Finding something new in Who (Doctor Who Magazine)

Member Name: caliban

Product:	Doctor Who Magazine
Date:	25/02/04 (44 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Consistently interesting articles, Great design

Disadvantages: Very specialist (but what do you expect!), Not cheap

Marvel's Doctor Who Magazine has been going since 1979! That's a long time for a publication on ANY subject! I've been buying it since issue 1 when it was weekly and cost 12p. It now comes out every month (or, I think, every 4 weeks) and costs £3.40. A big difference, but then it's a very different publication from when it started. Back then little was known about the background to the series, compare that to now with the countless reference works and the sheer wealth of information available to anyone over the internet. Over the years DWM has been a major contributor to this sum of knowledge with, as you might imagine, every conceivable kind of feature on every possible aspect of Doctor Who. This is a magazine that is aware that a large part of its readership know much, much more about Doctor Who than the average man on the street and for that reason many articles take this 'entry-level' knowledge as read, focusing instead on more arcane subjects relevent to the series. It would be unreasonable to expect them to do otherwise, to hope to sustain sales by rolling out yet another Nicola Bryant interview or 'fact-file' on the Daleks, for example. Anyone who is interested can find those kind of features in numerous other places; DWM is a specialist magazine for a specialist market. That may be off-putting, perhaps, but then I'd find picking up an issue of Babylon 5 Magazine (if such a thing exists) daunting as I know nothing about that series.
DWM has adapted very successfully over the years - especially when you consider that for 14 of those years the series it covers has been out of production! Despite the above, I do believe that it is accessible for people who don't know the co-ordinates of Gallifrey off-by-heart* as well as offering something of interest for those who do. Just be warned - it isn't the place to go for a 'what was your favourite story' kind of interview with Peter Davison. Do your D
octor Who GCSE first!

* 10-0-11-0-0-by-02, I'm afraid.

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