Doctor Who Annual 2006

The Doctor Who Annual 2006 was released in September 2005.

Overview

 * Release Number 1
 * Publisher Panini, UK
 * Released in September 2005
 * ISBN 1-904419-73-9
 * Priced £6.99
 * Format Hardback 62 pages
 * Featured Doctor:the Ninth Doctor
 * Featured Companions: Rose Tyler
 * Featured Enemies: to be added

Accredited credits

 * Editor: Clayton Hickman
 * Designer: Peri Godbold
 * Frontispiece illustration by Alister Pearson
 * Puzzles by Justin Richards and Gareth Roberts
 * Puzzle Page illustrations by Ben Morris
 * With thanks to: Russell T Davies, Tom Spilsbury, James Clarkson, Ian Grutchfield, Francine Holdgate, Nick Pegg, James Hawes, Kate Beharrell, Richard Hollis, Rosemarie Harrison.

Additional notes

 * With the new series on television proving such a success, it was not surprising that 2005 also saw the return of the Doctor Who annual.
 * Once again the license to publish the title was picked up by the publishers of Doctor Who Magazine, with Panini Comics having now taken over the title and rights from Marvel UK.
 * The Annual was the usual mix of comic strip, short stories, features and puzzles, and was a great success in publishing terms: so successful, in fact that by the following year two titles were released that fit the definition of Annuals (i.e. a hardback book, published around September and intended for the Christmas merchandising market, with a limited shelf life and often, but not necessarily, year dated on the cover).
 * The following year would see the publication of the Doctor Who The Official Annual 2007, published by BBC Books and the Doctor Who Storybook 2007, published by Panini. While the latter presented a series of short illustrated fiction stories, the former concentrated on the lighter side of activities, games, puzzles and a reprinted comic strip story from Doctor Who Adventures, and was aimed at a younger audience.
 * Russell T Davies's contributions to this Annual are significant. As well as offering a full biography of Rose Tyler which detailed many elements only alluded to on television, Russell gives an overview of the Ninth Doctor and perhaps more significantly, his involvement in the Last Great Time War and its legend. Later, in the TV story The Day of the Doctor, it was established that the Doctor that did much of the fighting was the War Doctor portrayed by John Hurt (although the Ninth Doctor, and 13 incarnations in total, are also crucially involved in the explosion that preceded the Doctor's solitary existence in the 2005-present revival).

"On the planet Crafe Tec Heydra, is a mountain, on the side of which is a crude record of an invisible War. Told in carvings and hieroglphs, it tells of two warring races (one flesh, the other metal), a fearsome explosion, and a solitary stranger walking away from the wreckage. Beneath the stranger is a phrase scratched in stone that translates as: 'You are not alone'!"

- Russell T Davies


 * Another significant contribution to be found in this annual, comes from the writer Steven Moffat, whose tale What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow was reworked to become the 2007 episode Blink. In this Doctor-lite story, a new, distinct version of Sally Sparrow was the lead character, receiving a message from the Doctor caught in the past.
 * The Annual also made a reference to the Big Finish audio drama The Apocalypse Element as one of the key moments leading up to the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, referred to only as "the Etra Prime Incident".
 * Some of the Time War events involving the Animus and the Eternals mentioned there were later used in the novel A Brief History of Time Lords.