Art Gallery 6
I have a great deal of affection for Revenge of the Cybermen, possibly more than it actually deserves. It
was the second BBC Video I bought, after Pyramids
of Mars, so it was subjected to multiple viewings that inevitably turned it
into something of an audience participation event as I learned the dialogue off
by heart.
Revenge of the Cybermen has the
misfortune to follow Genesis of the
Daleks and is unable to match the quality of that classic. But then how
many stories actually could? Revenge
is a good, solid tale with some great guest performances and a villain who,
when realising he has been discovered, pulls out a light machine gun. There’s
much to like, but on closer inspection, there’s the distinct lack of an iconic
moment in the story. It takes place on the set of a previous story and in the
dark dank tunnels of Wookey Hole. So when it came to the cover of the
novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen,
Chris Achilleos was in a spot of bother. That’s why we get the rather curious
cover he painted. It’s not one of his best, not by a long way.
The three images don’t seem to link in any cohesive manner.
The Vogan appears to be aiming his gun at the Cyberman, but the perspective is
all wrong. The Cyberman is much closer to the foreground so the Vogan’s aim is
a tad off. There’s no shared eye-line for either of the characters. Then we
have the Doctor’s head, apparently exploding off his body, possibly from
spontaneous combustion caused by impossibly high blood alcohol levels. What the
explosion is supposed to signify is hard to judge. After all, neither Nerva
Beacon nor Voga are destroyed, and the only two things that explode in the
story are the tiny Cybership and noble self-sacrificing Lester in Revenge’s finest moment. It is very
unlikely that Achilleos would put an exploding suicide-bomber on the front
cover of a children’s book, so I assume it is meant to be the anticipated
explosion of Voga. Whatever his intention, the cover is weak and muddled, but
he wouldn’t be alone in struggling to define Revenge of the Cybermen in a single image.
Alister Pearson didn’t fare any better when he painted the
cover for the re-release. Much like Achilleos’ effort, it’s one of Pearson’s weakest
compositions. Whilst Vorus (‘My Skystriker! My glory!’) is beautifully rendered
in Pearson’s usual photo-realistic style, both he and the Cyberman in the main
image appear to be staring at something just off-screen. The missing iconic
image, one presumes. Again the images don’t seem to be linked in any way, but
are more of a buffet of disparate elements that don’t necessarily go together. It’s
indicative of the story’s issues.
The best cover actually comes from an American version of
the novelisation, published by Pinnacle Books. It’s a gloriously stylized
image, complete with a psychotic wild-eyed clown-Vogan and a Skystriker zooming in
towards Voga, which appears to have its own moon, despite being the remains of
a planet floating in space. It even has a rare quote from Harlan Ellison where
he doesn’t threaten to sue somebody for stealing his ideas.
Pinnacle Books created at least ten Americanized imprints of
Target novelisations, with ever more ludicrous covers. It’s a fight between the
cross Zygon with the squashed face and the roaring Ogron ape-man for which is
my favourite, although I am also fond of the Conan-type who apparently appears
in an infinitely more interesting alternate reality version of Colony in Space/ The Doomsday Weapon and
the screaming prostitute menaced by Fu Manchu and the Phantom of the Opera on the cover of The
Talons of Weng-Chiang. Artist David Mann deserved a shot at an actual Target
cover, because some of his visualisations are more gloriously insane than the
actual televised stories. I’m definitely going to have to track these down on
eBay.
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