The Daleks (series)

The Daleks, later reprinted as The Dalek Tapes and collected as The Dalek Chronicles, was a series of 104 single-page comic stories published in the TV Century 21 magazine between 1965 and 1967. The stories detailed the history of the Daleks from their creation to their discovery of Earth.

Storyline
The strip portrayed a unique narrative of the creation of the Daleks. The original humanoid Daleks were diminutive blue men with large heads. For their war against the Thals, these humanoid Daleks had created not just war machines but also neutron bombs that were accidentally detonated by a meteorite fall. The subsequent explosion created mutant Daleks who used the war machines as their shells. This account conflicted with the story recounted in The Daleks and was later contradicted by Genesis of the Daleks.

Later stories told of the expansion of the Dalek Empire and a lengthy war against the Mechanoids and other enemies (tying into The Chase). In most of these, the Emperor Dalek served as the protagonist.

The final story, The Road to Conflict, concerned the Daleks' first encounters with humans and their discovery of the planet Earth. This was intended to lead into Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.. However, this was retconned in the followup story Return of the Elders, written and released thirty years later in Doctor Who Magazine issues 249-254. Another DWM followup, Deadline to Doomsday, was planned but ultimately unproduced by DWM, though a completed version was later published in the fanzine Vworp Vworp!.

Although the comic used a Dalek origin story which it is hard to reconcile with the later televised version, many characters and elements of the strips later made their way into the TV series, not to mention other DWU media; these include Daleks flying, the character of the Dalek Emperor, a singular, supreme Black Dalek who led the Dalek Empire directly below the Emperor, and even premises such as Daleks who experienced a conflict of faith and began admiring human values (as embodied by Dalek Sec in Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks).

In addition, the series served as an explicit aesthetic influence on another solo Dalek spin-off, the animated webseries Daleks!.

Stories by issue
Originally, no individual titles were given to the stories. However, some titles were given in the preceding issue's "coming next time" closing caption. After doing research and interviewing those involved in the original strips, John Ainsworth proposed the following titles, which were later used by Doctor Who Magazine in their reprints:

Crew
Though the strips featured the credit "by Terry Nation", writer David Whitaker also contributed. The editor of TV Century 21 said that he had a heavy hand in the writing of the Genesis of Evil story, although this is unlikely.

At different times, Richard Jennings, Eric Eden, and Ron Turner did the art duties.

Reprints
The first reprints of the World Distributors first reprinted some The Daleks comics in 1976 and 1977 in Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1977 and Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1978 under new titles (sometimes different from those later agreed upon by Who scholars; for example, The Penta Ray Factor was instead printed as The Envoys of Evil). These reprints erased the title panel and final caption-box of each comic, replacing them with new narration to give the appearance of a flowing narrative rather than a page-by-page serial. In the process, the crossover references to other ongoing TV Century 21 storylines were often elided.

Issues 33 to 42 of Doctor Who Magazine presented a multi-part comic story called The Dalek Tapes, which was essentially a reprint of the first few The Daleks stories, although with even more numerous alterations; not only were the original caption boxes removed or reworded, but a new framing device was added (presenting the Dalek history as a series of accounts found by the Doctor on a "twilight world") and on at least one occasion, a wholly new panel of art was inserted.

It was only in 1994 that an effort was made by Marvel Comics to reprint the whole series, with no new material (save for a in-universe prose prelude). The result was a graphic novel called The Dalek Chronicles, whose only edit to the stories was again to remove most of the caption-boxes referencing non-DW-related elements of the TV Century 21 shared universe.

Genesis of Evil alone was reprinted in Doctor Who Fifty Years 1: The Daleks, uniquely retaining the typewritten caption boxes.

In 2020 Panini digitally restored the strips, most from the original art boards, and reprinted them as a graphic novel in bookazine format called The Daleks, now indeed including the caption-boxes.

Title graphics
The title image occupied the first panel on the page for the first 75 issues. From issue 76 onward the title ran along the length of the page above the comic.