Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

 

Frank Hampson Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future (1951)
I picked up a few of these collected editions for pennies back in the nineties in some remaindered book store and only recently realised I'm still yet to read them all; and this particular one - collecting a year and a half's worth of Eagle strips amounting to the first Dan Dare story - is now several hundred quid on eBay, so that's nice, or possibly just weird.

My Dare standard was formed early on from a stack of Eagle annuals my dad passed onto me when I was a kid and probably at the right age to appreciate them without any of the strip's shortcomings getting in the way. The shortcomings aren't really anything worth getting too upset about given that this was a children's strip from the fifties, published by a man of certain religious convictions, and which probably shouldn't be judged by whatever standards one might apply to, off the top of my head, the oeuvre of J.G. Ballard; but it nevertheless feels like this first epic represented an experiment in progress with Dare still finding his feet, not least in a technical sense. What doubtless worked well as seventy-seven snappy weekly instalments seems a little jittery when digested in just a couple of sittings; and strangest of all is that the lettering - of all things - is particularly ropey, suggesting panels of artwork drawn to some vague notion of a script, complete with speculative speech bubbles which were either too large, too small, or poorly situated once time came to add the dialogue. It's not a massive problem, but it's something which requires a little getting used to whenever yet another explanation wanders out of its balloon to spill across the background. Also, in the absence of original artwork, the reproduction in this volume - taken directly from issues of the comic - tends to look a little overexposed here and there, which is a shame because Hampson's drawings were obviously painstaking and beautiful. I'm sure this was the best they could do in 1988, but it's nevertheless odd that the whole should seem so technically uneven in comparison even to the American comics of the time.

Still, I'm not complaining because even poor reception is unable to diminish the imagination and inspiration which informed this thing, even as it took these first faltering steps. Of course, it's Biggles in space and is as such an expression of the values of its time. The attitudes are entirely colonial and patriarchal, derived from a notion of authority figures as essentially decent, even altruistic. Sir Hubert Guest huffs and puffs when he realises he's sharing his spaceship with a woman and that the cabin will doubtless soon be full of washing lines strung with her unmentionables, but he gets over it, and Professor Jocelyn Peabody is at least spared the more traditional indignity of providing brainlessly imperiled eye-candy fit only to be rescued from the clutches of beastly foreign types. Venus is more or less colonial Africa but its people are treated with sympathy and, excepting the Mekon himself, ideology is the villain rather than those in its sway. The Treens recall colonial attitudes towards black Africans up to a point, but don't seem inherently malign and their bad guy status comes mostly from a misguided devotion to the ruthless logical superscience of the Mekon - not too hard to work out where that came from so close to the second world war. I gather this story was written back when Venus was still considered potentially habitable, and even that Arthur C. Clarke was consulted regarding the composition of the complex alien ecosystem and civilisation into which Hampson deposited our heroes. So even if we only experience the background detail in passing, it's convincing.

Naturally there are a few narrative howlers, my favourite being the fact that the Mekon had a full-sized replica of an Earth city built apparently just for the look on the faces of his human captives when he gratuitously blows it up. There's also the final battle to consider. The Treens are revealed as hating sports - just like the bad eggs they are - and have therefore destroyed all of their horse equivalent animals many years before as scientifically inefficient, or something like that. Spotting these details as a weakness, Space Fleet wins the day by shipping battalions of horseback fighters to Venus to storm Mekonta, the capital - specifically grenadier guards and a whole shitload of Tom Mix inspired cowboys direct from Texas. It's the sort of plotting which doubtless filled the heads of small boys in the fifties and is patently fucking ridiculous, but scores highly on its raw peculiar charm.

Following on from those Eagle annuals, I renewed my acquaintance with Dan Dare when 2000AD reincarnated him as Sid Vicious back in 1977, a version which seems not too fondly remembered and which has been criticised as a ropey, opportunistic besmirchment of the values represented by the original strip. While it's true that Belardinelli's Dare may have been a revision slightly too far, it's interesting to note that Hampson's Dare was itself likewise occasionally ropey, hamstrung by technical problems, and nothing like so confident as we may choose to remember. However, the art was great, and its generous, altruistic spirit still resonates regardless of contemporary wibbling concerns about things being of their time in the usual pejorative sense. I don't actually know if anyone ever found the original artwork since this edition was put together, or even if any efforts may have been made towards restoration in the intervening years, but Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future remains worthy of preservation, regardless.