The Wrarth Warrior

Sculpting the Wrarth Warrior — from Comic Book to Action Figure

It is always rewarding to sculpt a well-designed Doctor Who creature, but there’s a particular joy in sculpting one that has spent most of its fictional existence in the pages of a comic and has only recently been brought to life on screen. The Wrarth Warriors — first introduced in April 1980 in Marvel’s Fourth Doctor comic Doctor Who and The Star Beast — lived for decades only in stylised panels and in the collective imagination of readers. Not until November 2023, when The Star Beast hit television as the opening story of the 60th Anniversary specials, did viewers finally meet them in three dimensions. Which is where this sculpt begins. Our Wrarth exists in a strange — but satisfying — space between mediums: respectful to Dave Gibbons’ original concept, and utterly faithful to how the BBC realised them on screen.

Dave Gibbons Original Wrarth Warrior Design

Alien by Design

The 1980 artwork presents Wrarth Warriors as lanky, segmented insectoids with that unmistakable triptych silhouette: • layered carapace over the shoulders and back • exaggerated compound eyes like hot coals • elongated ‘two-kneed’ legs, tentacle-fingered right hands, a giant clawed left arm, and a distinctive stooping posture

The 2023 television design softened some edges, introduced real-world materiality, and added that beautiful mottled green skin patterning — ultimately answering the question:What would a Wrarth look like if it was real?

Finished Wrarth Warrior - Full Colour Turns

Loving the Alien

Looking at the turnaround above, you can see where I leaned into the alien biology:

Segmented body plan — chest, abdomen, and shoulders keyed like overlapping armour plates rather than a solid bodysuit.

Red ocular lenses — Character Options replicated the effect of the Wrarth’s eerie glowing eyes with the use of a light-pipe, refracting and diffusing light from the top of the head to the eyes.

Asymmetrical arms — one hand retained for grip and gesture, the other developed into the Wrarth’s iconic pincer variant.

Micro surface detail — wrinkles across the skin, with organic textures rather than clean comic-book lines.

Biggest Challenge

The Wrarth are among the largest practical-effects creatures to have been turned into a Doctor Who action figure, but while their size provided some challenge, the biggest hurdle we faced was replicating the creature’s distinctive weapon.

It highlights one of the quirky universal truths of product development: sometimes the simplest-looking objects provide the greatest challenge.

In the case of the Wrarth’s weapon, its construction was relatively straightforward — a spherical primary grip that fitted into the Wrarth’s palm, a secondary grip housing the trigger and controls, and a shrouded barrel forming the ‘business’ end of the gun.The forms were clean and, although challenging, still easy to replicate. The real challenge came in replicating the texture present on the two grips, especially the sphere. When Ed visited Bad Wolf Studios in March 2023 to be briefed on the specials and take a close look at some of the new hand props, he’d noted the complexity of the tessellating triangular texture — so when it came to replicating it, he already had a technique in mind.

Using bespoke graphics created in Illustrator, the texture was first ‘painted’ onto a high-resolution mesh, then masked using tonal values, and finally the surface was displaced and recessed to form the distinctive pattern.

Iconic Creatures

David Tennant’s second outing as the Doctor may have been brief, but it certainly provided some more iconic alien appearances. Character Options’ Wrarth Warrior set beautifully complements the existing 14th Doctor and Meep set they produced earlier this year.

To see more renders click here.

If you want to own your own Wrarth, you can purchase the set here.

If you’ve got a character that needs to be sculpted with a meticulous eye for detail, we’d love to help.