Branding: Who

Chris Achilléos, ‘Head of Medusa’ (1988)

Stare into the snaky head of corporate branding and grow petrific, art!.

Cypriot-born British artist Chris Achilléos worked on the borderline of illustration and art. His hyper-realist etching-style drawings of recognisable actors and celebrities—for the covers of tie-in novelisations of the Doctor Who and Star Trek, franchises, as well as for various movie posters—are enhanced with colours and patterns. To take just Doctor Who covers he worked on, from the 1970s through to the 1990s:

The faces of the first four doctors are precisely, almost photographically rendered—although Tom Baker lacks the accuracy and vividness of the others, looking more like Virginia Wade in a wig than a time lord; and the reproduction of various Doctor Who villains—Davros, a Sontaran warrior, a cyberman, and in the middle the most famous of the Doctor’s antagonists, the Daleks. Does it matter that, for all his photorealist penwork, Achilléos manifestly can’t remember which side the Daleks have their-ray-gun and which their sucker-arm? 

Perhaps it doesn’t. The images need to be, as the phrase goes, close enough for government work. These are unmistakeable icons of a successful corporate brand, and entice viewers and fans into the book with a tacit promise that the story between the covers will be as televisual as the actual show: the Doctor (whichever iteration is the protagonist of the particular novelisation) recognisable as the Doctor with which viewers are comfortable. The ribbon of colour (stars? genes? a mere abstraction?) that runs behind the figures is there to tie the composition together, and it works, though the whole cover is dominated by the BBC-dictated logo that announces ‘Doctor Who’, here and in all the covers that Achilléos created. Here, for Terence Dick's 1929 novelisation of the 1972 TV series ‘Day of the Daleks’, Jon Pertwee, the actor who portrayed the Third Doctor, looks unconcernedly away to the left whilst deadly Daleks swarm behind him and a Sontaran fires a randomly-aimed laser-pistol pointlessly into the air. That this laser-discharge leaves some kind of flatulent residue behind it does not enhance any sense of science-fictional potency of the super-weapon.

But the artwork does its commercial job: there's no mistaking that logo, Pertwee's handsome, lined face, of the iconic profiles of the Daleks. 

This cover illustrates a book with a lengthy back-story. ‘Doctor Who and The Daleks’ (1963-4) was the first Doctor Who serial to be adapted as a tie-in novelisation; written by David Whitaker and published in hardback as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964). There have been various reprints of this title, including a 1965 paperback with a cover and interior illustrations by Peter Archer. The book was relicensed in 1972 by ‘Universal-Tandem Publishing’, who commissioned Achilléos to create new cover art, which he did by sketching, from a photograph, the black-and-white face of actor William Hartnell, the first to play the Doctor, and positioning it amongst a couple of dynamically rendered full-colour Daleks, arrestingly diagonalised in posture, looking vital and threatening. The Doctor’s black coat, wittily, becomes repurposed as the background to outer-space stars and comets, and an oddly muted TARDIS, mauve rather than blue, and it seems sounding some kind of alarm from the light on its roof. This is a fine piece of composition, although the artistry is subordinated to the corporate branding.

For Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen (1976), Achilléos gives us a laughing Tom Baker head against a background explosion, as if the detonation had decapitated, but not diminished the good cheer, of the Fourth Doctor. Below this toothy rendering—one of Achilléos’ better renderings of Baker—a bored-looking Cyberman faces a ‘Vogan’, who appears less to be threatening him with a weapon than offering a piece of craft-art as a gift. Here, Achilléos illustrates ‘The Abominable Snowmen’, originally aired in six weekly parts from 30 September to 4 November 1967, and written-up as a novelisation in 1974.

Patrick Troughton, the second actor to portray the Doctor, looks somewhat grumpily down upon a Snowman, more cuddly-plushie than abominable, whilst the Doctor's two companions, Jamie McCrimmon and Victoria Waterfield, quail unconvincingly. There is nothing in any sense actually scary about any of this, although the disposition of  the elements in its circular backdrop gives a pleasant balance to the whole.