours after the Doctor leaves the Sun Makers on Pluto and the unravelling, horrible unravelling of everything that goes there, that would be amazing.
We accept those things we can’t get. All of Malcolm Holt’s stuff, we can’t get. We can’t get the Silurians, the Sea Devils, but also other things that would be fun. We accept that, we embrace that, and other people will be playing with those toys in due time. And I look forward to seeing them. (Cutaway Comics uses Sutekh in Gods and Monsters, and the villain came back in this last series of Doctor Who on Disney+)
We’re always keeping in touch with the creators and sometimes they say, “I’d like to do it.” Sometimes they go. “Actually, no, I don’t or I haven’t got a story.” That’s OK. It’s an amazing universe of things. Every Doctor Who story is a pilot for something new. There are settings, there are people, and they’re designed so we’re invested in them. I suppose “Horror of Fang Rock,” everyone’s dead at the end. So that’s difficult. You probably couldn’t do “Horror of Fang Rock,” but other things are always available.
Derek McCaw: You’ve mentioned that you’re expanding into high end publishing in other ways, which is interesting, but I want to focus on Cutaway because of the comics. I think you implied there’s fully original stuff you wish you were ready to talk about.
Gareth Kavanagh: Yes! We’re now beginning to work with writers and creators who are going “What do you think about an original?” And I can see because Kickstarter is such a wonderful tool that we could do that.
I know that Steve Gallagher’s got an amazing pitch for a comic which went all the way up through quite a major publisher and more or less got green lit, and then the publisher went bust. I can’t remember the name of the publisher, but it was a major one and he went, “oh bloody hell. I’ve done all this work now.” So he said, “Would you be interested?” And I said, yeah, of course I would.
And there are other creators we’re working with. We can because we now understand the comics business much better than we did. I think four years ago we kind of blundered into this party and were sort of feeling our way around in the dark, but we understand it a lot better now. So we know about Diamond and distribution and comic stores and Kickstarters and budgeting and just how long it takes to get comics up. Things can take a lot longer than you’d think. So we really have that down pat.
So yes, originals are coming and from some really amazing creators who I’m very honoured that they are choosing us to talk to, so you know… watch this space!
Derek McCaw: You brought up Kickstarter. You’ve done a lot with it. Has that helped break through in an international audience?
Gareth Kavanagh: I do think so because we get a large proportion of, you know, North America in particular. Because I think people now know, they understand that without the Kickstarter these things don’t happen. They know that we try and go above and beyond to give unique content and and yeah, I think it has helped. It also helps when you swing round to Diamond because a lot of the time these the comic stores have heard about it. So it is helping us build our profile.
I think it’s honest as well. It’s a proper dialogue. It isn’t just as I’ve seen happen in other bits of the industry where titles are announced, they go into Diamond. They don’t quite hit the threshold of orders, so they’re just quietly cancelled. And I think that that’s something that, you know, we want our stuff to be…
Derek McCaw: Yours exists.
Gareth Kavanagh: Yeah, mate. They exist. They’re real. We’re committed. You know, to do a Kickstarter, we have to do like the first 10 pages normally. Fully. We had to commission the full script. We’ve had to do the deal. We’ve had to get the art, colouring, lettering for, almost a quarter of the book. We’re invested. We’re strapped in and on board at that point.
Derek McCaw: Having read the at least the first issue of Paradise Towers, about all I had time to this weekend, If you didn’t know it continues from a Doctor Who story, you don’t need to know it was from Doctor Who.
Gareth Kavanagh: That’s right. Weirdly, I think one thing that is moving in our model is that strangely now, I think there’s more potential in a setting as opposed to a character. We started with Lytton, who is, I think, a great character, you know, two good 80s shows, well played, fantastic face in in Maurice Colburn. And then the scenario and the ensemble was built around that one character, but I’m actually increasingly thinking that for us, the star is the setting.
So Paradise Towers as a world, as a concept. There’s a slightly crazy edge, you know, like all those failed colonies that Star Trek used to do in the 60s. Right? That is the star. And I think certainly for The Happiness Patrol, it gives us both because it literally starts 24 hours after the Doctor leaves. All those characters are kind of there, but I think the world is the star again.
Derek McCaw: And I think it’s important because on this side of the Atlantic, someone coming new to Who… those are all behind gates, all those episodes. Hulu used to stream them, but not now. (Since we did this interview, I’ve discovered Tubi does have some if not all of the Classic Who episodes.)
Gareth Kavanagh: So we have minimum baggage, bizarrely, in a way. Like writer Gary Russell has an extreme version of Aubrey. Horrible things can happen, you know, because The Doctor is the show. He’s the framework of the show, but you can’t really do anything to The Doctor. You can’t really do anything to the companions. They have to more or less finish who and what they are by the end.
Whereas no one’s safe in our world and there are consequences to what we do. I think it’s quite satisfying for our writers to go somewhere. Not that everything has to be doom and gloom and dark. I think tonally there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of light and hope and you know, a bit like (the 10th Doctor episode) “Turn Left.” The idea that the universe steps up if The Doctor is gone.
Derek McCaw: And how can you not have fun with The Kandyman? I’m sorry. That’s my favorite. That is my favorite villain. So very happy that you’re bringing the The Kandyman back.
Gareth Kavanagh: I love The Kandyman. The Kandyman is so good and only Doctor Who could do Joseph Mengele as a sort of Bertie Bassett Sweets creative. And I I think it’s the genius and sometimes we can play from that.
You know the best stories of the 80s are comfortably, conceptually brilliant. But they’re being made on the budget of a sitcom and yeah, that does show. They’re trying. And they’re brilliant. Brilliant, brave, crazy people are trying to make Halo Jones on the budget of an episode of a Ronnie Corbett sitcom No — less than a budget of a Ronnie Corbett sitcom. Because that got more money. They were trying to make it on a quarter of the budget of a sitcom.
So hats off! Fantastic! But we can be more expensive.
Derek McCaw: Absolutely. I wish you the best of luck. I look forward to seeing you next year.
Gareth Kavanagh: Thank you. We’ll be here.
