AlphaBots: K is for K-9

This week's AlphaBots drawing is sure to tug at the nostalgic sentiments of some. And he is a faithful, charming, and useful robot by anyone's estimate.

As I have mentioned before, I was never a huge devotee of Doctor Who myself, though I did watch it when I could for a little while when I was in junior high. I even read one paperback novelization of a story arc on a trip to my grandmother's house.

The local PBS station was broadcasting episodes with the Tom Baker incarnation of the Doctor, and I had a hand-me-down TV in my bedroom that barely picked the station up. I consequently think of Doctor Who as a secret, almost underground show, half-masked in the snow of bad reception. I know that's not the way most people received it.

On reflection, though, I realize that those weird, low-budget shows were one of the first cultural products that I found entirely on my own. I don't know whether I even talked to people about it. If someone told me I'd dreamed or hallucinated the whole business, I'd almost believe it.

So, anyway, I remember K-9 with a sort of cobwebbed fondness, but he's not a major part of my contemporary situation like some robots.


(P.S. I actually considered, briefly, doing this other robot, and I'm glad someone else did it better than I could have.)

Alphabeasts: Z is for Zarbi

This is going to be my last Alphabeasts post. It's hard not to be a little wistful about the passing of this project. It drew a lot more artists to make a lot more art than the organizers could have imagined, and personally I think my cartooning has improved a lot over the last six months, at least within the idiom I've been working in.

If you'd like to see all of my Alphabeasts posts in one place, you can click on the tag, of course, but if you'd like to see all my drawings without the accompanying text, you can also trace back through the alphabet here behind this link.

(While you're looking over there, consider checking out the full string of D&D creatures drawn by Ben Towle, the wacky yokai by Leah Palmer Preiss, the mega-fun kaiju by Joey Weiser, the spontaneous watercolors of Lupi McGinty and the crazy inventions of her daughter AZ, Caitlin Lehman's fun and stylish drawings, the often-hilarious cartoons of Henry Eudy, and the energetic and stylish digital sketches of Andrew Neal, the guy who deserves enormous credit for managing the whole big project. Those are some terrific sets of images by some of the people I've been really happy to meet over the course of this project.)

Anyway, about the zarbi.

You might be wondering how I made it this far into my alphabet without using Dr. Who. I don't really know a lot of Dr. Who lore—I'm much more a Star Trek nerd than a Dr. Who nerd—but my impression is that most of the alien menaces on Dr. Who are, though weird looking, pretty sentient, and my original parameters for the project therefore excluded things like daleks and cybermen. Also, once I started doing my research, half a year ago, I found this:



The zarbi are officially a race of insectoid alien monsters, but to me they sure look like some dude wearing a gigantic ant body over normal pants and shoes.

This is what people are talking about, clearly, when they say that the special effects on the old Dr. Who were not all that great. The zarbi appeared in the second series of Dr. Who, in 1965. Maybe I shouldn't be too critical. I've never seen those early episodes, and I know that Star Trek wasn't doing a whole lot better four years later.

Anyway, that's it for me on this project. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be on board for the next alphabet, which is supposed to be illustrations of characters from books. I might be able to scrounge up a few blog posts between now and the next letter A, but to tell you the truth I'll probably need the time for grading or sleeping.

Doodle Penance: "десять докторов"

Google is everywhere, which means that even an ordinary website like ours gets the occasional hit from a far-flung place like Oxford or Rennes, or Israel or Hungary. And this week, we apparently received a very brief visit from a Russian-speaking inquirer, looking for десять докторов. That's "ten doctors," if you can't read Russian.

It's possible that some Muscovite has ten ailments, like Writer's Cramp and Butterflies in the Stomach. Or perhaps some right-wing American kook is trying to make a very subtle and misguided point about socializing health care.

But my theory—indubitably the most plausible interpretation of the search term—is that there's some student out there hoping to do some quick Russian-language drills by making flash cards out of the names of comics characters. In a "Twelve Days of Christmas" sort of build-up, he or she has already printed cards for nine versions of Superman, eight super-gorillas, seven Starmen, six trick archers, five folks with wings, et cetera, and is up to Doctors. (Eleven and twelve are Lanterns and Captains, clearly.)

(Click the pic, please, to enlarge and perhaps admire.)



Actually, there could be more in this set. I've thought of another six or seven already, and there are probably more. Somewhere in comics-land there must be a university that gives a lot of honorary degrees.

Anyway, since our Googler wasn't just looking for "ten doctors" but "десять докторов," let me supply the other side of the flash cards, too.



(Russian translations by my friend Zina Deretsky. Thanks!)

Recognize them all? If the dude with the wild eyebrows and the Kirby krackle isn't familiar, you might need to book a trip to the Fourth World.

If you don't recognize that bald little gremlin in the ninth square, you haven't been reading our archives.

And if you don't know the skeptic in the final panel, you'd better prenez garde aux architectes.

And if you think my original color version doesn't look Russian enough, here's a version in sable and gules.



Mike? What have you got this week?

—Man, why should I even bother? But since I must...

Since Russian doesn't use the definite article, I assumed that our Google searcher was interested not just in "ten doctors" but in "THE ten doctors," better, "The Ten Doctors," as in the Rich Morris fan-fic graphic novel I posted about here or just as in a celebration of the ten incarnations of the Doctor (aka Doctor Who), the tenth of whom just finished his tenure on New Year's Day. So I drew quick caricature-portraits of the ten Doctors whose adventures we have seen thus far:

The less comment on this, the better. But if anyone is still interested in a foreign-language variant on Doctor Who, you could do worse than to seek out the vastly superior rendition of the famous theme-tune as if it were Belgian jazz, complete with French spoken lyrics, by the great musician-comedian Bill Bailey.

The Ten Doctors by Rich Morris

Like many a young nerd who watched PBS back in the day, I was once a pre-teen fan of the BBC science-fiction classic Doctor Who, featuring a long-lived, time-traveling alien from Gallifrey, a canny Time Lord known only as the Doctor, who moved through space and time in what looked like a '60s-era British police call box and who could regenerate his body when catastrophe threatened him with death (which coincidentally tended to happen whenever an actor was leaving the title role). So taken was I with the program, and particularly with the seemingly definitive performance of the great Tom Baker as the fourth incarnation of the Doctor, that I briefly took up knitting in order to begin my own version of the fourth Doctor's trademark extra-long scarf (I never finished), and for many years I wore a version of the fourth Doctor's trademark hat (which sadly went up in flames in a car fire during college).

More to the point of this blog, I even made a bunch of Whovian doodles back in the day. Here are some selections from a page full of Fourth Doctors, K-9 robot dogs, and TARDISes I drew in fifth or sixth grade:

I even made a pitiful stab at Chris Ware-style toy construction (long before I ever heard of Chris Ware) with these notes on how to make a model Dalek out of washers, dowel, and a container of Dry Idea deodorant, while the Fourth Doctor himself could be fashioned out of dowels and cotton balls:

Anyway, time travel to my own misspent youth is profitless, especially when I really started this post to shout this joyous news from the laptops: not only has Doctor Who been revived in a successful and entertaining new BBC series—which I think is fantastic—but Rich Morris, Who-fan and cartoonist extraordinaire, has now completed his mammoth feat of comic-strip fanfic, the 247-page magnum opus The Ten Doctors, featuring all ten incarnations (thus far) of the Doctor:

You can read the first nine pages here, and you can download the whole shebang here. I still haven't read the whole thing myself—I've read it off and on since last spring, checking in every now and then to see how much further the story has advanced—but I'm confident that Rich Morris has kept the mix of humor, action, and convincing characterization intact to the end. His cartooning is sharp—sharp enough to make for compulsive reading even though most pages are scanned direct from pencils, with no ink or color—and his caricatures of the various actors are economically recognizable without designy cheating. This story has appealed to fans of both the classic Doctor Who series (1963–1989) and the revived series (2004–present), whether or not they are familiar with all ten iterations of the Doctor (usually termed "regenerations," though that seems off for the First Doctor). If you've enjoyed official BBC Doctor Who adventures, chances are you'll enjoy these, too—and it's one of the only ways you'll ever see ten Doctors together in one story.