From the late-70s to the mid-80s, the madcap cartoons of Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett were an integral part of almost every title published by Marvel UK. One of their most fondly remembered strips was Doctor Who? which ran in Doctor Who Monthly/Magazine for over 10 years and was one of the few of their titles to survive the storm-in-a-teacup purge that followed the release of Channel 33⅓ – The Children’s Comic TV Station. As well as the regular three panel strip, they also released two original collections: The Doctor Who Fun Book for Target Books in 1987 and It’s Bigger on the Inside for Marvel UK in 1988. They’ve been active as a duo again in recent years, rereleasing some of their earlier material as It’s Even Bigger on the Inside and now, in celebration of the Diamond Anniversary of Doctor Who, a collection of old and new material – some of it in colour for the very first time – Who’s 60? A Celebration of Whos.

I’ve always loved Quinn and Howett’s stuff, not just for Doctor Who, but all of it! Their anarchic sense of humour seems to chime perfectly with my own. Tim Quinn’s writing is sharp and provocative, but never really oversteps the boundaries of good taste and Dicky Howett’s artwork has an incredible sense of chaotic movement that brings to mind half a century of British humour comics. When I started doing my own half-arsed comic strips for the fanzine FanMail in the late-80s, they were absolutely where I was drawing my inspiration from, although I never captured a fraction of Tim’s wit or a soupcon of Dicky’s dynamism. When I heard that Tim & Dicky were publishing a book for the 60th Anniversary (along with a collection of The Fantastic 400, which I shall also definitely be reviewing in due course), I was overjoyed.

Who’s 60? gathers together the best of Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett’s Doctor Who? strips, the best of The Doctor Who Fun Book and It’s Bigger on the Inside, new material featuring Doctors 8-15 and some other interesting bits and bobs in one handsome, (almost) full colour hardback volume. No mean feat considering this material was produced for more than one different publisher! As I said, a lot of it is published in colour for the very first time, but I can understand why some of it isn’t, because Dicky Howett’s sketch-like artwork doesn’t always lend itself to colourisation. Those pieces that are coloured though look extremely nice and definitely benefit from the process. It feels unusual to see Doctor Who? with so much attention lavished upon it, because it was for so long just a 3-panel addendum to the letters page.

One of the first strips in the book (and one of my favourite Doctor Who? pieces) is reprinted from the Doctor Who Monthly Winter Special 1983 and it’s An Unearthly Child: The Unscreened Edition. Running at 4 pages, a surprisingly lavish page-count for the boys, the story is a riff on the unscreened ‘pilot’ episode of Doctor Who, only in this version the mysterious policeman is Dixon of Dock Green, Susan anomalously listens to Duran Duran and the First Doctor introduces the cavemen to Raquel Welch, complete with shammy-leather bikini. It’s a great little spoof and it works much better than Tim and Dicky’s other famous long-form strip The Test of Time from The Doctor Who Fun Book. Sure, it’s been reprinted before in one of the Doctor Who Yearbooks, then later in It’s Even Bigger on the Inside, but any good comic strip can stand multiple reprints – as my five versions of The Iron Legion will testify.

Also a bit longer is A Day in the Life of a Television Producer from It’s Bigger on the Inside, spoofing John Nathan-Turner’s 1980 book called, er… A Day in the Life of a Television Producer. Like a lot of the Doctor Who? strips, this largely pokes fun at the budget and production values of the show and some of the ‘interesting’ choices that the then-incumbent producer made regarding the costumes of companions (particularly Peri). You have to remember when reading these older strips that the broader opinions of fandom have changed over the last 40 years or so; John Nathan-Turner might be lauded now, but he was something of a figure of fun in the 80s and Bonnie Langford’s depiction as an annoying screamer was largely how most fans saw her in a pre-Big Finish world. There’s no malice meant from any of these jokes, they’re all very good natured, although younger fans will have to regard them in the correct historical context.

Although these longer strips are a lot of fun, it’s in the 3-panel quickies that the boys excel. Most of these are laugh-out-loud funny in a way that most of Tim and Dicky’s successors at DWM have struggled with (until the arrival of Lew Stringer’s sublime The Daft Dimension). Some of the very best are included here, either colourised or in their original black and white, and they remind you how Dicky Howett’s artwork very quickly adopted a certain shorthand for the various Doctors; William Hartnell always looks grumpy, Tom Baker always looks wide-eyed and lugubrious, Colin Baker always looks either cheerful or angry (and a bit portly, again a product of its time) etc. It’s his depiction of Sylvester McCoy that always makes me laugh though – loose-limbed and slightly buck-toothed, like a time-travelling version of The Bash Street Kids’ Plug. New material showing an ashen-faced Peter Capaldi and Matt Smith with a colossal chin give a tantalising glimpse into how the world of Doctor Who? would have shaped up if the boys had kept doing it for all these years.

There are also a couple of interesting additions to the comic strips. Tim Quinn’s passion, besides comic books and Doctor Who, is the Beatles and he uses his knowledge of the Fab Four to concoct a delightful short text story called The Night Before, in which the first Doctor takes his granddaughter Susan to see the Beatles perform in Stockton-on-Tees on 22nd November 1963 – the night before the events of An Unearthly Child. This show actually happened and there’s a playbill to prove it! Of course, something else famously happened on 22nd November 1963 – the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas – and Tim cleverly weaves this event, along with the knowledge of future events, into the narrative. It’s a great story and it’s told with obvious love for the era in which it is set. It really makes me wish that Tim Quinn would write either a Doctor Who novel or a book of short stories like this.

Dicky Howett also contributes a solo piece. His is a memoir of the making of the 2013 drama An Adventure in Space and Time, for which his props company Golden Age TV provided vintage cameras for the 1960s TV studio set and in which Dicky himself played a small role as a BBC cameraman. This piece is largely a photomontage of snaps taken on the set, but it’s a timeless document of the making of the show and should be of great interest to not only Doctor Who fans but also anyone with an interest in TV production. The sets look absolutely amazing! I think Dicky’s recollection of the original 1960s actors who visited the set might be slightly askew though – didn’t Mike Craze die in 1998? Maybe it’s his son with the same name? Never mind, if I can choose to ignore the fact that one of the 3-panel strips is printed twice, I can deal with this.

Who’s 60? ends with a new strip featuring Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and commenting on the BBC’s deal with Disney+ for the new series. Given that we’ve only seen the vaguest of clips and a handful of BBC stills (most of which wouldn’t have been available when this book was being compiled), Tim and Dicky capture the Fifteenth Doctor beautifully and it only makes me want to see more. It’s a great way to end a great compilation. Now, younger fans who were raised on the ‘new’ series might struggle with this book, they might lack context for some of the jokes and the prevailing mood of Doctor Who fandom at the time they were written, but I’m confident that most fans are smart enough to seek out the information they need to enjoy it. Us old farts on the other hand will all have very fond and nostalgic memories of Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett’s work and should have no problem enjoying it. Me? I adore it! But then, when it comes to comic strip Doctors, Doctor Who? has always been my guy.

‘Who’s 60? A Celebration of Whos’ by Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett is published by Viking Press Comics Ltd, a division of Newhaven Publishing (2023).