Zygon Outer-Space Diaries!

If you haven't already, check out Zygon Outer-Space Diaries, available HERE, with proceeds going to Cancer Research UK.

It's a gorgeous hardback book in the style of 1970s Doctor Who annuals, with almost 200 pages of Zygon stories (both text & comic), artwork, games, features, and puzzles!

Just to give you an idea of what a labour of love and titanic effort the book has been by Paul Cooke - because he's too modest to blow his own trumpet! - Paul first mentioned his idea to put this together to me in October of 2017(!)

It's never been a secret that Terror of the Zygons is Paul's favourite Doctor Who story, so I always knew he was going to pull off something special, but seeing what he's achieved with the book has totally blown me away.

Obviously, being a contributor, I'm a bit biased! But I can hand-on-heart say that the finished product is such a super high quality collection of work (plus my scribblings!) that if you're a fan of Doctor Who and the Zygons you absolutely won't be disappointed. 

Paul's really done the Zygons justice and then some, marshalling top drawer talent to flesh out a whole history, culture, and mythology for the alien shapeshifters and their fearsome cyborg, the Skarasen.

The book is also a beautiful love letter to the '70s Doctor Who World annuals, with stories, art, puzzles, games, fact files, and adverts evoking the style and feel of those books in a way that's so alive and joyful that it's anything but a mere exercise in nostalgia. Every page has so much thought and detail put into it, it repays countless re-reads. Special shout out on that front to Andrew-Mark Thompson's wonderful pieces that smuggle in so many wicked jokes while you're too busy marvelling over his super artwork!

In the now distant past I had aspirations to be a novelist and I was halfway decent at drawing but I never really put the hours in through a combination of laziness and just being tired enough from a 9-5 day job. Seriously, artists and writers, I don't know how you do it.

So it was quite a privilege to be asked to contribute to this, especially knowing some of the other names involved! Paul obviously knows I like to dabble, I think he'd caught a few bits and pieces I'd done for a mate's fanzine and asked if I'd have a stab at a story.

Obviously I bit his hand off! Without giving away any secrets, Paul's brief gave us an overview of the over-arching themes for the book & a choice of writing a story that fit into 1 of 3 areas: (1) legends of the past (2) struggles within the fleet (3) away missions. (That's a massive over-simplification, but I don't want to give too much away!)

I fancied the legends option, and Paul was really patient and helpful giving guidance and answering questions about the kind of look and feel he was imagining, the touchstones and influences, massive, crucial details really nailed down and crystallized.

I bashed together the rough outline (including the title of "The Curse Breaker's Tale", which I had right from the start) in a few days, and luckily Paul liked it enough (subject to a few tweaks!) to give the green light!

I definitely wanted to tap into that 40s/50s Flash Gordon style for the actual adventure, so the whole 'different world' underwater setting, with the 'fight a big monster in a gladiator pit' was very much that.

The framing narration is supposed to evoke a more mystical, mythic, vibe that (hopefully!) had more in common with Beowulf and the Herne the Hunter stuff in Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood...

...but very much narrated by a Zygon who is basically John Hurt in Jim Henson's "The Storyteller" series, so you should try to imagine his voice when reading!

The underwater kingdom allowed me to use an idea I'd already had floating around in the back of my mind for quite a while, which was to have an offshoot of the race of Zygons we all know and love: Sea Zygons!

Obviously this is a riff on the Sea Devils being the aquatic cousins of the Silurians, so not all that original, and the Zygons were supposed to be native to a more aquatic world already (at least in Terror of the Zygons their plan is to melt the Earth's polar icecaps to raise the planet's temperature and create a world of lakelands), but this was for a truly underwater kingdom, where the Zygons would have evolved slightly differently.

So the "Sea Zygons" are basically a cross between the Zygons we know and a Great White Shark. Here's my original concept drawing for the Zygon goddess of death, Helka:

The description from the story is as follows:

"At first glance, the Zygons of the under-realm could pass for blue-green hued counterparts of their orange-red skinned land and marsh dwelling cousins, or their slate-black mountain relations. On closer examination, however, the conditions of the hellish depths had twisted their forms to be more savage and cruel. Aside from the dorsal fin at their backs, their mouths were filled with row upon row of serrated hooks. In truth it was the mouth of a shark, and like a shark, their nostrils seemed to be constantly sniffing out for the merest particle of blood, for their next kill. The skin around their eye-sockets and cheekbones had crusted around into a stony-looking mask that sat on their faces like a spiny crab formed of bone. Barnacles ran down the lines of their arms and legs and congested around their thick shoulders and necks, which were gashed by the slits of blood red gills."

Having many writers and artists to wrangle Paul was trying to build in fairly long deadlines, I think, so while we vaguely aiming for around Xmas time, we'd talked about maybe going as far as February. So I managed to get the story done and back to him in, er, February.

So now I just had to hope Paul liked what I'd come up with! Luckily he did, and I must have done something right, because he then asked me to have a go at a follow up...! But as they say, that’s a tale for another time!

Dave