It’s the interview we wanted almost more than any other from day one of Vworp Vworp!: ALAN MOORE discussing Doctor Who and specifically, those backup strips in Doctor Who Weekly and Monthly from 1980 and 1981 which coincidentally were his very first professional big title commissions.

We’re eternally grateful to the late great Steve Moore for brokering this conversation. Both Steve and Alan were hugely fond of these early strips, as you’ll find out when you read this extraordinary chat about Autons, Cybermen, Darth Vader and the modern Doctor Who TV script he has in mind but will probably never write.

Here's a teaser excerpt from the interview, as Alan takes us back to 1980 and how the commission came about…

VWORP VWORP!: The Doctor Who stuff seems to be right at the beginning of your long comic-scripting career...

ALAN MOORE: Sometime around this point I was also, I believe, approached by Paul Neary, probably through Steve, who would then have been head of Marvel Comics and I think that they’d perhaps just bumped Steve up from the back-up strips to the main story and so the back-up strips needed a writer.

So I imagine that probably something like what happened is that maybe Paul Neary asked for suggestions, and whether it would have been Steve who suggested me or Paul Neary himself I don’t know.

But I was offered the chance to do a four-part story and each part would be two pages long, and I was given the brief that this would be a back-up story for Doctor Who where the set-up was that you were allowed to use any of the monstrous Doctor Who villains, except for the Daleks...

There was some sort of complicated stuff which I never really understood. It wasn’t really relevant to me so I never really understood the ins and outs of it.

But I suppose that, faced with an eight-page story that had to be broken down into four parts, I started to think about what might make a decent eight-page story and I came up with the narrative of what would be Black Legacy. I’m trying to remember exactly how my thinking went upon that particular project.

I think that I decided that if I couldn’t use Daleks then probably the next biggest Doctor Who enemy would probably be the Cybermen. I started to think about the Cybermen and, as I understood it, the main part of the Cybermen ethos was efficiency, and a kind of a hygiene.

Physical and mental disease would be completely unknown to the Cybermen. So I thought, what if there was something that could reintroduce these forgotten terrors to this race that has evolved beyond the fear of mental and physical illness.

You can read the full interview only in Volume Three of VWORP VWORP! Order your copy here.

vworp vworp! Volume 3 includes some Extraordinary Gentlemen

With supporting interviews from Alan’s Doctor Who strip artists JOHN STOKES and V for Vendetta’s DAVID LLOYD, together with a brief chat with 80s script editor ANDREW CARTMEL on Halo Jones and Doctor Who and informed by specially commissioned features exploring key aspects of Alan’s Doctor Who work and beyond from ALAN STEVENS (co-author of The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guides to Blake’s 7/The Prisoner/Battlestar Galactica), TONY J FYLER, LEON HEWITT and Eruditorum Press’ own PHILIP SANDIFER.