Malevilus
The Malevilus were a malevolent winged race of bat-like humanoids said to feed off death. They possessed a range of powers from shape-shifting to low-level reality warping.
History[[edit] | [edit source]]
On an alternate Earth, five Malevilus named Babiyon, Abiss, Epok, Nekros; and the most powerful, Magog, took on the form of Roman gods and supplied the Roman army with advanced technology. In return, the Romans offered up prisoners to them for sacrifice. The Malevilus set up puppet Emperors in their stead and oversaw the expansion of the Roman Empire throughout the Mutter's Spiral.
The Fourth Doctor ended their rule by televising the image of Magog and showing the Roman people the true faces of their "gods", inciting them into open revolt. Magog was trapped in an empty dimension within the Doctor's TARDIS, and the rest of the Malevilus tried to escape in their spacecraft, which exploded on take-off, killing them. (COMIC: Doctor Who and the Iron Legion [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Iron Legion (comic story)"])
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- Doctor Who and the Iron Legion [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Iron Legion (comic story)"] was originally published in black-and-white print, and no colour for the Malevilus was mentioned within the story. Most coloured reprints present them as being a light shade of purple, although they appeared to be dark red in the Marvel Premiere releases.
- The fan magazine Vworp Vworp! created a Malevilus costume for its first issue. The design was intended to look deliberately cheap, as if it might have been made on a Graham Williams budget.[1]
- The Krillitane from the episode School Reunion [+]Loading...["School Reunion (TV story)"] strongly resembled the Malevilus. Lawrence Miles compared the Malevilus to the super-intelligent psychic pterodactyls of At the Earth's Core,[2] and he later featured an intelligent pterodactyl-like species in The Adolescence of Time [+]Loading...["The Adolescence of Time (audio story)"].
