Polystyle Holiday Special is an invented name for a loose "series" of three 1970s releases by Polystyle — the Doctor Who Holiday Specials 1973 and 1974 and the Doctor Who Winter Special 1977.
Publication details[]
The 1973 and 1974 editions feature the Third Doctor. They contain a mixture of original short stories and comic strips. They have the feel of a Doctor Who annual, without the children's games and puzzles that are usually present in such books. These editions contain some interesting and rare Polystyle usage of televised characters.
Published in the waning years of the Polystyle licence, the 1977 edition couldn't be more different. It is reprint-heavy, as reflects the state of the TV Comic strip of the late 1970s, and its one original story confuses televised continuity entirely.
1973[]
The 1973 volume is quite faithful to Doctor Who as it was then being televised. It makes thorough and in-character use of UNIT, the Brigadier and the Master. It contains both a comic story and a short story using the Master. That alone is unusual — most non-televised stories with the Delgado Master being published in the 1990s — but the fact that these came while Roger Delgado was still alive makes them quite extraordinary.
As an example of the effort this volume makes to be faithful to television, one story even mentions Mike Yates. He didn't actually appear, but it was the only time the the character ever got a namecheck in comics published contemporaneously with the Pertwee era.
| Stories original to this volume | Reprints |
|---|---|
| COMIC: Fogbound | COMIC: Duel of the Daleks reprinted as Dalek Duel |
| PROSE: Smash Hit | |
| COMIC: Secret of the Tower |
1974[]
The 1974 special retains the quality of the previous edition, this time including the comic strip debut of Sarah Jane Smith — or as Polystyle preferred, “Sarah-Jane Smith”. Until the publication of In With the Tide in 2013, these were the only appearances Sarah-Jane made alongside the Third Doctor in Doctor Who comics.
As with the previous year's special, UNIT and the Brigadier also featured, this time with Sergeant Benton appearing in one story. Moreover, the notion of parallel universes is explored in Who's Who?, which — as an occasional theme of the Third Doctor's televised era — further makes this volume feel like a more faithful representation of Pertwee's time in the TARDIS than is typical for the ongoing Polystyle comic strip. Significantly, this publication was also the first Polystyle title – and among the earliest of any tie-in publications – to use a variant of the programme’s then new “diamond” logo, designed by Bernard Lodge and introduced on-screen in December 1973 with the launch of Season 11.
This special was published contemporaneously with the initial broadcast of Planet of the Spiders. It's thus a kind of "last hurrah" for the Third Doctor which would have been experienced by many contemporary readers after they knew a new Doctor was on his way. Still, just as with the Second Doctor, Polystyle would stretch out the Third Doctor's comic era for more than six months after the initial broadcast of the televised regeneration into the Fourth Doctor.
| Stories original to this volume | Reprints |
|---|---|
| COMIC: Doomcloud | COMIC: Power Play reprinted as The Daleks |
| COMIC: Perils of Paris | |
| COMIC: Who's Who? |
1977[]
The 1977 edition nominally stars the Fourth Doctor, although the comic strips are all reprints of strips originally published in TV Action, with a sometimes poorly-drawn attempt at Tom Baker’s likeness drawn over that of Jon Pertwee. The publication’s one original contribution to the body of Doctor Who fiction is a short story featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela in Victorian England, presumably devised so it could be illustrated using available photographs from The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
| Stories original to this volume | Reprints |
|---|---|
| PROSE: The Living Wax | COMIC: The Labyrinth |
| COMIC: The Threat from Beneath reprinted as Invasion | |
| COMIC: The Spoilers | |
| COMIC: Who is the Stranger |
Why "Polystyle Holiday Special"?[]
The somewhat artificial name is necessary because the three publications were not really a part of any ongoing series — although, in common with several other reprint-heavy specials published by Polystyle in 1977, the Doctor Who title did emphasise its connection to (Mighty) TV Comic. Thus, "Polystyle Holiday Special" serves to clearly distinguish between these publications and "Holiday Specials" of particular magazine titles, such as the TV Action Holiday Specials of 1970 and 1971, and the 1992 Holiday special edition of Doctor Who Magazine.
In addition, these three volumes are sometimes mistaken for TV Comic or TV Action annuals. In the first place, their publication schedule didn't match that of a British annual: not only were they not published for the Christmas market — "holiday" specials usually being published for summer — but also they weren't all published at the same time of year. Moreover, both TV Comic and TV Action had their own, proper hardback annuals and summer specials — quite separate publications, which contained bits from the full range of properties for whom Polystyle then had a comic strip licence.
Thus, these specials were all standalone publications. However, they are roughly similar, and were published by the same company within a period of four years. Convenience demands that these effective "orphans" be somehow grouped: thus, for clarity, they are placed under a name which doesn't quite appear on either the covers or in the indicia of any of the three publications.