Quality Universe

Cover of Warrior #4, showing a Warpsmith among other elements of the magazine's shared universe.

The Quality Universe was the multi-dimensional shared continuity of science-fiction comics created by Alan Moore, Steve Moore and others for Dez Skinn's Quality Communications publishing company, principally in the magazine Warrior, launched in 1982. One of its flagship series was the superhero strip Marvelman.

Connections to the DWU

Some time before October 1983, the two Moores created a document entitled A Chronology of Everything (Almost). Although it was later printed in 2001's Kimota! The Miracleman Companion, it was not intended for release, but rather as an internal reference for writers, nailing down the timelines of the interlinked series published by Quality. This was contemporary with Alan Moore's Doctor Who Magazine backup comics dealing with the early history of the Time Lords, in which he had introduced the alternative name of Chronarchs for them. In A Chronology of Everything (Almost), he linked these works to the Quality Universe with a multiverse twist: the foundational point of divergence of the Quality continuum, which then further forked off in the 20th century between the timelines inhabited by Marvelman and V for Vendetta, was the invasion and near-genocide of "the Chronarchy" by the Warpsmiths, a race introduced in the 1982 Marvelman story The Yesterday Gambit, using the Death-Cats. A Chronology of Everything (Almost) went as far as to point out that this Chronarchy were "like Earth-2 Time Lords", drawing a parallel between DC's Earth-1 and Earth-2 continuities and the relationship between the Doctor Who unvierse and the Quality Universe.

Daniel O'Mahony's 2003 charity Doctor Who short story A Rag and a Bone, connected to the War in Heaven arc of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, nodded to these ideas and linked them to the Special Executive also featured in Moore's comics by stating that Rassilon had created the Special Executive to "fight the Killer Cats for the sake of the future", showing that in the Doctor Who timelines, the Executive were instrumental to Gallifrey not falling to the Warpsmiths' attack.

More official acknowledgement of the Quality Universe connection came in 2005 with the second season of Big Finish Productions' licensed Gallifrey audio series. Starting there, the weaker N-Space version of the Warpsmiths started to be explicitly seen throughout the series, later playing a key role in Volume One of Gallifrey: Time War, where their eventual extermination by the Daleks was depicted as what made the Time Lords begin to take the looming threat of the Time War seriously.