Comic Review: Dan Dare

PUBLISHER: VIRGIN (2007-2008)
WRITER: GARTH ENNIS
ARTIST: GARY ERSKINE

There have been many attempts to bring Dan Dare up to date since the original strip in Eagle retired with its' protagonist in 1967. 2000AD tried a spikier revival when they launched in 1977 by bringing him out of suspended animation but it didn't go down well and the non-traditional elements were cranked back until it disappeared; a revival of Eagle in the eighties saw a more conventional story with the contrivance that this Dare was a descendant; more influenced by war comics this never quite took on either and reverted to a straight sequel featuring the original to no great effect. The next outing was Grant Morrison's heavy-handed but still striking Thatcherism satire Dare in Revolver, after which most of the rights' owners energies were in exploring TV and film in light of the weakness of the British comic industry, resulting in the single-season CGI cartoon Pilot of the Future. In print there was no significant new material until the licence was picked up by the recently-founded comic wing of Virgin Enterprises.

Comic Review: Dare

PUBLISHER: FLEETWAY (1990)
WRITER: GRANT MORRISON
ARTIST: RIAN HUGHES

Since the iconic Eagle character Dan Dare had been left behind by the industry in 1967 there had been two main revivals; firstly as the lead of 2000AD on launch before Judge Dredd and other brand new characters rapidly overtook it and then as the lead of the relaunched Eagle itself a couple of years later. Both had their own style quite different from the enjoyably cor-wow original but neither were as shocking as Grant Morrison's take at the start of the nineties.

The serial - simply titled Dare - debuted in the new and short-lived Revolver, a Fleetway title launched in 1990 to try and cash in on both the serious adult comic audience uncovered by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and the late eighties interest in the sixties in general and psychedelia in particular. The result only lasted a handful of issues before folding into Fleetway's other adult comic, Crisis, with the main legacy of Revolver being Peter Milligan's Rogan Gosh. 

The Dare strip was somewhat typical of the milieu of adult British comics of the period, dripping with heavy-handed but well meaning political allegory. Britain is under the yoke of unsubtle Thatcher parody Gloria Monday and her Unity party; Spacefleet has been privatised, the Treens have been subjugated and live on Earth as a hated underclass and a retired Dan Dare lives a life of empty privilege in London while people queue for food in the North. So this would be something of a bleak take, then.

For all its edginess and shock tactics the story is surprisingly readable. The plot concerns the mysterious death of Jocelyn Peabody after a spell working off-world on the new Manna miracle superfood at a time when Dare's patriotic image is being exploited by the government, and leads to an uneasy reunion with an embittered Digby,  now a leading Northern freedom fighter. 

If the script is occasionally clumsy the story is worth reading for Rian Hughes' angular artwork, a propaganda postcard from a future dystopia. The art is at its' very best in some of the story's more striking juxtapositions, notably the militant secret police using Frank Hampson ray guns that cause Steve Dillon damage. Like the first couple of books of Zenith, this is very much a story of its' time and in a way it's as outdated now as the fifties stuff. However, it's still a diverting and entertaining piece of work.

 Total File Size: 13.6MB