10 Doctor Who Comic Book Characters Who Should Appear In The Show

Despite his unimposing visage and relative obscurity, don't be mistaken - Yarvelling is the true creator of the Daleks, not Davros.

At least, according to the 1965 TV Century 21 comic strip. It wouldn't be until 1975's Genesis of the Daleks did the Skarosian war machines receive an on-screen origin story as creations of mad Kaled scientist Davros. For ten years, it was a fact in the Whoniverse that this blue baddie, Yarvelling, had originated the Daleks.

Long before the events of 1963's The Dead Planet, Yarvelling had developed the Daleks as mobile weapons in the war against the Thals. As the machines came into production, a meteor storm detonated the Neutron Bombs under Skaro's surface and irradiated the planet. For two years, Yarvelling and his kind hid out in a fallout shelter, believing themselves to be the only people on the planet not to be mutated by the radiation.

Escaping their bunker, Yarvelling and Minister Zolfian discovered the mutated Daleks populating the machines. Realising that the mutants now had accelerated intelligence and longevity, Yarvelling rebuilt the Dalek Factory in a bid to prolong his kind's extinction. As the Daleks were wheeled out and the mutants encased within them, the scientist and the Minister succumbed to radiation poisoning and died.

Subsequent novels, audio adventures, and comics have tried to retcon Yarvelling into Davros' creation story from Genesis of the Daleks as a scientist he stole the idea from, but these two conflicting origin stories have yet to be fully tied together. With Davros' popularity, Yarvelling faded into obscurity - a Doctor Who legend - but one with a lot of potential to return and create new stories, and an identity crisis, for the Dalek race.

Galactic Rating: 'The original, you might say.'