CREATOR EXCLUSIVE
The heat is rising in Cutaway’s latest Doctor-less comic Inferno – The World Dies Screaming!
→ COUNTING “INFERNO” AS HIS “favourite Doctor Who story of all time,” Gary Russell is now writing a spin-off series for Cutaway Comics. Illustrated by John Ridgway, Inferno – The World Dies Screaming! takes place in the alternate fascist Britain first seen in the 1970 Third Doctor seven-parter, which along with 1971’s “The Mind Of Evil” is one of two Doctor Who stories scripted by Don Houghton.
“We’ve ended up with access to both of Don Houghton’s stories, which makes the universe just that bit bigger,” Russell tells Red Alert. “I could immediately see how, if you have a planet that’s post-‘Inferno’’s holocaust, an alien mind parasite that feeds off powerful negative emotions might just look around and go ‘Woo-hoo, lunchtime!’
“This meant the survivors not only had to contend with Primords and other nasties infected by ‘the green’, but also a hungry alien mind parasite for whom said lunchtime was becoming a banquet of international proportions. And don’t forget at the end of ‘Inferno’ on TV, we saw all that lava and Stahlmann’s gas blowing up into the atmosphere – so the old adage ‘what goes up, must come down’ plays heavily on the survivors, not least because England is rather famous for its rain. They’re also coping with not-just-rain every day, so it’s not a cheerful set of stories we’re weaving here!”
As with all of Cutaway’s ventures into the wider Whoniverse, the Doctor himself is otherwise engaged. “Inferno is really the ultimate Doctor-less universe,” says Cutaway publisher Gareth Kavanagh. “The Doctor is absent, except for a brief visit during Inferno, and ultimately he was too late to change things. It’s a dark and unpredictable place with so much storytelling possibilities, peril and unhappy endings.”
While future issues will explore the impact the ecological catastrophe has in other regions such as China, America and Europe, first up is a prequel one-shot, chronicling how Baronet Mosly first came to power, beginning in the 1940s with the assassination of Winston Churchill. “It runs from the D-Day landings through to the night before the events we saw in ‘Inferno’,” continues Russell. “We see how and why this fascist English Republic came about and how (Project Inferno director) Professor Stahlmann was dragged into it all.”
The World Die Screaming’s Second World War location was the ideal backdrop for John Ridgway, whose very first comic book credits in the early 1970s included several issues of Fleetway’s Air Ace and War Picture Libraries
