Welcome to my fan blog about Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future!
Dan Dare
Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future was a science fiction adventure comic created by artist Frank Hampson for the British Eagle magazine in 1950. Space Pilot Dan Dare and his allies would have adventures on other planets and foil the plans of alien villains, including his arch-nemesis, emotionless super-scientist the Mekon. The artwork is beautiful, well ahead of its time and easily standing up alongside modern comics; the stories expertly balance weekly cliffhangers with satisfying long-term story arcs.
The original stories are obviously very dated now, both in a “charming retro rocket ships” sense and a “1950s British values” sense—although I'd argue that on the latter front they've aged better than one might assume.
The original Dan Dare was drawn by Hampson and a team of artists under his leadership until his departure 1959, and then continued by other writers and artists until the Eagle folded in 1969. Since then the character has been revived roughly once per decade, in wildly varying styles. As well as comics there have been radio dramas, home computer games, and an early 2000s CGI TV series. As I write this, a new comic version by Alex di Campi and Marc Laming is in the works after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
All of the 1950s stories and some of the 1960s ones have been reprinted in collected editions, most recently by Titan Books.
This Blog
I've been a fan of Dan Dare since I read the Hawk Books reprints of the original stories around 1990, when I was exactly the right age for them. I've returned to the stories periodically as an adult and have always found something new and interesting about them. I'm now an indie text-based game developer, and count Dan Dare as one of my major influences.
I'm writing this blog in part because I think there could be more Dan Dare fan sites out there, but mostly because one of the ways we grow as writers is to critically analyse things that influenced us, and I've decided to do that with these comics. I don't know if anything here rises to the level of literary analysis, but it might be of interest to other fans of Dan Dare or of sci-fi comics generally. Note that I'm a writer rather than an artist, so although I can appreciate the artwork, my commentaries will mostly be from a writing point of view.
My commentaries are of course subjective, and I'm sure other Dan Dare fans will disagree with some of them, but I'll try to write the blog in such a way as to distinguish factual information from my opinions.
The spaceship Kingfisher is the ship we see on the launch ramp in the very first panel. I choose it as the name of this blog because I wanted to call it something other than “John's Dan Dare nerd blog” and it's the first thing I thought of.
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A recurring theme in several Dan Dare stories is the danger of surrendering part of your humanity to machines. Absolutely no generative AI is used in the creation of this blog.
Dan Dare is copyright © Dan Dare Corporation