To
anyone remotely interested in British comic history, Dan Dare is an
iconic figure, whose reputation has long since transcended the
relatively narrow fraternity of comic collectors. It may come as some
surprise then, when I report that, during the 1960s, I remained in
blissful ignorance of his existence.
Dare
had made his comic debut some eleven years before I was born, and by
the time I was of an age to take an interest in more sophisticated
comics, Eagle was drawing its final breath. 1969 saw it
absorbed into old rival Lion, and the years immediately
preceding the takeover had been a story of gradually diminishing
quality. Dare himself, a front page feature for the whole of the
1950s, had eventually been relegated to the inside pages, and by the
mid-60s new adventures were set aside in favour of reprints. This
isn’t to say that there wasn’t anything of merit in the post-50s
Eagle: indeed, the Dare strip had enjoyed a temporary reprieve
around 1964, returning to the front cover, in colour, under the
capable stewardship of Keith Watson, who had formerly served as an
assistant to Dare’s creator, Frank Hampson. I,
however, saw none of this, save for odd glimpses of back numbers that
formed part of the comics stash kept in our school classroom to be
broken out on rainy lunchtimes. Such occasions were less frequent
than one might imagine, and I was fully occupied chasing up old
copies of TV21 or following the exploits of The Cloak
in vintage copies of Pow! I literally had no time to find out
what those Eagle comics were all about.
By
the early ’70s, I’m fairly sure I knew of the existence of a
character called Dan Dare, but beyond that basic information, I was
still very much in the dark. I’d seen Dare-branded toys on sale in
a few shops, including a cool-looking torch raygun that produced a
range of differently-hued beams of light; and I’d been afforded a
passing glimpse of a 1960s Eagle cover in the first cinematic
outing for Doctor Who, where Peter Cushing as the titular character
was seen engrossed in a copy.
The
first real step in my discovery of Dan and his chums came in the form
of a parody. By the early ’60s, all rights in the Dan Dare
character had passed into the hands of Odhams Press, who in 1964
launched a distinctive new humour comic in the form of Wham!
Masterminded by Bash Street Kids creator Leo Baxendale, Wham! saw
Odhams take on the tried and tested DC Thompson comics formula and
bring it up to date. The inhabitants of Wham! had a slightly
sassier, more contemporary edge than their Beano or Dandy
counterparts, and even included a pair of pop-fans, The Wackers,
whose exploits revolved around efforts to collect their idols’
autographs or sneak into gigs without paying. Another comic character
in the Wham! lineup took advantage of Odham’s ownership of
the Dan Dare copyright, in the form of Danny Dare, whose
adventures came with the tag-line: ‘he’s Dan Dare’s number one
fan.’ Danny, a junior Dare wannabe, complete with lantern jaw and
’50s hairstyle, imagined himself as his hero, with his winged
go-cart standing in for Dan’s iconic ship, Anastasia; his mundane
exploits in the here-and-now were transformed into futuristic
reimaginings via thought bubbles interspersed between the normal
comic frames. The strip was thus a curious mixture of styles, with
Danny rendered in the standard Leo Baxendale manner (although not,
seemingly, by Baxendale himself), whilst his imaginary adventures
were drawn in a style approximating that of the contemporary Dare
strip, which by this time had passed into the hands of Keith Watson.
|
From the 1966 Wham! Annual: Danny Dare. (Xel was the current villain in the real Dare strip at the time of publication) |
I
first came across this strip in a battered old copy of the first
Wham! annual that had been passed on to me by a cousin. The
Danny Dare strips probably weren’t the best thing in it
(that honour falling instead to Eagle Eye, Junior Spy), but
they intrigued me with their blend of comic and serious artwork, and
in the cross-hatching of the ersatz Dan Dare panels, I felt I
recognised something of the style of another artist whose work I had
admired for some time. Although he had no input into the Wham!
parody, the drawings had put me in mind of the work of Eric L. Eden,
who had provided illustrations for some of WM Collins and Son’s
Fireball XL5 annuals. I didn’t realise it at the time, but
I’d accidentally made a connection that was entirely relevant: Eden
had worked on the Dare strips as a studio assistant since Eagle’s
beginnings, and his style had evolved from his close association with
Frank Hampson.
Having
discovered his comic alter ego, I would have welcomed any information
or insights into the ‘real’ Dan Dare, but in the absence of Eagle
or access to back numbers, I simply had to bide my time. The chance
finally arrived at christmas 1973 with the publication of a Dan
Dare Annual, again from the Odhams group. There had been a couple
of Dan Dare annuals in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but
none of them had registered on my personal comics radar. The 1973
publication was, in fact, comprised of reprinted material from the
1950s: the first half was made up of 1951-52’s The Red Moon
Mystery, while the second consisted of 1959’s Safari in
Space. One look at this annual was all I needed. The Danny
Dare strip had dropped the vaguest of hints about the genuine
Dare artwork, but nothing could have prepared me for my first
encounter with the undisputed genius of Frank Hampson. In his pages,
I recognised many of the techniques that had drawn me to the work of
his assistant, Eden: the cross-hatching, the elaborate back-lighting,
the tonal modelling on faces... but this was work of an altogether
higher order. While Eden had achieved a form of stylised realism,
some of Hampson’s panels might almost have been photographs
outlined with a mapping pen. I still believe that it is the best work
ever produced for any comic, anywhere in the world, and that it will
never be bettered.
Hampson’s
artwork had, in fact, never been seen to such impressive effect, for
the printing technique of the 1970s collection far surpassed the
somewhat limited rotogravure of the early Eagle, which had the
effect of ironing out all the subtleties in shading and tonality. The
annual had been put together from original artwork boards which,
having been chopped up to remove the space left by Eagle’s
red masthead, were newly photographed for four-colour offset
lithographic reproduction. This may seem like vandalism, but at the
time of its production, the Dare artworks would have been viewed by
Odhams as nothing more than twenty-year-old assets ripe for
exploitation, rather than artefacts for preservation. The
two stories were somewhat shortened to fit the page count, but in so
doing, the storytelling was considerably tightened, losing a few
episodes where the narrative had trod water for a week or so. One
such elision included an experimental page wherein Hampson, whether
by intent or through fatigue, had lapsed into a loose, jagged
technique that felt at odds with his customary detailed approach. A
couple of pages, introducing the first story, had been redrawn,
presumably in the absence of the original art boards, but otherwise
this was virtually full-on Frank Hampson.
The
Red Moon Mystery must be one of the very best Dan Dare
adventures. Its Earth/Mars setting gives it a realism that was set
aside when Dare and co ventured into more exotic realms, and there
are parts of the story that anticipate the later trend for disaster
movies, with the British Isles battered by hurricanes as the rogue
Red Moon approaches. The story also presents a very early example of
Martian Archeaology, with its backstory of Dan’s uncle Ivor
investigating the ruins of an ancient civilization that had been
wiped off the planet by a mysterious force known as ‘the red moon.’
This discovery provides the cue for the dramatic revelation that
astronomers at Mount Palomar have discovered a rogue asteroid
entering the solar system, to which they have coincidentally attached
the selfsame appellation. The story builds and builds, finding time
en route for a full-scale evacuation of Mars (portrayed here as a
kind of ski resort in space), which culminates with a flotilla of
little ships defying the gravitational pull of the rogue moon as they
attempt to drag the orbiting space station away from its malign
influence. It’s as good a piece of space opera sci-fi as has ever
been realised in any medium.
Regrettably,
the story begins to lose pace and focus towards the end. Hampson,
succumbing to the first of many bouts of debilitating illness, took a
forced leave of absence from the strip, leaving the concluding weeks
in the hands of his studio team, whose work, whilst efficient, lacks
the sparkle of their mentor in full flight. The ending, in fact,
feels rushed, almost as if the team couldn’t wait to crack on with
Dan’s next adventure, which a fully-recovered Hampson already had
on the drawing board; but Marooned on Mercury would run for
mere weeks before he was forced to relinquish control once again, and
ended up a relatively drab and uninteresting affair.
Dan’s
personal spaceship, the Anastasia, was already familiar to me from
the two Danny Dare strips in the Wham! annual, and in
the Red Moon Mystery it is employed to great effect, taking
part in some of the story’s most dramatic episodes. In later years,
‘Annie’ would be absent altogether from some of Dan’s
adventures, which seems a pity, given that it was such a neat,
well-designed craft. To me, Anastasia was everything a spaceship
should be: great looking, with a compact, yet detailed interior, an
ideal setting for dramatic close-ups, and possessing a kind of cosy
Englishness that recalled the interiors of wartime fighter-bombers.
If
the artwork in the Red Moon Mystery impressed me, then Safari
in Space was little short of stunning. In the seven years between
the end of RMM and the beginning of Safari..., Hampson
had honed his working methods to perfection, with a studio system
that began with his own carefully-crafted page roughs, before moving
on to posed photographs of the team in costume, or table-top models,
that would serve as reference material for the final frames, ensuring
that details such as shadows and folds in garments were rendered with
absolute conviction. Of course, at the time of acquiring the Dan
Dare Annual, I knew nothing of this, and blithely assumed that
Hampson had done all the work himself, although there could be no
question as to his genius. It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the
publication of Alastair Crompton’s Dare/Hampson history, The Man
Who Drew Tomorrow, that the full story was revealed to me. This
volume, indispensible even in the wake of its supposedly upgraded
edition, provides a salutory story and a stark warning for anyone
contemplating comic art as a career path. Frank Hampson’s story was
not a happy one: deprived of his copyright, cast into obscurity and
forced to tout for entirely unsuitable commissions (his speculative
pages for Modesty Blaise are a sad illustration that what
looks good on one character doesn’t necessarily work for another).
Odhams’
1973 annual may have been a cheaply-produced exploitation of a valued
copyright character, but it started me on the road to Dare fandom.
It’s not a journey I ever honestly completed, and although I have a
modest pile of 1950s and 60s Eagles in the wardrobe, I’d
draw the line at calling myself a full-on Dare fanatic. The
merchandise, for instance, has never interested me, albeit its
unavailability probably has a lot to do with this (Dare was, in fact,
a very early example of the kind of character merchandising that
would later attach itself to film and television properties). Neither
have I ever taken anything more than a passing interest in the many
(too many) Dare revivals that have been talked about, argued over and
occasionally put into production since the strip’s demise. 2000
AD’s attempt at a ‘punk’ reimagining of the character was
Dan Dare in name only, and while there have been more faithful
attempts to rekindle the magic of the glory years, none has ever come
anywhere near equalling the sheer imaginative and creative power of
the original. It’s a safe bet to say that there will never be any
more Dan Dare artwork of the quality of those Hampson-era boards, and
however diligently contemporary artists may work at likenesses and
hardware, their efforts are constantly hampered by today’s reliance
on digital colour. Whilst it is possible, with a great deal of time
and effort, to achieve some stunning effects in the digital arena,
it’s simply not possible to pass off such work as having been
rendered in ink and gouache, and it’s those lovely organic textures
of the original Dare that still shine through today, even from the
muddiest, most faded old copy of Eagle.
Dan
Dare was one of those creations who arrive at exactly the right
time; in retrospect, the 1950s Eagle feels like a key
component of the mood of post-war optimism, and the comic thrived in
that environment, benefiting from improvements in reprographic
technology, as demand pushed its circulation figures skywards. By the
end of the decade, however, boys’ comics faced stiff competition
from the mushrooming medium of television, and within ten years the
golden age of Eagle would be little more than a fading memory.
I regret not having been around to experience it at the time, but
turning over the pages of those old and fragile editions is to take a
step back into a more innocent world, where all things were possible,
and the idea of Britain being the international base of an
interplanetary space fleet still seemed eminently plausible...
Dan
Dare may have been the pilot of the future, but for me at any rate,
he is best appreciated as a product of the past.
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