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A Season Of Doctor Who You Never Knew You Wanted

by Vince Brusio

From tackling an alien pet in the streets of London, to exposing a devilish mystery in the 1930s Bayou, the creative team of Rob Williams and Al Ewing let it all hang out in Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Volume 1 — After Life HC (SEP141640), now in stores! Check out this PREVIEWSworld Exclusive interview where we talk to both creators to ask them about their thoughts on the one Doctor who's always willing to make house calls!

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Article Image c242PREVIEWSworld: What’s the attraction for you to work on a Doctor Who book? What do you like about this particular incarnation of the Doctor?

Rob Williams: It's The Doctor. One of the biggest, best loved pop culture characters in media. Who wouldn't want to write The Doctor. You get to tell any story you want in any era. That's pretty creatively freeing. Time machines are good like that. And, from a personal point of view, my son loves watching the show, so I get dad points with him for writing some of The Doctor's adventures. As for the 11th, I like his sense of fun, his verbal patter. His mouth runs faster than his brain, which is always fun to write. And Matt Smith gave him this great weight and gravitas too. The 'angry god' is always just below the surface. That's a nice dynamic to play with.

Al Ewing: To write Doctor Who is to write a little piece of pop-culture history. There's no overestimating the importance of it for any British kid, whether it's back in the old days with the 'classic series', or now - I know for a fact both my nephews watch it religiously, so writing something I know they can get into when they're old enough is a big deal for me. In terms of what makes Eleventh special - coming right on the heels of the Tenth, he seemed more fallible, more human, more interesting in a lot of ways. I suppose that sense that he can lose as easily as win is something we've gotten into a little.

PREVIEWSworld: When you put together the script for this book, did you hammer it out all at once, or did things change along the way?

Article Image 821aRob Williams: Al Ewing and I worked out the macro A plot for the series between us, and then we each had issue slots that we had to individually pitch.

But there's a degree of co-writing on each issue really. We both get the chance to offer an idea or two to the other's books. And some of the issues we've co-written in different forms. It's been a fun experience. Plus working with a writer like Al really pushes you to try and do your best work, which I think has helped our book be quite ambitious in places.

Al Ewing: A few things have changed from the very early days - originally, things got very dark, but we ended up backing away from that (although some readers of what we've got coming up will be amazed that we were planning to go even darker.) And the over-plot we've been working with isn't completely set in stone — as we've been writing the actual issues, we've made small changes here and there. It's always the way. I don't think I've ever had a plot that's survived completely intact after becoming a script, and that's as it should be. When a plot's completely inflexible, it means you can't plug holes in it as they crop up.

Rob Williams: It's everything you want from your 11th Doctor adventures plus some exciting new things you've never seen before. The comic format allows us to throw budget out the window and have a shape-shifting alien as a companion. We have, effectively, David Bowie as a companion. And Alice, our main new companion, offers a different texture herself, being a 30-something woman who's physically older than Matt Smith.

Plus there's the whole over-reaching emotional arc of dealing with grief and moving forward. We've tried to deliver a book with adventure, spectacle, horror, comedy and heart. All the things Who should have.

Article Image 9370Al Ewing: I'd call it the extra season of Doctor Who you never know you wanted! And it's doing things comics can do that TV can't - not just all the things Rob mentioned above, like budget-shattering alien companions, but the already-famous 'backwards issue' Rob wrote, featuring a reverse timeline that the Doctor has to navigate to survive - that'd be almost impossible to pull off in TV-land. And coming up in #11, we've got something I can't even describe in words, or spoiler-free words, at any rate. But it's colorful! Very colorful.

PREVIEWSworld: If you had to type up a blog entry about your experience writing this book, what scene in the story would you most likely “geek” over?

Rob Williams: It's the Bowie stuff for me, definitely. Our 'John Jones' character goes through all these Bowie incarnations and gets to hang out with The Doctor. Which explains a lot, when you think about it. But in terms of classic Who, there's a surprise at the end of issue #12 which made me feel like I wanted to go hide behind the sofa.

Al Ewing: I think the one scene I'd 'geek out' over would be the introduction of ARC - my attempt to write a classic 'base under siege' story, that turned into a murder mystery, that turned into a monster rampage, that turned into... something new. And continues to evolve with every issue into something new and strange. To get back to issue #11, that's going to be the astonishing origin of ARC - what it is and how it came to be, and I think that's something fans will be geeking out over as well.

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PREVIEWSworld: Can fans contact you through any social media site?

Rob Williams: I'm on Twitter as @Robwilliams71 and my website, with updates on my different comics, is at robwilliamscomics.co.uk.

Al Ewing: I'm @Al_Ewing on twitter, and I also have a tumblr at alewing.tumblr.com - see you there!

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