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Monday 4 August 2008

Crossovers That Never Happened: The Two Doctors

... The Two Doctors in question being Doctor Who and Doctor Strange.

It was TV Doctor Who script editor Andrew Cartmel who proposed a Doctor Who/ Doctor Strange crossover and submitted a plot to me around 1991/92, about the same time as he was writing Evening's Empire, a six-part story for Doctor Who Magazine that ran into more than a few deadline problems.

As the then editor of Doctor Who Magazine, I either commissioned Lee Sullivan to do the piece of promo art below, or he did it for fun. Lee's like that.

Marvel US Editor-in-Chief Tom de Falco, a Doctor Who fan himself and who, in the early 1990s, regularly visited Marvel UK to discuss its direction, ran workshops on comics creation and more, liked the idea of a crossover. Howver, he felt that at the time, with the reduced interest in Doctor Who that was the result of the BBC's 'hiatus' for the show that effectively ended the Seventh Doctor's period on TV, there was no advantage in proceeding with a crossover which would, in his view, benefited Doctor Who more than it would Doctor Strange.

Although the story never happened, I believe Andrew used some of the ideas in his novels.

For the benefit of posterity, here then is a Two Doctor image you may never have expected to see...

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