Dan Dare: How the British superhero survived to make the digital age

This October sees publisher Titan Comics release brand new adventures, in traditional American comics format, while a new series of audio adventures are available on CD and download

Dan Dare returns, ably assisted by Professor Peabody, right, and Digby

Born in the white heat of the Cold War and the impending Space Race, Dan Dare was the square-jawed, morally upstanding and thoroughly British hero who thrilled a post-war generation of children who could finally look up at the sky in wonder as to what lay among the stars, not with fear at the prospect of bombs raining from above.

An antidote the muscle-bound, garishly-costumed superheroes from the United States, for sure, but Colonel Dan Dare of the Interplanet Space Fleet was very much what we might think of now as “of his time”, almost a planet-hopping version of WE Johns’ stiff-upper-lip flying ace Biggles, promulgating good, honest, English decency among the barbaric, godless creatures that inhabited worlds beyond our own.

Debuting in legendary children’s comic the Eagle in 1950, Dan Dare, ace pilot of the pride of the Interplanet Space Fleet, the Anastasia, might easily have inhabited just a small window in pop cultural history, consigned to the history books and left behind in 1950s Britain.

But, you can’t keep a good hero down. Batman, Superman and Captain America have survived and transcended their origins in the 1930s and 1940s, and similarly Dan Dare is the great British comics survivor, enjoying periodic resurgences and explorations of not just strange new worlds, but fresh media including radio shows and TV animation.

And it’s time for Colonel Dare to ride to the rescue once again, as this autumn sees not only a brand new comic book featuring the classic character, but a series of unrelated audio adventures released featuring big name voice talent.

Dan Dare No 1 is out next month, and fans can pick up three variant covers including this one by Christian Ward

Before exploring those, though, it’s interesting to look at the genesis of Dan Dare, and why it’s quite remarkable that he continues to thrive almost 70 years after his creation.

Eagle published its first issue in April 1950, with Dan Dare on the cover, of course. It was the brainchild of Marcus Morris, who perhaps had an unusual background for the man who would create such an iconic comic… he was the vicar of St James’s Church in Southport, Lancashire.

Morris had a colourful life for the time. He was a chaplain in the RAF, was engaged to a model, and married an actress. Settled in his church, he created a parish magazine which was a cut above the usual notices of coffee mornings and raffles. Called The Anvil, it featured work by CS Lewis, crime writer Dorothy L Sayers, and illustrator Frank Hampson.

It was the partnership with Hampson that was pivotal. The Anvil was popular, but not a commercial success. At the same time, Morris wrote an article decrying the violence and gore in American crime and horror comics of the time, and hit upon an idea of creating a story-paper for British children that espoused more wholesome, Christian principles. Hampson wrote and drew “Dan Dare”, among other strips for Eagle, and after touting dummy issues around Fleet Street publishers, Morris persuaded a company called Hulton Press to take it on.

It was an immediate success, the first issue selling a whopping 900,000 copies — numbers to make today’s comic publishers faint with joy.

Dan Dare flew high, in both his adventures and in popularity, throughout the 1950s. Adventures were long, often complex, and featured a well-realised and heavily-populated solar system explored by Dare, his loyal (and sometimes comedy northerner) batman Digby, who hailed from Wigan, and Dr Jocelyn Peabody, a surprisingly well-rounded female character with brains and not, given the Christian origins of Eagle, merely a swooning love interest for the hero. And that’s not to mention arch-enemy, the globe-headed and decidedly evil alien mastermind The Mekon.

But Morris, and then Hampson, parted company with Eagle in 1959 after a series of new owners took over the title, and the title’s popularity waned in the Sixties until it was folded into another title, Lion, in 1969. The times they were a-changing, and this was the Marvel age of comics, when youth-focused characters such as Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four were crossing the Atlantic.

Legendary ‘2000AD’ artist Chris Weston has produced this cover for October’s launch

Still, Dan Dare endures. He was revived by British comic 2000AD in the 1970s, Eagle was relaunched with new Dan Dare adventures in 1982, and in one notable strip by Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes which appeared in the British comics magazine Revolver, Dare was depicted as old and disillusioned and living in a bleak, dystopian future that bore more than a passing resemblance to Thatcher’s Britain. The last major comics outing was published ten years ago by the short-lived Virgin Comics, written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Gary Erskine.

So it’s time for the return of “Dan Dare”. This October sees publisher Titan Comics release brand new adventures, in traditional American comics format, with art by Alberto Fouche and written by comics veteran Peter Milligan.

Milligan got his first break in comics writing for 2000AD in the 1980s, and went on to produce strips for British magazines including “Johnny Nemo”, “Hewligan’s Haircut” and the controversial “Skin”, about a skinhead thalidomide sufferer, before breaking into the US market and writing titles for Marvel and DC ranging from “Shade the Changing Man” to “X-Men” to “Batman”.

His work has often been edgy and envelope-pushing, so is it a surprise to see him taking on Dan Dare, that most quintessential of chiselled, upstanding heroes, born of a desire to make wholesome comics for 1950s children?

“The last number of years have seen a few radical iterations of Dan Dare,” says Milligan, perhaps surprisingly, “and I didn’t really want to go down that route. I wanted to do something more along the lines of the original Frank Hampson creation.”

But that doesn’t mean, as Milligan puts it, recreating a “misty-eyed idea of Britain” as perhaps suggested by former Prime Minister John Major’s wistful vision of “long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs”.

Milligan isn’t even sure such a Britain existed, not for the majority of people, and wouldn’t want it back if it ever did (though he is a big cricket aficionado). What he’s more interested in exploring is his idea that Dan Dare was actually a character of liberal sensibilities, a man of decency in an uncertain universe. “How do you stay decent and handle the sort of stuff he has thrown at him?” muses Milligan.

The original “Dan Dare” was a simple tale of good, represented by the hero, versus evil, in the shape of the menacing Mekon. The green one will be returning but, in Milligan’s hands, will be “more nuanced”. “Nobody thinks they’re truly evil,” he says. “Even the Nazis believed what they were doing was right in terms of what they stood for. And I think that makes a character like The Mekon more scary… he’s not just being evil for the sake of it, he believes he’s right.”

All the old elements will be present in the reboot, including Digby, though he loses some of his bumbling comedy to become a no-nonsense, practical northern engineer. Dr Jocelyn Peabody returns as well, a character who Milligan believes was originally “handled remarkably well for the time”.

Ultimately, the new comics will ask a question that perhaps many of us are asking ourselves today. “Can Dan Dare, with his liberal sensibilities, be properly equipped to deal with a world, a universe, where there are people with much darker moral centres?” says Milligan. “That’s basically the theme of my take on Dare.”

Almost simultaneously with Dan Dare’s first appearance in Eagle, radio adventures were aired five times a week on Radio Luxembourg. That’s another medium that’s making a comeback, after a fashion, with a new series of audio adventures from Big Finish, a company that specialises in providing listening pleasure to fans of a host of science fiction and fantasy properties, from Doctor Who to Blakes 7.

No radio required for these adventures, though; they’re available to download or purchase as CDs. These productions, with full cast including Ed Stoppard as Dare and Heida Reed – Poldark’s Elizabeth – as Professor Peabody, unashamedly hearken back to the original 1950s strips.

It’s been producer/director Andrew Mark Sewell’s long-held ambition to bring “Dan Dare” back to the airwaves. He says, “We’ve assembled a great team that has respect, but not reverence, for the original comics and a real passion for sci-fi and space exploration. Together we have created a truly cinematic audio series that recaptures the spirit, wonder and heroic adventure that characterised the original ‘Dan Dare’.”

Stoppard, who plays Dare, shares some of Milligan’s thoughts about the character. He says, “He’s an intrinsically morally upright man. Hero is too simple a term to describe him – he’s got a complexity to him. It’s nice to be doing something that isn’t overly earnest and is great fun at the same time – although I am learning a lot about cosmology, quantum mechanics and plasma drives!”

The new ‘Dan Dare’ comic launches in October from Titan (titan-comics.com) and ‘Dan Dare – The Audio Adventures’ Vol 1 & 2 are available now from dandareaudio.com