The Time War was an integral part of Russell T. Davies' 2005 Doctor Who revival, but legendary comic author Alan Moore first came up with the concept in 1981. Alan Moore, creator of such iconic graphic novels as Watchmen and V For Vendetta, cut his teeth writing back-up strips for Doctor Who Magazine. Moore wrote standalone stories that featured many of the Doctor's foes, including the Cybermen, the Autons, and the Ice Warriors. However, his most influential work was a trilogy of strips that depicted the very early history of Doctor Who's Time Lord society.
Alan Moore's three Gallifrey strips, "Star Death," "4-D War," and "Black Sun Rising" were illustrated by the artist David Lloyd, who would later collaborate with Moore on V For Vendetta. Moore's brief time working for Doctor Who Magazine came to an end when he left in solidarity with friend Steve Moore, who had been removed from DWM's main comic strip. However, the three strips depicting the foundation of Time Lord culture would prove to be massively influential on Doctor Who in the decades that followed.
Alan Moore's First Doctor Who Time War Explained
In the 1981 comic strip "Star Death," a time traveler named Fenris the Hellbringer attempted to stop the Gallifreyans successfully achieving the ability to travel through time. Fenris was sent by the Order of the Black Sun, who, in the future, had been locked in a Time War with Gallifrey for millennia. Fenris failed in his attempts to stop the war before it could begin, and accidentally helped Rassilon and the Time Lords discover the secrets of time travel instead. Although the circumstances were very different, this concept laid the foundations Russell T. Davies would later use for Doctor Who's Time War.
In "4-D War," the Order of the Black Sun was able to prevent the Time Lords discovering information about the oncoming war by sending other operatives back in time to dispose of Fenris before his thoughts could be analyzed. 30 years later, the war began as it always would, as depicted in Alan Moore's final Doctor Who comic strip "Black Sun Rising." The leader of the Black Sun was murdered as part of a Sontaran plot to pit the Time Lords and the Order against each other, but the warring sides teamed up to defeat the Sontarans. As Alan Moore left DWM, the story was left unfinished.
Alan Moore's Gallifrey Inspired Later Time Wars In Doctor Who
The Gallifrey of Alan Moore's comic strips was hugely influential on the Doctor Who books of the 1990s and early 2000s. Writer Lawrence Miles drew from the idea of the Time Lords fighting a war from the future in his Eighth Doctor novel Alien Bodies. Instead of the Order of the Black Sun, the Time Lords were at war with a mysterious foe known simply as "the Enemy." This war eventually led to the destruction of Gallifrey in the novel The Ancestor Cell - an event wrongly believed to have ended the war.
Author Lawrence Miles name-checked the influence of Alan Moore's Gallifrey strips in a blog post entitled "1979," referencing the year that Doctor Who Magazine began publishing under the original name Doctor Who Weekly. Moore's mystical representation of Gallifrey is also a clear influence on Marc Platt's Virgin New Adventures novels, which further expanded the history of the Time Lords prior to the Doctor's birth. The influence of these comic and literary conflicts came to its inevitable conclusion in 2005, when Russell T. Davies' revived Doctor Who TV series revealed a Time War as part of its new mythology, carrying Alan Moore's influence into the present.
The Time Lords Vs. Daleks Was Doctor Who's "Last Great Time War"
Despite being restored at an undisclosed point after the final Eighth Doctor novel, Lance Park's The Gallifrey Chronicles, Gallifrey was destroyed yet again. Echoing the Doctor Who books' war against the Enemy, John Hurt's War Doctor realized that the destruction of Gallifrey was the only way to stop the Time Lords and Daleks fighting. In another similarity to the book story, it was revealed in Doctor Who season 1, episode 12, "Bad Wolf" that the Daleks survived, and the presumed destruction of the Doctor's own planet was for naught.
Interestingly, Russell T. Davies pinpointed the inciting incident for the war between the Time Lords and Daleks as the serial "Genesis of the Daleks." In that story, the Fourth Doctor is sent to stop the Daleks being created at the behest of the Time Lords. RTD outlined this incident in the Doctor Who Annual 2006 in a short expository story called "Meet the Doctor." It was an interesting flip of Alan Moore's "Star Death" strip, placing the Doctor in the role of Fenris the Hellbringer.
The Doctor's inability to commit Dalek genocide would define the character, and ultimately lead to the devastating effects of the Last Great Time War. Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor refers to the "Last Great Time War" in Doctor Who season 1, episode 6, "Dalek". This is in deference to the two earlier conflicts imagined by both Alan Moore and Lawrence Miles in the comic strips and novels. With the Time Lords seemingly destroyed, the temporal battlefields of Doctor Who have fallen silent for now, but the Time Lords and their enemies have a habit of returning to create problems for the Doctor, continuing the story first imagined by the legendary Alan Moore.
Sources: Lawrence Miles