The ‘Doctor Who’ 50th Anniversary Graphic Novel That Wasn’t… Yet

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, a fact celebrated not only with new episodes of the show itself (including, it's rumored, a special anniversary episode), but also with a new IDW comic series looking back at the history of the character. But there was almost more to the half-century celebration of everyone's favorite final Time Lord, as Russell T. Davies, the writer who resurrected the TV show in 2005, has revealed.Talking to the British Daily Telegraph newspaper to promote his new kids' show Wizards Vs. Aliens (I know, I know), Davies revealed that he'd pitched his own 50th anniversary project to the BBC, only for it to go nowhere:

Don't ask me about the 50th anniversary [in November 2013], because it's nothing to do with me... I'm just a happy viewer now. This'll teach me though – I did ask BBC Books if they fancied a graphic novel, and they went, 'No'. I sat here thinking, I could write a graphic novel, I could even draw the graphic novel, that'd be brilliant... No. There we are then, I tried.

As the hardcore Who faithful know, Davies isn't joking about possibly drawing the graphic novel; as a child, he'd wanted to become a comic book artist, and he's kept up with drawing throughout the years, with some of his Who-centric cartoons showing up in The Writers' Tale, the behind-the-scenes book on his final years on the show that the BBC published in 2008.

Even though the BBC turned the project down, it strikes me that another publisher with the Doctor Who comic license (Ahem, IDW) might be interested in an original graphic novel by the man pretty much entirely responsible for the modern day popularity of the character... So perhaps this project, like the Doctor himself, may survive death to regenerate into something else after all.

(Via io9)

Image from Doctor Who: The Forgotten, IDW's 2008 series teaming all ten (as they were then) Doctors.