The Art of... The Web Planet

Doctor Who and the Zarbi was the novelisation of The Web Planet, by its original author Bill Strutton. It was the second Doctor Who novelisation to be published in hardback by Frederick Muller Ltd in 1965 - one of three Hartnell adaptations. The cover is by John Wood (no relation to the designer on the story), who also provided the internal illustrations - some examples of which can be seen below.

A hardback reissue came from White Lion in 1975, which featured then current Doctor Tom Baker on the cover - but still had Wood's Hartnell inner illustrations. It's a proper Zarbi, and the Baker image comes from a photograph taken at the Dartmoor location for The Sontaran Experiment.

Along with two David Whitaker books (Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Crusaders) the rights were bought by Target to help launch their new junior imprint range in May 1973. Richard Henwood, of Target, seriously considered replacing the Hartnell illustrations with ones featuring Jon Pertwee, the Doctor of the day.

All three had cover art by Chris Achilleos, who adopted a consistent style for each - a stippled pen and ink B&W portrait of the Doctor, based on a BBC publicity photo, set against a colourful background based on story elements. He had originally used real ants to represent the Zarbi, which he was very pleased with, but was instructed that he had to use images which matched what had been seen on screen.

The book was reprinted in 1991 with a new cover by Alister Pearson, using the image from the VHS release. Pearson has recently revisited this work as a charity piece, adding a Larvae Gun in the foreground of the main image and an Optera in a separate circle, and adding colour to the Doctor. It was sold at an event at Riverside Studios in March 2023.

As with the other two releases, the book was sold to various foreign markets. The Dutch version - Doctor Who En De Zarbi's - reuses Achilleos' artwork, whilst the Portuguese version - Doutor Who E Os Zarbi - gives us a bizarre giant eye emerging from a volcano. Presumably this is meant to represent the Animus. The back cover depicts more of these eyeball volcanoes, as well as a couple of little figures dropping from a spaceship.

Oddly, we never got a French version presented by Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff.

John Wood's internal illustrations are clearly based on photographic images in that they depict the Zarbi, Larvae Guns and Menoptra as they appeared on screen - though they are not copying specific photographs. The Zarbi wield strange guns, and this derives from the text. Ian and the Doctor came across a huge pyramid-like structure in the broadcast version, and you couldn't really see the top, other that it appeared to be a winged figure.

The story was issued on VHS in the UK in September 1990 with, as mentioned above, a cover by Alister Pearson. An early release, it was issued in two separate volumes of three episodes each, though retailers were expected to sell the two volumes together. The only difference between the two volumes is the colour panel with the tiles - purple text on a yellow ground, or vice versa. The story was released in the US with the same cover in August 1994.

The Region 2 DVD arrived in October 2005, with a cover by Clayton Hickman. He opted to use the same image of Hartnell as Pearson, which appropriately enough came from this particular story.

The Region 1 DVD had a different photo-montage cover, but again it is using images that actually come from the story - a Menoptra posing with a Zarbi and a Hartnell image from the scene where he first encounters the ant-like creatures. This US release was issued in September 2006.

The novelisation was released as an audiobook in October 2006, using the Achilleos cover. The reader is William Russell.

Below is the cover for the recent vinyl release of the soundtrack (December 2019) from Demon Records. Unlike many of the Hartnell stories, lost or not, it had never been released in this form on individual CD. Maureen O'Brien provides the narration.

Lastly, just for a laugh - what if the third Peter Cushing Dr Who movie hadn't been another Dalek adaptation..?