Dan Dare: The 2000 A.D. Years Volume Two

Steve Winders reviews Rebellion’s second collection of Dan Dare reprints from 2000AD weekly in 1978 and ’79.

This book completes the collection of all 2000AD magazine’s strips and text stories featuring their version of the adventures of the space hero Dan Dare. In this second volume are the strips from the weekly comic running from February 1978 until August 1979, as well as two strips from the 2000AD Annual for 1979 and the Dan Dare Annual for 1980 and two text stories from the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special from 1979 and the Dan Dare Annual for 1979. Most of the art from the weekly is by Dave Gibbons, whose sharp detailed artwork and expertise in conveying action make all the strips visually exciting. One serial is drawn by Brian Lewis and Trev Goring and Gary Leach share the work on another with Gibbons. The annual strips are drawn by Adrian Beeton and Dave Harwood, although both are ‘identified’ as anonymous in the book because the annuals did not carry writer and artist credits.

The first 163 pages complete the adventures of Dare and his crew on the Space Fort, exploring a mysterious region of space. There are seven stories ranging in length from two to seven episodes. These include one where the Fort encounters deadly plants which can take on human form; one set on a planet covered with water where Dare saves a race of intelligent beings from predators who are devouring the planet’s core and one set on an ice world where he rescues a space dwelling creature from entombment in a glacier. The Space Fort saga ends with a seven part story where Dan barely escapes with his life after losing both the Fort and his crew in a huge explosion that destroys the giant spacecraft that the Fort and many other ships have been pulled inside. The Space Fort stories were written by Gerry Finley-Day, Chris Lowder, Roy Preston and Nick Landau.

The next 128 pages, written by Tom Tully, cover a long continuous adventure with Dare’s old enemy the Mekon, who is now dying and desperate to steal the fabled rejuvenating ‘Crystal of Life’ which will restore him to health. He initially tricks Dan who has lost his memory into helping him, but Dan recovers and gains the ‘Cosmic Claw’, a gauntlet which gives him special powers that enable him to escape when on his return to Earth he is sentenced to death for aiding the Mekon.

At this point the story ends abruptly as it did in 2000AD An informative article by David McDonald explains why Dan never returned to the weekly and outlines the various plans that writers and editors had to complete the story. I was able to contribute a little to David’s research because a few months after the story ended I contacted Steve McManus, the 2000AD editor to enquire about its return. I was told of tentative plans to have Dan travel back in time to prevent the incident that caused the near death of the Eagle version of himself, which had led to him being placed in suspended animation and later reconstructed. The 2000AD Dan would die saving his original self, creating a temporal anomaly, but allowing the Eagle version to have new adventures.  A planned TV series based on the original was being developed at the time.

Of the Annual strips, Beeton’s is particularly interesting as he drew Dan’s face closely resembling the Eagle original and even sneaked a character who looked exactly like Digby into the story. This was clearly mischief on his part as he drew the Space Fort in accurate detail and produced good likenesses of the other regular characters from the Fort’s crew.

The book has an introduction by Garth Ennis who wrote his own version of Dan Dare for Virgin Comics a few years ago. Most Forewords are full of praise for the books they introduce, but while Ennis praises the Space Fort series, he heavily criticises the ‘Crystal of Life’ story, saying that the “storytelling rambles, with a great deal of sound and fury yielding very little by way of plot development.” While this is fair comment I actually enjoyed this long running narrative more than many of the short and often predictable Space Fort stories, but it is refreshing to read an Introduction which is honest in its appraisal.

The new book does not contain as many colour pages as its predecessor because more of the earlier episodes included colour, but there are more pages here and as in the first volume the reproduction quality is excellent. The cover has been illustrated by Ian Kennedy who produced some excellent work on yet another version of Dan Dare for the 1980s new Eagle, but apart from one 2000AD Annual story, which was included in the last book, he was not associated with the 2000AD version. Nevertheless his cover is well up to his usual standard, although his style is quite different from Dave Gibbons’ whose work dominates the book.

I can recommend this collection as I recommended its predecessor and Rebellion, the current publishers of 2000AD but not the owners of Dan Dare, deserve praise for producing these albums. The 2000 AD version did not please everyone, but it was a bold and exciting strip which contributed to the early success of the weekly and is fondly remembered by a generation of readers.

Dan Dare: The 2000AD Years Vol.2 by Chris Lowder, Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons. Rebellion ISBN 978-1781-08460-1, 3 November 2016, £30. Available from Amazon.

Dan Dare audio release

The upcoming release of B7 Media's Dan Dare audio adventures has inspired the company to put together a brief video history of the character:

And here's a preview of the first story:

The first three stories can be ordered now from Big Finish. The first volume also contains a fourth disc of music by Imran Ahmad from Dan Dare and other B7 Media productions.

Dan Dare audio posters

With the Dan Dare audio adventures due in December from Big Engine, Brian Williamson has been commissioned to produce three posters to celebrate the event. Here are the first two...

Dan Dare Cast Revealed!

Inspired by the original Eagle comic strips the cast for B7 Media’s dramatic new audio version of Dan Dare has been announced.

Ed Stoppard – The Pianist, Joy Division, Brideshead Revisited and Youth – has been cast as the intrepid ‘pilot of the future’ Colonel Dan Dare. He’s joined by Geoff McGivern as Digby (McGivern is best known to science fiction fans as the original Ford Prefect in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and Heida Reed as Professor Jocelyn Peabody; Reed currently plays Ross Poldark’s first love, Elizabeth, in the hit BBC drama Poldark.

“It’s very exciting to have been cast as Dan Dare,” says Ed Stoppard. “We’re having a ball. It’s very nice to be doing something that isn’t overly earnest, and is great fun at the same time – although I’m also learning a lot about cosmology, quantum mechanics, plasma drives and the like.”

As for his take on the classic British comic book character, Stoppard goes on to say, “Dan’s an intrinsically, morally upright man, the kind of man we could really do with in Number 10 or the White House. ‘Hero’ is too simple a term to describe him – he’s got a complexity to him.”

Ed Stoppard during the recording of Dan Dare

“It’s an effable delight to play Digby in Dan Dare,” says Geoff McGivern, who is convinced Douglas Adams was inspired by the Eagle comic strip the new audio adventures are based on. “I’m sure Hitch Hiker’s came out of Douglas reading Dan Dare, because he was the same age as me, and created his own take.”

“It’s a great challenge,” says Heida Reed of playing Professor Peabody, long-suffering foil to Dan Dare’s action man, “and very different to Poldark. It’s great to play a character like this – she’s both intelligent and challenging.”

“It’s been a long-held ambition of mine to bring Dan Dare back to the radio waves,” says producer/director Andrew Mark Sewell. “We’ve not only managed to bring together a superb cast, but in Ed Stoppard we’ve found a lead actor who embodies the spirit of the original Dan Dare and makes him feel utterly relevant today.”

Raad Rawi, known for roles in Spy (2015), The Devil's Double (2011) and Traitor (2008) features as Dan Dare’s arch nemesis, the Mekon, an alien leader plagued by Dare’s loyal ally and Treen resistance fighter,  Sondar, voiced by Bijan Daneshmand.

Geoff McGivern and Heida Reed recording

“It’s extremely exciting to be in this show, given the people I’m working with,” says Raad Rawi. He insists the Mekon is “misunderstood”, not evil. Rawi is a fan of SF authors such as Frederick Pohl and Phillip K. Dick. “Doing audio completely frees the imagination; we don’t have to worry how we look – we can imagine it.”

As it is for many of the cast, science fiction is something of a departure for actor and abstract painter Bijan Daneshmand, but he’s finding it fun, especially playing an alien. “You can sound different to your normal human being voice!”

And does he think there is alien life out there? “Definitely,” he insists, echoing the views of many of the other actors in the cast, who are currently midway through recording the first of six all-new Dan Dare audio adventures.

Completing the regular cast as Space Fleet boss Sir Hubert Guest is Michael Cochrane, a familiar face, and voice, who has appeared in many popular television dramas, and most recently can be heard in Dan Dare guest star Nicholas Briggs’ acclaimed audio reboot of The Prisoner starring Mark Elstob.

B7 Media’s Dan Dare Audio Adventures offers a distinctly 21st century take on the space adventure hero first brought to life in Eagle comic in the 1950s. Other guest actors in this first season include Jake Maskall (EastEnders, The Royals), Hugh Fraser (Agatha Christie's Poirot, Sharpe), Nicholas Briggs (Doctor Who, Torchwood), Noof McEwan (Vera, Leave to Remain), Jonathan Rhodes (M.I. High, Beacon 77, Deadpan Valentine), Kelly Burke (The Blind Man) and Dean Harris (The Fourth Arm, Howard’s Way, Bad Boyes).

Inspired by the original Eagle comic strips, the all-new Dan Dare audio adventures are being directed by Andrew Mark Sewell (The Martian Chronicles, Blake’s 7) and produced by Simon Moorhead (Luna, Mirrormask). Former Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel Comics editor, John Freeman, is attached as consultant to the series.

Nicholas Briggs

Dan Dare - Voyage to Venus animation

Russell Devlin posted this on YouTube almost a year ago, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, there are worse ways to spend it. According to Devlin, "This is the feature version of my earlier posted Dan Dare webseries for those of you who prefer it in that format. It is essentially the same, but with individual ep titles removed and editing to make the eps flow better together."