Genesis of Evil

odd little 60s origin story for the daleks but definitly not a recommend avoid these i fear

This was alright.  A passable attempt at telling the origins of the Daleks, before Davros and that version of the story was originally conceived.  The art is well done enough but the story is wholly unsatisfying and feels largely empty.  The Daleks are a war-like race that mutate and build their original casing in an attempt to defeat the Thals.   An utterly unremarkable take on these classic monsters.

Genesis of Evil comprises the first 3 instalments of the TV21 Dalek comic strip.  I’ve read this comic strip a couple of times before and have never been a massive fan.  The Daleks are probably my least favourite ‘monster’ from Doctor Who.  I am never excited about their return to television and am certainly never excited when they crop up in yet another Big Finish audio.  Particularly on audio, I find their voices incredibly difficult to stay focussed on.  This means scenes featuring only Daleks tend to lead me to lose interest and therefore miss salient plot points.  I do enjoy most of the television stories featuring them, but my favourites are probably those which do something a little different with them, or have them in the background – Revelation of the Daleks, The Chase (just because it’s so ridiculous), Asylum of the Daleks.

The main issue I have with this comic strip though, at least for these early instalments, is the artwork.  It’s horrible.  It’s really hard to make out what is happening in the pictures and just seems terribly messy.  It doesn’t help either that occasionally it is difficult to work out which order the frames are supposed to be read in.

The story itself is quite an interesting take on the creation of the Daleks.  The scientist Yarvelling and War Minister Zolfian survive a horrendous accident involving a neutron bomb which wipes out life on Skaro with only a few mutated Daleks left.  They manage to put themselves into the war machines Yarvelling had invented before the accident.  Zolfian and Yarvelling die from radiation sickness but not before aiding the mutated survivors to build more Dalek machines, including a very impressive gold Emperor.

What I do remember about this strip is that the Daleks are far more interesting as they are much more conniving and scheming than they have been on television.  Indeed, Big Finish, certainly in the early days, seem to have deliberately veered closer to this version of the Daleks as they are far more interesting to write for dialogue wise.  The whole Dalek Empire series seems much more in the spirit of these TV21 strips than it does the original TV series (which I believe was partly the intention).

Reconciling Genesis of Evil’s account of Dalek creation with either The Daleks or Genesis of the Daleks is a tricky matter, although Lance Parkin and Lars Pearson seem to have managed it in A History’s third edition and I’ll comment on how these versions of Dalek history can match up, later.

The Daleks, in humanoid form, are shown as short blue men with rather large, Mekon-like, heads.  The Skarosian landscape is one of craggy outcrops and odd colours, both before and after the atomic devastation.  The Dalek machines themselves are similar to their TV counterparts but seem shorter and more compact (and certainly a far cry from the Paradigm Daleks!).  And of course we also have the gold Emperor with his enormous globe of a head, extra headlights and shiny gold colour scheme (there is a hilarious frame where he decides he needs better ‘armour’ and details the ingredients as including the sap of a flower!).

The strip ends with the Emperor deciding they need slaves because (apparently) Daleks are all-powerful but can’t actually do any manual work for themselves.  It’ll be interesting to see how this changes in later stories as I’m not sure it’s a conceit which can be sustained for very long without starting to seem a bit ridiculous.