Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of Doctor Who. It doesn’t die, no matter what. It’s still serious, and it’s still dangerous. The virus is out there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.

You don’t have to believe me. Not now. But I’ll tell you this. The next time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several floors, then, in that moment before the doors open, you’ll wonder, even if only for a moment, if they’re going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the moons of Pluto, or a full-service pleasure dome at the galactic core . . .

That’s when you’ll discover that you’re infected too.

And then the doors will open, with a grinding noise like a universe in pain, and you’ll squint at the light of distant suns, and understand . . .

Taken from the introduction to Paul McCauley’s 2003 Doctor Who novella, Eye of the Tyger, back when prose was pretty much the only way to get your Doctor Who fix.

On Comics and Films: 2006

I can still remember how excited everyone was, seventeen years ago, by the arrival of the Batman film. Frank Miller’s story of an aging Batman coming out of retirement, The Dark Knight Returns, had, along with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, spearheaded the first, abortive, graphic novel explosion, and I believed that a good, serious Batman film was all that was needed to put it over the top, legitimize comics and change the world. Two decades later, we live in a world in which comics have spawned a generation of summer blockbusters. This summer it’s a Marvel v. DC face-off, X-Men v. Superman, with Spider-Man waiting in the wings for 2007.

Comics and movies have always been a two-way street. Will Eisner’s seminal The Spirit, back in the 1940s, took from Orson Welles and the films noirs as much as it borrowed from radio or Broadway, and there have been movies made from comics pretty much as long as either medium has existed. Last week an interviewer asked me whether I thought that the recent success of superhero movies meant that we might see a world in which comics that don’t include the capes-and-tights brigade might also have a chance at making it onto the silver screen. “You mean comics like Road to Perdition, Ghost World, Men in Black, A History of Violence, Sin City, From Hell, American Splendor . . . ?”

I started to suspect that there might be a cultural sea change occurring a few years ago, when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was released. It was not the first time that a bad film had been made from a good comic, not by a long shot, but it was the first time that the world at large seemed aware of this. Review after review pointed out that the film had none of the wit or brilliance, or even coherence, of the comic it was taken from.