Dan Dare: Complete Collection: Vol. 1: The Venus Campaign

by Frank Hampson

Introducing one of science fiction's most enduring heroes, Dan Dare. This Omnibus edition of Dan Dare contains his first three full adventures digitally remastered for the very first time.

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future was first published in classic British comic The Eagle in 1950. These are the original adventures of one of the best known and loved of British comic characters, presented in a new series of gorgeous library editions from Titan Comics.

Pilot of the Voyage to Venus Pt 1 & 2
Dan and his crew set off to explore Venus, hoping to find new resources to feed a starving earth. But the planet is already the lair of the pint-sized megalomaniac The Mekon, who plans to conquer the Earth! Now it's up to Dare and his bat-man Digby to help the enslaved people of Venus to rise up and defeat the massive green headed evil genius.

THE Red Moon Mystery
Dan and his trusty crew must head once more into the dangerous, icy depths of space to uncover the secrets of a strange red moon that has entered the Solar System and threatens Earth with destruction!

Genres: Comics, Science Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 2018

Reviews

[Al Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good collection of classic tales from the pages of the Eagle, Firstly the Venus Campaign, which is more of an adventure and then the Res Moon Mystery which is more of a sci fi tale.

Art work is great, amazing that Frank Hampson could turn out these two wonderful pages of art week after week.

Highly recommend, I hope Titan continues to release these complete Collection of Dan Dare, though given several years have passed I’m not optimistic.

[Alex Sarll]

I've read various reboots, sequels and such, not least the infamous Morrison/Hughes run with the Thatcher and the bumming, but never before the original Dan Dare series, let alone these first installments from 1950-52. Which, to be honest, I was expecting to be of mainly historical interest, like so many other foundational but painfully dated comics. Maybe, at best, the beautifully depicted idiocy of The Trigan Empire. Well, I was wrong on both counts. For all that Frank Hampson's art has become a byword for elegant, old-fashioned futures, here it often doesn't look all that great. Partly it's the reproduction, where fancy paper will never catch how it was meant to appear, and the intermittent blobbiness of the colours suggests the inevitable limitations of reprinting mass-produced art from a lifetime ago. But beyond that, the pace of the stories means that the panels in each week's two-page episode are often too cramped to allow for grandeur. There's impressive work being done all the same - to get news across, half a page will become an actual, fairly convincing newspaper, not the scrawled headlines within a comics panel you'd get in US comics until decades later than this. The ships and battles, when one can see them, have great designs; the characters are distinct, lively, and in Dan's case have the only eyebrows in comics to rival a John Byrne character. Yes, especially early on the science is a fright; the handwaving use of rays and waves in the first story is dubious even by the standards of fifties SF science regarding rays and waves (I'm a little surprised Arthur C Clarke gets a cover credit for his scientific consultant role; if I managed the estate of a writer normally associated with fairly scrupulous SF, I'd have insisted they keep it as quiet as possible). But once the strip has found its feet the adventures are genuinely gripping, ominous cliffhangers followed by resolutions that push the story yet further, rather than cheap get-outs.

The story opens in the space age future of 1996, when Earth's population has doubled since 1950 - an optimistic under-estimate by three quarters of a billion, but perhaps because a federal world government ensures equal distribution of supplies, food shortages are biting all over. So our heroes, undeterred by the failure of previous missions, set off to Venus in search of fresh supplies. The assumption that anyone who might inhabit Venus will be absolutely fine with this obviously reads as a bit of unexamined colonialist thinking now, but mercifully that's as bad as it usually gets, and sometimes even the unexamined bit isn't true; we do get a bit of 'But the professor - is a lady!' business when Professor Peabody is introduced, but it's not long before she's consistently getting the better of interactions with exasperating menfolk: "You reached us only just in time. Things were so bad, Sir Hubert had forgiven me for being a woman." Even the Treens aren't played as the dodgy Green Peril they might have been so much as a warning of runaway scientism, which of course makes sense when you remember that the Eagle was started by a clergyman* who wanted a more instructive alternative to morally questionable American comics; if only Wertham had channelled his distaste so productively, instead of just lying and wrecking. And speaking of outright villains, it's curious to see the very gradual appearance of the Mekon, surely the best-known bit of the franchise, yet here turning up without much fanfare and feeling like a bit of an afterthought, barely getting chance to make a few callous pronouncements before he's taken hostage and being tossed hither and yon. Although even then, the comic relief duties mainly fall to Dan's bluff batman Digby, as if the creators knew that of all their characters, the ones where mockery would age best were the Northerners. And even then, he's capable of bravery as well as buffoonery, an affecting mixture which reminds the reader that this was a comic crafted by people who'd seen active service, and knew how heroes really responded to life or death situations, rather than the platitudinous version.
(One Digby detail that can't have been anticipated, though, is the way that any time another character addresses something to him, and the sentence ends 'Dig?', to the modern reader it's as if they've suddenly turned hep)

Anyway, once matters on Venus are resolved, through a combination of help from the less obnoxious locals and good old-fashioned Earthling pluck, humanity can have proper dinners again - at least until we pick up the story again three years later for The Red Moon Mystery, which gave me fewer Belly earworms than expected. The beauty of this one lies partly in the way it doesn't redo the winning formula; initially I assumed the mysterious rogue asteroid menacing Mars and Earth would be revealed as a plot of the escaped Mekon or loyalist Treens or something, but no - he doesn't feature at all, they stay loyal, and the answer to the mystery lies entirely elsewhere. Obviously there are still common elements, fancy flying and brave, desperate missions - but the context is sufficiently different, evacuation and investigation and delaying actions over exploration and conventional warfare, that it never risks feeling stale. Just really fun stuff, and this collection ends on what feels like an upward trajectory.

*While I knew the bare bones of the Marcus Morris story, it was only from the introductory matter here that I learned another cleric involved with the comic was Chad Varah, later of the Samaritans and Terrence Higgins Trust. Meanwhile, the radio adaptation had Kenneth Williams - though alas, he doesn't appear to have played the Mekon.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fantastic! A must-read for any fan of comics history. This is such a fascinating read. Apparently, it was produced by a British paper backed by a religious organization, who wanted a more wholesome comic hero for English boys than the horror comics that were coming out of the US at the time. This book covers the first two Dan Dare stories, the excellent Pilot of the Future, and the less exciting, but still fun, Mystery of the Red Moon.

What's great about this, for me, is that it's the commingling of two very different stylistic elements: first, it's REMARKABLY hard science fiction for the era. I read this coming off an Expanse book, and a lot of the same ideas about physics are referenced. Sure, a lot of it's fanciful and weird, that just comes from reading dated science fiction, but you can tell there was a lot of actual science knowledge on display, even if it was presented in a zany and bonkers way. The second element was the stodgy British storytelling. The characters were are ultra-thin, but built on well-worn stereotypes that serve the story just fine. There's British gentleman pilot Dan Dare, his Lancashire batsman (British military equivalent of sidekick) Digby, plucky dame scientist Jocelyn Peabody, stodgy sexist commanding officer Sir Hubert, American guy Hogan, and French guy, you know what, I don't even remember his name, his sole personality trait was that he was the one with a French accent. Seeing these super one-dimensional characters solving these super-modern science fiction stories was great, and also, kind of the blue print for both Star Trek AND Star Wars.

Oh, and the whole thing was pretty progressive for something put out by a Christian British newspaper in like 1950. Race was ignored (which was important, because the Earth, in futuristic 1996, was ruled by a one-world government), and Sir Hubert's sexism was played for laughs, as the plucky Miss Peabody was constitutionally incapable of doing the wrong thing, and was only a damsel in distress in a single strip out of like 240, which isn't bad at all, for the time.

Terrific, must-read for any comics fan with ANY kind of mind to knowing where stuff came from, and any science fiction fan, as well. Oh, and the art is miles ahead of a lot of stuff that's coming out now, let alone back then.

[David Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Golden Age of Sci-Fi
Back to the days before angst ridden anti-heroes, when heroes were clean cut and square jawed.
Clean, crisp artwork, great characterisation and superb storytelling.
Wish I could give it more than 5 stars