While there are true Doctor Who obsessives out there who have watched the show since in November 1963 (and are, it should be said, quite old...) there are quite a lot of us who are still newbies to the show.
Whether you're a newbie or hardcore Whovian from the '60s, the new Doctor Who in Comics exhibition at the Cartoon Museum will no doubt thrill you to bits.
Doctor Who was featured in its own comic strip in TV Comic in 1964, and there have been comics about the Doctor and his companions ever since - in various publications including TV Comic, TV Century 21, Doctor Who Weekly, Doctor Who Monthly, Doctor Who Magazine, the Doctor Who Adventures and the Doctor Who magazine in the States.
Bottom line: Doctor Who comic strips are incredibly popular, and even have an influence on the TV show.
Interestingly, after Doctor Who suspended transmission in 1989, it was up to the comics' artists and writers to keep the Doctor and his mad stories alive. Aside from the one-off Doctor Who film starring Paul McGann in 1996, it wasn't until 2005 when Christopher Eccelston became the ninth Doctor in series one's first episode "Rose" that things changed for the comics.
While they had been free to switch back and foreward between Doctors for the last 10+ years, they now agreed to only feature the new Doctor, Eccelston, in comics and agreed to not run a story that included foreshadowing or would conflict with the new series, and the illustrators and writers found themselves working much more closely with the BBC.
Newer Doctor Who fans will be more aware of the influence the comics have on the TV show, as in 2007, a short story Steven Moffat wrote in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual called "'What I Did on My Christmas Holidays' by Sally Sparrow" was then transformed in to the much-loved episode "Blink", which introduced the world to the terrifying Weeping Angels for the first time.
More recently, Gareth Roberts turned a comic he wrote for Doctor Who Magazine in 2007 called "The Lodger" in to a episode of Doctor Who of the same name in 2010, featuring the new Doctor Matt Smith and his new flatmate, James Corden.
The exhibition at the Cartoon Museum is thorough, and incredibly interesting for comic fans and Doctor Who fans alike.
Doctor Who In Comics: 1964 - 2011 runs until 30 October 2001. Get thee to the museum!
Images from top to bottom:
Doctor Who material © BBC TV, © Panini UK
Umwelts for Hire, Martin Geraghty, The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011
Usual Suspects Revisited 2011, © Lee Sullivan
From The Dalek Omnibus, Marks and Spencer Annual 1976, Artist Unknown