television series on which it is based. The strip appeared almost every week: first in TV Comic, then in Countdown and TV Action before returning to TV Comic. All these titles were produced by a company called Polystyle Publications (formally TV Publications), which held the rights to publish a Doctor Who comic [strip] until May 1979 when the last installment of the strip appeared'. Both the First and Second Doctors were, for a time, shown travelling with two youngsters named John and Gillian who are identified as the Doctor's grandchildren. Their place within established continuity has challenged fans ever since, although attempts have been made to reconcile their existence in various spin-off fiction venues. Dalek comics At the height of "Dalekmania" in the 1960s, a comic strip featuring the Daleks written by Alan Fennell and Doctor Who Script Editor David Whitaker, but credited to Terry Nation, appeared in the Gerry Anderson TV Century 21 comic magazine. The BBC also published a number of Dalek Annuals which contained a mixture of comic strips and prose short stories, and, in later volumes reprints of the TV Century 21 stories. Although much of the material in these strips directly contradicted what was shown on television later, concepts such as the Daleks' use of humanoid duplicates and the design of the Dalek Emperor would later appear in the series. The TV Century also featured the Daleks' enemies the Mechanoids, the spherical robots seen in The Chase. An early Dalek Annual featured the Doctor's companion Sara Kingdom and the Space Security Service in stories set prior to her death while. Doctor Who Magazine and related publications (1979-present) Comic strips, both starring the Doctor and other Doctor Who characters, appeared in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. This began as a Marvel comic under the name Doctor Who Weekly in 1979, which soon changed its title Doctor Who Monthly. The magazine continued to be published between 1990 and 2005 during which, apart from one-off productions, Doctor Who had gone off the air. The comic strip has usually featured the current Doctor in a series of adventures independent of the novels and the audios, and with another companion, though several crossovers with the worlds of the audio and literary Doctor Who and the comics have occurred. Creators who have worked on the DWM strip include such notables as writer Alan Moore and artists Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon