The Daleks (series)

Originally entitled simply The Daleks and written by David Whitaker, the comic strips retroactively named 'The Dalek Chronicles, began in the TV Century 21 comics magazine in 1965. It had many reprints, most recently in 1994.

The strip detailed the history of the Daleks from their creation on Skaro, to their discovery of space flight, their conquests, their war with the Mechanoids and, finally, the Daleks' discovery of Earth.

The Dalek Chronicles gave a very different account of the creation of the Daleks than Genesis of the Daleks and somewhat different account recounted, but not seen in The Daleks.

The TV 21 strips portrayed the opposing sides in Skaro's war as the Thals and the humanoid Daleks, shown as diminutive blue men with large heads somewhat similar in appearance to Dan Dare's Mekon. According to the comic, these humanoid Daleks built neutron bombs which were accidentally detonated by a meteorite storm.

The Daleks' chief scientist, Yarvelling, had built Dalek casings as war machines prior to the nuclear holocaust. After the neutron bombs exploded, Yarvelling and Zolfian, the warlord of the humanoid Daleks, discovered that a mutated Dalek had survived in the war machine casing. This Dalek told Yarvelling and Zolfian to build more Dalek casings for their mutanted descendants. Before the last two humanoid Daleks died, it declared itself the Dalek Emperor.

Later stories in the Dalek comic told of the expansion of the Dalek Empire, including a lengthy war against the Mechanoids. In the last published comic in this series, the Daleks learned the location of Earth, which they proposed to invade. Although much of the material in these strips directly contradicted what was shown on television later, some concepts like flying Daleks, Daleks using humanoid duplicates and the design of the Dalek Emperor did show up later on in the programme.

The Doctor did not feature into the history. The Emperor appeared in most of the stories as the series' main viewpoint character, though a heroic humanoid anti-Dalek robot featured in many of the later stories.