Episodes - Afterlife: Mondasian Cybermen

For a great many years it looked as though the Cyberman design seen in The Tenth Planet would be their one and only on-screen appearance.

On their return, just a few months later, the Cybermen would be totally redesigned to look more robotic, mainly due to the problems experienced by the actors wearing the original cruder costumes.

They might have been absent from TV, but the Mondasian Cybermen did live on - initially in a quite unexpected place.

The whole point of comic strips is that you can create anything you want, so long as you have imagination and the skill to draw it. It seems good reference material also helps...

Patrick Troughton was already the Doctor, and the new version of the Cybermen seen on screen, when they made their first appearance in the Doctor Who comic strip in TV Comic. The visual material given to artist John Canning for "The Coming of the Cybermen" proved to derive entirely from their first story.

This first adventure saw the Doctor, with grandchildren John and Gillian, discover an abandoned spaceship on the planet Minot. This proved to belong to the Cybermen, a group of whom then turn up to retrieve it. The Doctor is trapped on board as it takes off, and he has to find a way to escape back to the planet.

At one point he specifically describes the Cybermen as his greatest enemies - this being the period in which the Daleks were still tied up in their own strip elsewhere.

Other adventures followed, in which the Cybermen attempted an attack on Earth using a burrowing mole-machine ("Cyber-Mole"). In other strips, the ever growing list of allergies which the Cybermen were susceptible to was foreshadowed by them being destroyed by flower pollen (a story called "Flower Power").

"Eskimo Joe" saw them in another snowy setting - and includes the surreal image of Cybermen on skis. "The Cyber Empire" had them enslaving humans and building a Cyber-Hovercraft, which the Doctor promptly stole. A Cyber-Controller is mentioned.

Throughout their series of adventures, the comic took the decision not to update the Cybermen at any point, even when the strip began to feature newer enemies such as the Quarks, and companion Jamie.

The Mondasian Cybermen had been popular with at least one of the classic Doctors. Peter Davison recalled:

"The Cybermen were always my favourite adversaries, dating back to when I watched them with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. I remembered they'd changed entirely since those days. They used to have a sort of sock over their heads, and a headlamp on their foreheads, and they talked in a very strange voice".

They would later become identified with another Doctor...

A few months before Davison took over the DWM comic strip, his predecessor encountered an abandoned Mondasian Cyberman in "Junkyard Demon". It was found in a scrapyard presided over by Flotsam and Jetsam. Reactivated it even tried to take over the TARDIS. In the end it ran out of power.

Big Finish revisited the Mondasians in the highly acclaimed "Spare Parts", which told an origins story for the Cybermen as the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa arrived on Mondas. This acted as an inspiration for elements of The Rise of the Cybermen / Age of Steel. 

The company also presented a Mondasian Cyberman in "The Silver Turk", featuring the Eighth Doctor and set in 19th Century Vienna. Like The Haunting of Villa Diodati, this sought to link Cybermen to the Frankenstein story via Mary Shelley's inclusion.

Artist Adrian Salmon also lent his talents to a strip which featured a Cyberman / Silurian / Sea Devil crossover, in Mondas' ancient times.

The first sighting of an original Cyberman in modern times came with the 50th Anniversary drama An Adventure in Space and Time. This dealt mainly with the earliest days of the show, but then had to move on to Hartnell's departure from the series, with recreations from The Tenth Planet. 

At one point we see an actor in Cyberman costume, smoking by the TARDIS prop. He is identified as "Reg" - so Reg Whitehead.

Mondasian Cybermen were finally back for real in The World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls, as a sort of farewell gift to their other big Doctor fan - Peter Capaldi. The Doctor and company encountered a new race of these Cybermen which evolved on a colony ship which originated on Mondas. It was made clear in this story that Cybermen can evolve anywhere that you find humanoids living in extreme circumstances, so the Mondasian design might well have been the ancestor of all later versions - other that the alternative universe Cybus ones.

This story then segued into Twice Upon A Time...

Capaldi's swansong incorporated the final moments of The Tenth Planet into an adventure in which the First and most recent Doctors compared notes on regeneration.

The episode opened with some recreations from 1966, and one of these included the Cybermen. Unfortunately this scene was deleted (no pun intended) but can be seen on the DVD / Blu-ray extras.

It should be noted that the new incarnation of the Mondasian Cybermen only pays homage to the originals. They are not exact copies by any means. The one in the 50th Anniversary drama was far more faithful to the original Sandra Reid versions than the Capaldi ones.