Pilot of the Future... Product of the Past

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 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 in the annual had been redrawn, presumably in the absence of the original art boards, but otherwise this was 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 archaeology, 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 many film and television properties). Neither have I ever taken anything more than a passing interest in the many (one might argue 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.