The Daleks (series)

The Daleks was the title of a multi-media Daleks-focused Doctor Who spin-off launched by Terry Nation independently from the BBC in 1965 following the success of the first Dalek annuals.

The series principally comprised a series of comics detailing the history of the Daleks from their creation to their discovery of Earth. These were originally published in TV Century 21 magazine between 1965 and 1967, then later reprinted as The Dalek Tapes and collected as The Dalek Chronicles. TV Century 21 also released a tie-in audio production adapting an episode of The Chase.

Nation also hoped to launch The Daleks as a television series. Although these plans fell through, the script for the pilot, which featured Sara Kingdom and Mark Seven battling the Daleks, was eventually released, still under the umbrella of The Daleks, by Big Finish Productions in 2010.

Storyline
The TV Century 21 comics 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 comic story of the original run, 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 altered in the followup story Return of the Elders, written and released thirty years later in Doctor Who Magazine issues 249-254, so as to resolve the timeline contradiction between the 2060s timeframe of the comics, and the 2150s setting usually agreed upon for the Dalek invasion of Earth. 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!.

Comics
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
Although the comic strip's title frames featured the credit "by Terry Nation", presumably for contractual reasons, he actually had little or nothing to do with the strip itself; writer David Whitaker was the primary author of the stories. Alan Fennell, editor of TV Century 21, also said that he had a heavy hand in the writing of the first story, Genesis of Evil.

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

Reprints
World Distributors first reprinted some The Daleks comics in Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1977 and Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1978. These reprints erased the title panel and final caption-box of each comic, replacing the crossover references to other ongoing TV Century 21 storylines with new narration to give the appearance of a flowing narrative rather than a page-by-page serial. The stories were also assigned new titles, sometimes different from those which would later enter common parlance: for instance, The Penta Ray Factor was titled The Envoys of Evil. The edited reprints in Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1977 formed a story titled The Daleks.

Issues 33 to 42 of Doctor Who Magazine reprinted the first few The Daleks stories in the context of a multi-part framing narrative called The Dalek Tapes. In this edition, the alterations were even more numerous: 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.

In 1994, Marvel Comics reprinted the entire series in a single volume, The Dalek Chronicles, without any edits or new material other than an in-universe prose prelude.

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 including the caption-boxes, and reprinted them as a graphic novel in bookazine format called The Daleks.

Title graphics
The title image occupied the first panel on the page for the first 75 issues. From issue 76 onward the title was a banner running the length of the page above the comic strip.