God bless the Blue Peter Design a Monster Competition!
If this had never taken place, we'd never have had thirty seconds of brilliant fun viewing the 'winners' on More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS, which is how I first discovered our Hero's monster. Nor, indeed, Gareth Roberts' Missing Adventure The English Way of Death, which put the ironclad tentacled terror back into my head in a flash while I was mooching around trying to find a sparring partner for my new comic strip character.
I decided to have The Karkus so inept he only won this encounter by doing absoluely nothing worthwhile. It was a fun and effective debut, resurfacing years later in RTP's second instalment of its own parody strip Pulp Who. In this strip here, Professor Zaroff is just a tack-on character - someone had to spur the beast on!
Readers familiar with past Karkus strips will have worked out that this isn't the original - it's a re-draw, wth a couple of amendments (I removed a mention of NZ discount chain The Warehouse, an early indication of a lamentable parochialism that slips in to all my creative work.) The original can be viewed elsewhere in scanned form, but its original copy is lost, presumably forever. I'd prefer to think that it was sent brimming with optimism and dreams of stardom over to the UK where it had been considered for appearance in License Denied, Paul Cornell's 1998 anthology of Doctor Who fanzine articles and artwork; but if I'm honest, it was probably a photocopy sent, and the dimensions of which may have doomed its chances of seeing print. Well, that was according to Paul at the time in an email, but having bought the book and seeing what it was up against, I did wonder whether he may have been letting me down gently. Ah well. Gone it is, anyway.
As for the scanned original, contrast and compare here.
And as for the Blue Peter Design a Monster Competition? Its finalists and optimistic chancers inevitably provided me (and The Karkus) with a few more adversaries along the way. Winners, all!
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