Comics about Doctor Who are all well and good, you may say, but he's still a licensed character. Albiet a brilliant one that lends himself to pretty much any story in any medium. How about a proper British comics character? How about somebody who is the very embodiment of the stiff upper lip Boys' Own adventurer... how about Dan Dare?
2026note: The above was in response to part 1 of this series of articles, which was about the Doctor Who Storybook 2007, and is located Here
Now, I know what you are thinking. Here is a character who has been given ignorant, tone-deaf, cargo-cult "updates" by rich men in suits more times than you've had hot dinners. Each time becoming more and more removed from the brilliance of the original version – a version started by a man in a dog collar and drawn by one of the greatest comic artists of his own or any era. Who was incidentally pouring his heart and soul into every panel (well, the ones he did!), as if each one was a miniature masterpiece destined for a gallery wall.
Well fear not, for THIS Dan Dare is exactly like the original! Created as a labour of love by a small group of determined fans with a vision. This is...
Spaceship Away issues 1-7
I had been aware of Spaceship Away for ages. I even had a look through a few issues at the Bristol convention in either 2005 or 6 (but couldn't attract the attention of any of the overworked people behind the table to ask the price!). It took me until 2010 to finally order the first 7 issues. They were well worth it!
Aaand here they are. For some reason my memory remembered them as being "US Comic" sized. Actually they are A4 sized.
The first issue is actually a bit sparse. It is basically the first pages of the story that started the whole thing (called The Pheonix Mission) and one long article about how the story was funded, drawn and gotten to press. This story is amazing in itself and deserving of some real recognition. And I don't mean some afterthought "Oh, yeah, and the best small press award goes to Spaceship Away, right, where's the bar?" award, either! The story took so long to get to press that it had originally been intended as a pitch to New Eagle, a comic that ended in 1994! Issue 1 of Spaceship Away finally emerged in 2003. Sadly the artist who began the tale, Keith Watson, did not live to see it reach print.
Article. Later on columns were added!
They rounded up assorted artists who had worked in Frank Hampson's studio during the days of the Eagle, and got members of the Eagle Society to "commission" artwork from the artists on a page by page basis to get the story paid for (2026note: The first crowdfunded comic??). The result looks amazing... and because it's printed using modern techniques, direct from the boards (modern DD reprint books mostly have to make do with scans of the old Eagles) is absolutely uncompromised!
Oh yeah, they make the strip look as if it's on the covers of the 1950's Eagle too!
That was issue 1, one story (well, there's also the one-page strip Dan Bear on the back cover... which also has incredible artwork and it's own interesting and cute story) and one article. However, expansions and improvements were rapid. Lets jump up to the newest issue I have, number 7.
Not quite “strip on the cover”, but it’ll do!
We now have six regular comic strips, as well as one-off funny strips. There are still articles, too. These are now either about Dans' World, the history of the Eagle or the science behind the stories. Unfortunately, I found several of these articles pretty dull or 'fluffy'. But never mind them, we're here for the comics!
The Pheonix Mission has now given way to it's much-longer (at the time of writing, it's still going!) sequel Green Nemesis. This tale features the villains of the saga, the Treens – and their leader The Mekon! It's crammed with all the stuff that made the original Dan Dare so great – resourcefulness, never-say-die attitudes and a stern sense of duty. Qualities any former officers would no doubt have recognised in their son's Eagle only five years after the war.
Rocket Pilot – Britain leads the way to the moon in 1970!
We also have Rocket Pilot; originally a webcomic, this tells the story of Sir Hubert Guest, the commanding officer of Spacefleet in the first Eagle. In this story he is still a young officer, and is on the first trips to the moon (in 1970) and mars (in 1988). It even briefly jumps back to his schooldays, when he looked up in awe at the RAF's new rocket interceptors, based on German designs and developed by captured scientists.
Crafty photo use, it's like the 20th century (as Gerry Anderson imagined it) never ended!
At the far end of the scale we have Project Pluto. Set in the 2020's, this has Dan himself as the commander of Spacefleet. However, he is not content to sit around in an office, and pops back and forth between the moon and space stations. Mind you, with the advanced space drives of the time that's probably easier and safer. In the background some shady politicians are trying to manipulate a war between Earth and Saturn('s moons – even when Dan 'originally' went there, they knew the planet wasn't solid).
Airbrushes! It's like Frank Bellamy... which is probably the idea.
Ahh, but did I not say yesterday (er... in 2010!) that proper comics need some text stories too? Well here's one! It's set just before the Eagle story Project Nimbus. This was the first full story Frank Bellamy worked on, after Frank Hampson was unceremoniously booted off, because his studio system cost too much. Frank Bellamy put his own stamp on Dan Dare's artwork, bringing it into the swinging sixties, but taking away a fair bit of the charm. This story attempts to explain the various visual changes as Spacefleet "looking like they're doing something", after politicians complain about their inflated budget!
2026note: Just in case anybody is unfamiliar with British comic artists; Frank Bellamy was by no means a bad one. Only when he was replacing Frank Hampson could his art be considered a "downgrade"! It was still better than pretty much anybody else, in his own time, or any other!
In addition to the ongoing Dan Bear, and other humour strips, issue 7 introduces something new – a non-Dan Dare strip! This is Journey Into Space, based on a famous radio serial. This strip was originally published in Express Weekly, a “high-minded” adventure comic, with expensive photogravure printing, which began as a rival to Eagle. To predict that the flagship strips of both would one day appear in the same comic would be like, I don't know, predicting that Sonic the Hedgehog would one day appear in Nintendo games! Utter madness.
Can Sonic run as fast as this, though?
Later issues of Spaceship Away introduced even more non-DD stories including a CGI one called Space Girls, some more classic sci-fi characters in the shape of Hal Starr and Nick Hazzard, and also Garth, from the long-running Daily Mirror strip. However I don’t own these later issues – yet!
2026note: My old blog was making far too much effort to be polite, democratic and swearing-free, so I mentioned nothing about the reason I didn't already have every issue of Spaceship Away; It's ever-rocketing price! This was because the copyright of Dan Dare was bought by some blubbery fuckwit, who delusionally insisted he had a big-budget Dan Dare film "in the can" and was only needing a distributor. Yeah nah if Frank Hampson couldn't get one made, I doubt you can. He also had an "official site", which was shit and broken, even by the standards of my own notepad-coded efforts.
Anyway, this dickhead, hoping to make millions off an almost-forgotten (if amazing) IP, was arbitrarily and pointlessley DOUBLING the cost Spaceship Away had to pay to use Dan Dare every year. I suppose that wouldn't be so bad if the first year it was a token £1, but somehow I doubt that. This insane drive to profit off his purchase was also tying up Titan Comics, so they couldn't keep their lavish Dan Dare reprints in print (and second hand copies go for silly money; Operation Saturn pt 1 was over £350!). By trying get a big Hollywood movie, about something Americans don't give a flying fuck about, "in the can", he was only ENSURING it remains obscure and irrelevant.
The far right conspiracy theorist in me even wonders if that isn't by design. The sort of people who go on about being "dragged back to the 50's" might be unpleasantly surpried by what was in a story from 1950-51! Better to keep that swept under the carpet and out of sight, eh? I notice shitty modern "reboots" of Dan Dare didn't have half the trouble those reprinting, or continuing, the original did. Hopefully one day a decent government will step in and nationalise Dan Dare, and various other old British properties which are currently in copyright hell. Then have at-cost paperbacks flying off the presses. Dan Dare albums, in the style of the TinTin books, should be in every British school and library.
OH WAIT NO I forgot the stupid fucker also stepped in and threw his legal weight around because the website Comics-UK had POSTAGE STAMP SIZE COVER PICTURES of Eagle on a "Comics Family Tree" article. These things were like 128 pixels high, and he still sent them letters threatening action over "copyright infrigement". Like what the fuck? How can a rational human being act like his? Pure, unadulterated vermin.