The Eagle II

The Eagle was launched in April 1950, just one year and three months after my birth so it had been established for a few years before I became aware of it. Effectively, it had always been there like Superman who was launched ten years and six months before my birth.

One of the Scottish comic creators (I forget which) said that he and his contemporaries had, at the time, grown out of comics because, "We were starting to have girl friends and Dan Dare wasn't getting organised with Professor Peabody."

I wasn't getting organised yet either but it was noticeable that nothing was done with the Prof. She became neither our hero's fiancee nor a character in her own right and simply stopped appearing.

Digby wanted "a bob's worth of fish and chips" so they had a World Government and an Interplanetary Space Fleet but had had neither decimalisation nor inflation of the pound. But they did live in the early twenty first century, like us. Earlier flights to the Moon, misnamed "Lunar," and Mars had occurred in the late twentieth century. The idea of a spaceman having a batman is nonsense from the word go.

A scene of commuters in a bus included a bald green "treen" from Venus wearing a suit and reading a newspaper - an interplanetary immigrant. It is to be hoped that he was not suspected of Mekon loyalty.