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.

Yesterday's Tomorrows

 

Rian Hughes, Grant Morrison, Chris Reynolds and others
Yesterday's Tomorrows (2010)
I remember thinking Grant Morrison's Dare was amazing at the time, but apparently not so amazing as to keep me from flogging all my issues of Revolver on eBay; then, more recently, I found this which reprints the same along with other things by Rian Hughes. This is going to be a bit painful because I've met Rian Hughes and he's a friend of at least one friend - or was - and he seems a decent guy, and I genuinely love his design work; but this ain't great.

Dare retains the initial thrill I recall experiencing thirty years ago, or whenever it was, but then suddenly stops as though they ran out of shocking things to do with the poor cunt and decided just to cut to the explosion. It probably wasn't so obvious in monthly instalments, but read in one sitting it comes across as comically weak. This was the era of the comic growing up, Rupert Bear dealing crack in Nutwood and so on, so naturally the latest version of Dan Dare turned him into a metaphor for the failure of England's dreaming and a colonial embarrassment who buddies up to Morrison's version of Thatcher. Here she's even more like Mosley than the real one and her big scheme is to win votes by solving a national food shortage, all endorsed by Dare, so it would seem; and the cheap food source is produced by a biological monstrosity made out of recycled members of the unemployed and resembling four giant penises penetrating four vast vaginal orifices to yield a cheap nutritious Pot Noodle style substance somewhat resembling spunk. It's all a bit exhausting, and our Thatcher substitute is quite naturally business partners with the Mekon. Morrison did this much better in St. Swithin's Day, The New Adventures of Hitler, and probably almost everything else he's ever written; and while Dan Dare might be a relic of a certain era with all sorts of discredited cultural baggage in tow, I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to call him a bully. Even Belardinelli's Dan Dare as Sid Vicious seems ultimately more faithful and certainly less insulting.

Yet, such were my tastes back in 1990 that Rian Hughes art was enough to carry the thing; except with hindsight I realise that it's mainly the deco buildings and the tailfins which do the heavy lifting, with the figures seeming almost intrusive. Unless reduced to design elements seen in the distance, Hughes' people are awkward, angular, and seem forced, as though they're deco buildings trying to look like people; and the lines which serve the landscape so well remain consistent for the sake of the design, despite being ill-fitted to anything organic, particularly the human face. One can see what he was getting at - possibly something with the elegance of Fougasse - but Hughes' figures are sabotaged by the style to which he was apparently committed.

Regrettably, I felt the same about the rest - strips reprinted from Mauritania and elsewhere. The figure work is awkward, despite its best efforts, and painfully so, reducing the potential for anything truly expressive, turning it all into an exercise in retro-cool with little discernible substance. The Lighted Cities is sort of atmospheric, probably because it's short; The Science Service is barely comprehensible, and I've already read Really & Truly once this decade, which was more than enough. There's also some sort of Raymond Chandler adaptation but I couldn't face it.

Design-wise, I'd say Rian Hughes is right up there with Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett, but the cartoon strips unfortunately weren't all they could have been.

Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume two

Chris Lowder, Gerry Finley-Day, Dave Gibbons & others
Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume two (2016)
Here's the rest of the Joe Strummer version of Dan Dare, namely the stuff which didn't fit in volume one. The collection is thus unfortunately lacking Bellardinelli's fascinatingly peculiar interpretation of the character and is therefore a little dry by comparison - not quite Jacob's crackers, but something in that direction. This version of Dare doesn't square too well with the original, which we can probably take as given and instead concentrate on what it does have going for it.

One thing it had going for it was that it seemed wild and original when I was thirteen, so the nostalgia compensates for what is now revealed as having been pretty thin. This volume divides mainly into the second half of the Lost Worlds storyline and Servant of Evil. Lost Worlds was an episodic Star Trek variant with more explosions and generic schoolboy nihilism, which works in places despite the limitations of the form, particularly the gorgeous full page splashes of Waterworld. Lost Worlds ends with a massive explosion because I guess they couldn't come up with a better resolution, following which an amnesiac Dare is recruited by the Mekon and so becomes a Servant of Evil. This storyline has been criticised for not going anywhere, then ceasing after umpteen weeks with the promise of a conclusion which never came; and while it suffers from some of the same conventions as Lost Worlds - and whoever thought of giving Dan a super powered glove and making him into the chosen one was obviously an idiot - it also seems to be an attempt to do something a bit more satisfying, even mythic, than yet another planet of slimies blown up every few weeks concluding with final panel puns based on which item of starship canteen fare is now banned due to a resemblance to whichever alien race has just been driven to judicious extinction. My guess is that Servant was an attempt to turn Dan into Star Wars, or thereabouts, and for the most part it sort of worked, or at least worked on me when I was thirteen, which I suppose is what mattered.

Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years

Pat Mills, Massimo Belardinelli, Dave Gibbons & others
Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume one (2015)
In his introduction, Garth Ennis writes that while 2000AD's 1977 reinvention of Dan Dare as a generic action hero may have annoyed purists, we all loved him because we were too young to have read the original in Eagle and he was our Dan Dare - the we here equating to my generation. The thing is, I'm not sure this is strictly true. I was myself very much familiar with the earlier Dan Dare through a stack of Eagle annuals inherited from my dad who had read the comic when he was a kid; and even after it had been cancelled, Dan remained sufficiently popular as to warrant his own Fleetway annuals. I still have the one which came out in 1973 reprinting The Red Moon Mystery and Safari in Space; so most of us knew who he was, I would say.

That said, I'm probably just splitting hairs, because the return of Dan Dare was why I started buying 2000AD, and the main reason why I continued to buy it during those first couple of years. I've seen it argued that Dan Dare as Sid Vicious and then Joe Strummer has been somewhat relegated to the basement of comic book history simply because it wasn't very good. After all, this is the Dare who kicks your ass, hangs out with ne-er-do-wells, and says rude words such as stomm and possibly even drokk. In defence of our boy, I've also seen it argued that if you look closely you will notice that the Eagle version of the strip was also badly written juvenile piffle despite those lovely pictures.

Well, I have had a look and it simply isn't true. Rather this seems to be a case of someone being unable to tell the difference between something which is badly written and something which is simply aimed at a fairly young audience. The Hampson and Bellamy Dare may be a little stilted due to having been delivered in a million instalments of just one and three-quarter pages each; and old Dan was stylistically very much of its time, but it never pandered and should at least be credited with concessions made to yer actual proper science and a surprisingly progressive attitude towards persons other than the white, English, Christian, and male. Most notably it didn't seem to require that there be either an explosion or someone firing a gun every three panels.

Tharg's Dare is bewildering and inept by comparison. The stories are vehicular to massive implausible ideas such as the Biogs with their living spaceships, and in terms of plot the stories verge on Scooby Doo levels of thin. No less than two tales in this collection conclude with food gags punning whichever generic menace has been defeated in the preceding panels - one of Dan's crew remarks that he's built up quite a hunger following the team's escape from a desert planet of living sand, and so Bear jokes that he will happily eat anything except a sandwich; and I can even remember a third one of these - a no cauliflower cheese for me zinger which concluded a story presumably scheduled for reprint in the second volume.

Bear is the huge Russian ex-cosmonaut Dan hires as a general puncher of faces. He refers to himself in third person and, like many of the characters, often describes what he's doing for the benefit of the reader - 'Stava! Bear's astro-axe spikes the alien guns,' as we watch him swing the aforementioned nuclear-assisted axe into the mechanism of some alien weapon; in this case a weapon belonging to the Starslayers who live on a planet called Starslay and who are ruled over by their Dark Lord, who actually knows he's a bad guy. I have no idea how or why the axe is nuclear-assisted. It just is, okay?

It's not simply that new things are always rubbish. Tharg's Dan Dare really was a poor effort compared with the original, at least in terms of narrative relationship with its readers. Aside from the name and the fact of his being recognised by the Mekon, he may as well have been Dredger or Hellman or John Probe or any other generically grizzled action hero from a seventies comic; and yet knowing all of the above, I can't help but love this stuff in spite of itself.

The key is, I suppose, the art combined with those previously mentioned massive implausible ideas - the Biog's living technology, the Shepherds, the Two of Verath in his hollow planet, the Roman-style vampires and their heart-shaped spaceships. This stuff once blew my mind on a weekly basis in a way that not even Doctor Who could manage, and so much so that I never noticed how there was hardly a story underneath. Now that I'm fifty, the same tales have lost some of their initial impact, but the shortfall is made up with massive blasts of memory sherbert going off every few panels. Nostalgia alone shouldn't really be enough to save a strip, which is where the art comes in. Belardinelli's figures were often ropey, but you don't really notice here, and he was at his absolute weirdest drawing the Sid Vicious version of Dare in those early progs - bordering on the Hieronymous Bosch of the comic strip; and it looks so fucking amazing that it doesn't seem to matter that the dialogue - mostly bloody awful as it is - should be reduced to something like background music, a sort of word condiment sprinkled across the artwork for the sake of flavour. The same roughly applies to the Dave Gibbons version which, if not quite so visually arresting, has enough of a pleasantly chunky quality to compensate for crappy or even non-existent narrative.

A few years later, a version of Eagle returned and reclaimed Dan Dare for its own. I had a look at the thing, but despite the admittedly bed-wettingly gorgeous art of Ian Kennedy, it seemed like a boy band version of the character, a pointless exercise in recreating the original magic by following the same recipe which failed because the rest of the universe had long since moved on; and this was why Dan Dare worked so well in 2000AD, because I was twelve and it absolutely nailed the spirit of its time, for better or worse.

Having only just found out that Belardinelli is no longer with us, this also comes as a wonderful reminder of just how magnificently weird his art was at its best. I can't help feel that had somebody pushed him in the general direction of a life drawing class or two, he might have been remembered with the sort of reverent tone generally reserved for the likes of Kirby, Ditko and Moebius.