Dan Dare

2000 AD, a revived Eagle, Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis have all revived Dan Dare in different forms but have any of them done it right? (Maybe Grant wasn't trying to do Dare, just to make a point about power politics?)

I get the feeling that there is nothing left to do with the character. A plan of the original creators was to get him into films. He would have been there before Star Trek and Star Wars. (Another sf series that was meant to be filmed but wasn't was James Blish's Cities In Flight.)

The first Dan Dare story started with the premise that the Moon and Mars had already been visited in the twentieth century. The first story was about the first trip to Venus and the first conflict with the Mekon. (A story in the revived Eagle had the Mekon saying, "Even my escape craft has an escape craft!" Neat.)

There followed some stories set in the inner and outer Solar Systems, then a long trilogy:

(i) an extrasolar alien, a "Krypt," arrives on Earth;
(ii) Dan, Digby and others make the first human interstellar crossing to help the peaceful Krypts against the war-like Phants;
(iii) they return to find that the Mekon has conquered Earth in their absence.

Usually in Eagle, one story ended and another began without any indication of how much time had elapsed between or, more generally, how they were related chronologically but this "trilogy" was a single long sequence. I started looking at the pictures, not yet reading, somewhere in (ii).

Dan encountered a Scottish clan McWho, thus a pre-Doctor Who use of the word "Who" as a surname. After the second conflict with the Mekon, there were some more interstellar journeys. Dan went to Terra Nova to try to find his father but was interrupted by a long paper strike. I would like to know more about what happened in subsequent adventures of this original Dare.

There was an eight page Dare story in each Eagle Annual and sometimes also a separate Dan Dare Annual. A story about an attempted terrorist attack on the Olympics when they were held on Venus was particularly exciting as some of the athletes had to run across the field to the bewilderment of the audience to prevent an explosion. One story in an Annual backtracked to the first meeting between Dan and Digby.

Comics And Comic Books

In those days, British comics differed from American comic books in every respect:

weekly, not monthly;
fewer, larger, unstapled pages;
a comic strip, not a single picture, on the front;
black and white alternating with coloured pages inside;
several one-page serials about continuing characters instead of two or three complete stories about a single character (thus, we read one episode of Dan Dare in each issue of Eagle but three stories about Superman in each issue of Superman);
no shared universe or cross overs;
heroes but no superheroes;
less well known characters, except maybe Dare;
an Annual was a hard back book, not a thicker comic.

Having said that, one exception was Marvelman, a low quality black and white superhero book imitating the Captain Marvel reprints which it had replaced. An early issue of John Constantine:Hellblazer showed Constantine reminiscing about childhood seaside holidays. Appropriately, a montage of memories showed some other British comic and a Marvelman cover. This was doubly appropriate because Alan Moore had created Constantine and re-created Marvelman.

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.

The Eagle

I started getting the Eagle in the early 1950's before I could read. I remember being asked what comic I wanted and saying "the Eagle" without knowing how I knew there was such a comic. I must have heard the name but knew nothing about it. I answered the question because I had been asked it.

I liked "cowboys" (Westerns) but realised very early that I preferred men in spacesuits (science fiction). Why? When Dan and Digby returned to the Solar System after ten years to find that their old enemy the Mekon had conquered Earth in their absence, that was my first encounter with the Mekon.

I read the Eagle until the first or second year of secondary school. It had three companion comics, as well as imitators. The companion comics were:

the Robin, for pre-school children;
the Swift, for primary school pupils;
Girl, for secondary school girls.

I borrowed someone else's copies of the Swift. For a while, it featured a couple of space cadet type characters and we thought they might cross over with Dare but they didn't.

The Western, "Riders of the Range," was better than cowboy strips in other comics. It featured historical events and characters. When Pat Garrett killed William Bonney (Billy the Kid), his deputies were Jeff Arnold and Luke, the continuing fictitious characters of the series. When Custer was killed at Little Big Horn, Jeff and Luke were two of his scouts who were elsewhere that day. Sitting Bull was shown joining Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show so Buffalo Bill, meanwhile the title character of a series in a rival British comic, appeared in a single panel of "Riders of the Range." There was also a story line about the outlaw Sam Bass.

Meanwhile, a rival comic featured "Billy the Kid" not as the historical outlaw but as a masked hero whose secret identity was William Bonney, thus modeled on the American comic book tradition of superheroes, masked avengers and costumed adventurers.

At secondary school, another pupil warned me, "The Eagle is a good comic but don't believe anything you read in it. I've heard the Editor is a Communist." In fact, he was a Church of England vicar and the earliest concept for Dan Dare had been as an RAF chaplain. The Eagle was so named because in an Anglican church, the Bible rests on a lectern in the shape of an eagle, the symbol of St John, as if in flight with the book on its wings.

Another regular character was "Luck of the Legion," a British man in the French Foreign Legion. I was concerned when a Marist Brother at my second primary school said dismissively that the strip was "lies." I was being indoctrinated that telling lies was seriously sinful and began to doubt the difference between lies and fiction.

The rules of my secondary school included "Comics and other childish papers are discouraged in boys over twelve." What did they know?

At home and at school, I was guilt tripped about reading:

comics instead of books;
about other religions instead of just about Catholicism;
science fiction instead of something else;
instead of doing something else.