Tube Surfing: Dr Strange and Spider Man, zines in Birmingham , a misunderstood shark and more CLiNT reviews

Right, what's out there today:

There's an excellent interview with artist Brendan McCarthy over at Mark Kardwell's Bad Librarianship blog. In it, Brendan gives us the inside track on various projects past and present, as well as discussing his new trade collection, Fever (starring Doctor Strange and Spider Man):

"Marvel got a fun and unusual comic and I was able to get the Ditko/Dr. Strange thing out of my system. The Fever trade collection also reprints the 1960's Spider Man Annual by Lee and Ditko that inspired my story. I wish they could have scanned it directly off the old printed pages to get the period feel. Still, artistically it's Ditko at his peak. His genius is there to be enjoyed. Sadly, I am not worthy to sharpen his pencil!'

• Leonie O'Moore has posted a short (and funny) online comic about Jaws at her blog. Have a read!

• Comics collective We Are Words + Pictures (WAWP) will be attending the Birmingham Zine Festival this weekend and running a Drop-in + Draw session there too. What's a Drop-in + Draw, you say? Over to the peeps at WAWP:

'We’re also running a Drop In + Draw in the nearby Island Bar between 5 and 6.30pm, a chance for creators and the public to unwind with pencil and paper. We’ll have material to help you get started, and a few people on hand to guide you and answer your questions, all for free.'

• Speaking of the Birmingham Zine Festival, their site has lots of cool interviews that are worth checking out, such as this one with James Nash.

• Oh, and a whole bunch of people are reviewing Titan Publishing's new anthology, CLiNT: we already mentioned some, but check out further reviews at Comic Book Resources (via), Paul Gravett (scroll down for this one), Bleeding Cool and Comic Vine...

Oh, and we reviewed it too awhile ago...

Anyway, that's all for now, folks. See you at my next Tube Surf!

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...