The Klepton Parasites
The first Doctor Who comic strip was almost a Dalek story - until the BBC rejected it. TV Publications' The Klepton Parasites (1964) introduced John and Gillian Who, and began a comic universe that would run across four Doctors' eras.
The Klepton Parasites
TV Comics Story #1
"In the far distant future, the Thains have lived happily and peacefully for many years. But one day, strange, menacing creatures hover over the city..."
— The Klepton Parasites
While the popularity of the TV Show continued to skyrocket into the mid-60s, Doctor Who began to expand into other mediums. TV Publications - later renamed Polystyle Publications in 1968 - published a weekly magazine “TV Comic” between 1951 and 1984. In late 1964, a new two-page comic story began to be featured, focusing on extra adventures with the Doctor - fashioned as Dr Who - and his two grandchildren John and Gillian. The main rival for TV Comics at the time was City Magazine, which published a similar weekly story featuring the Daleks.
TV Comics wanted to start their new comic strip off with a bang - with the Daleks and the Thals on Skaro. However, the BBC Publicity’s Editorial Assistant Evelyn Thomas and the BBC Head of Serials Donald Wilson rejected it outright - mentioning that the original draft was just a copy of The Daleks, in a way that would avoid paying the original writers and removing most of the original characters to save money. Instead, the Daleks and the Thals were changed to the Kleptons and the Thains, with the plot being rejigged to be a little bit more action orientated.
The first in this series was The Klepton Parasites, which introduced John and Gillian Who as the grandchildren of Dr Who, despite them never having met each other before, with John stating that Dr Who is “an inventor or something”. It was written and illustrated by Neville Main, printed across ten issues between the 9th of November 1964 and the 11th of January 1965, beginning in TV Comics issue 674, and later reissued in colour in Doctor Who Classic Comics.
When Dr Who and his grandchildren accidentally land in the 30th century, they find the peaceful Thains under brutal assault from the Kleptons. The travellers use ancient heat weapons from a museum to help the Thains stave off the invasion, before tracking the Kleptons to their secret underwater base. Captured by the Kleptons, Dr Who engineers a mass escape by turning the Kleptons' underlings - the Creepers - against them and destroying their reactor. The base is destroyed, the invasion stopped, and Dr Who, John and Gillian slip off to continue their travels.
The differences between this story and the television series is quite significant for the first spin off. The TARDIS goes unnamed, John and Gillian are original characters replacing Susan on screen, and the Doctor himself is a lot different in characterisation than Hartnell’s rather distinctive on screen version. This rather underwhelming start to the comic universe of Doctor Who would nonetheless continue across another thirty-one stories in the First Doctor’s eras, as well as carry on through the Second, Third and Fourth Doctors’ eras.
The Klepton Parasite is extremely rare physically and difficult to find digitally in its original black and white form. This archive holds the colourised versions published later, but is still searching for the original publications.