A New Career In A New Town: DAN DARE

This is a part of Discourse 2000, a blog looking at 2000AD story-by-story. It will include spoilers for all stories under discussion.

WHICH THRILL? Dan Dare was the “Pilot Of The Future”, now woken from suspended animation to battle alien evil in the 23rd Century.

OUT OF TIME

The first thing you see in a 2000AD story is an icon of the British future under fire. The Post Office Tower, a sleek, slim, confident symbol of the “white heat of technology” opened in 1965. 34 years on it’s dying, blitzed by the Volgan paratroopers who are ending Britain as readers knew it. A few pages later, a woman Prime Minister is executed: “Shirley Brown” is a clear lookalike for Opposition leader Margaret Thatcher. By the end of Invasion!, the sole barrier between your family and tyranny is Bill Savage, a lorry driver with a shotgun. It’s the perfect introduction to the 2000AD creator Pat Mills envisaged – a futuristic comic that drew its energy from the forces shaping the present: violence, technology, power and class.

But Invasion is not the headline story in 2000AD. The cover of Prog 1 is dominated by the free gift of a “Space Spinner” frisbee, the latest bit of plastic tat that publishers IPC traditionally used to pull in readers and get a new launch off to a strong start. At the centre of the spinner you see a little green head – this is Tharg, 2000AD’s alien editor. In the tiny gaps left around the edges of the toy there’s room for a couple of story trailers (“STOP PRESS: GREAT BRITAIN INVADED”). And top billing goes to “The New Dan Dare”.

Dan Dare is a marquee name alright, a venerable one at this stage, 27 Earth Years old. He’s your Dad’s space hero, his endless tussles with The Mekon the star attraction of a generation-old, long-cancelled comic that was founded by a vicar to mix education and excitement. Violence and power are not Dan Dare’s direct concerns, and as for class? He and Bill Savage might not quite see eye to eye. What on Mars is he doing in 2000AD?

Hold that thought, Earthlet Reader, while we do the intro.

WON’T IT BE STRANGE WHEN WE’RE ALL FULLY GROWN?

History is written by the winners, and 2000AD has comprehensively won the history of British adventure comics. By the year 2000 it was the last man standing from a once-thriving industry of boys’ adventure titles, even if it was dragging itself half-dead over its own dateline, like Judge Dredd at the end of “The Cursed Earth”. 24 years on – more than half its history! – and not only does ‘the Prog’ endure with uncanny stability, but 2000AD’s publisher Rebellion exists as a kind of British comics Valhalla, preserving, reissuing and refreshing properties from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Like Dennis The Menace turning into his own Dad, 2000AD has gone from the bratty upstart of UK comics to the responsible custodian of their legacy.

2000AD’s central place in British comics now means its early history comes with plenty of myth and awe and teleology. It’s a hell of a story, and it’s had some marvellous tellers: British comics creators are a talkative, opinionated bunch. As the tale of 2000AD gets repeated and retold, there’s an understandable tendency to reduce it to a series of high points – legendary strips and characters which can still thrill readers today. There’s also the lure of an easy fit with other storied parts of British pop culture – 2000AD as a comics version of punk rock, which in this telling means a revolutionary break point from what had gone before.

Neither of these ideas are wrong, but they’re simplifications. 2000AD was a genuine break alright, but also a comic that built on and in fact compromised with its immediate predecessors. Dredd, Nemesis, Halo Jones et al. are the comic’s formative high points but they shared Prog space with dozens of other strips, which often tell you as much or more about the comic, its readers and the place and time it came out of. The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic soared higher than a space spinner on launch in February 1977, but it was also, for most of its first few years, at constant risk of absorption, cancellation, censorship and a dozen management whims.

I’ve wanted to write about 2000AD for years. It means a lot to me. It means a lot to most British comics readers of my age and a fair spread of years around that, I’d guess. A lot of my aesthetic sensibilities, in comics and frankly beyond them, are rooted in what 2000AD did to me at a tender age. Acquire a taste for thrill-power when your brain is young and open and it never really leaves. This blog is my attempt to do right by the comic.

Its format is simple. I’m not a historian in the archival, dates and interviews and reconciling sources sense. This is a critical history of 2000AD, in that I’m arranging its entries so they tell a roughly chronological story – but the emphasis is on criticism, which means I’m more interested in what appeared in the Prog than the details of how it got there. 

But I’m interested in everything that appeared. Each entry will look at a different strip; each strip will get its own entry. I’m taking 2000AD a year at a time, aiming to cover the first 10 years at least, and long-running features with multiple stories (most obviously Judge Dredd) will get an entry for each year. But something like Inferno, which starts in 1977 and runs into 1978, will only get the one write-up. Sometimes the entries will stick closely to a discussion of the strip; sometimes they’ll range more widely. Britain in the late 70s and early 80s was a volatile, exciting place, even as it was also tacky, venal, and nasty. There’s a lot going on.

The adults who made and managed 2000AD had fiery opinions on the comic (and on Britain), not always matching. Pat Mills’ originating vision of 2000AD as a comic with aggressive, anti-authoritarian working class heroes and visceral action stories is at the heart of the comics’ development, and alongside mordant Scots satirist John Wagner and war story specialist Gerry Finley-Day his voice drives the early comic. But there are other, competing, visions that emerge over time. Science fiction itself is changing rapidly in the late 70s, and so is SF fandom, and that more fannish perspective pushes the Prog along too. As the comic begins to settle into its niche, it attracts older, hipper readers – much as early Marvel did in 1960s America – and it also lures writers more attuned to that sensibility, like Sounds cartoonist Alan Moore.

Set against that are the ways 2000AD was in continuity with the rest of the British comics industry, particularly its parent, publishing giant IPC. It gradually attracts a golden generation of radical, individual British artists, but a lot of its early look is defined by Spanish and Italian creators, who found work across the IPC range, drawing war stories, sports yarns, tales of romance. As with the Brits, 2000AD rewarded – in a reader popularity sense more than an economic one – the most individual European visions. The comic is unimaginable without Carlos Ezquerra or Massimo Belardinelli’s work.

The writers, too, included many old IPC hands alongside Mills and company – sports specialist Tom Tully, for instance, or Malcolm Shaw, whose great gift was for fantastic melodrama on IPC’s girls’ titles. Meanwhile IPC management had very different ideas about what comics were and should be than anyone in the 2000AD offices. John Sanders, Mills’ boss, became a staunch admirer of Thatcher, particularly when it came to Trades Unions.

All these are topics we’ll return to. The broader point is that what 2000AD is, what comics are, and what science fiction is are ideas in constant flux, and for me, the way you understand those things is by looking at what makes it to the page, and trying to take those stories on their own terms, the failures as well as the successes.

One broader possible failure before we get back to Dan Dare. Every name I’ve mentioned so far in this blog is a white bloke. This will largely continue to be the case. If you come to British comics after looking at, say, British pop music of the same era, 2000AD seems ferociously un-diverse. This is a bit less true on the page, even if IPC’s strict publishing gender division meant a glaring lack of women characters. But IPC had strips with Black heroes, though they tended to be sports stories, and 2000AD was no exception to this. 

Even behind the scenes, 2000AD wasn’t entirely a white boys’ club. Recent excavators of 2000AD history have done extremely valuable work to restore the fame and raise the profiles of the first women to work on the comic. Jan Shepheard, for instance, made immense behind the scenes contributions to the look of early 2000AD as an early designer and art editor (she created Judge Dredd’s craggy logo, among other things). 

But appearances aren’t that deceptive.  Long-serving editor Steve MacManus tells a story of how he was awed to meet Julie Burchill in a lift: he wanted to introduce himself, but alas was wearing the Tharg outfit. It’s a funny story, but it makes you realise that 2000AD, unlike the music press, never had a Julie Burchill or a Caroline Coon or a Chrissie Hynde. In the specific case of Burchill maybe that’s no bad thing given her career since – but this is a major way in which the other cultural comparisons you might want to make to 2000AD don’t stack up. Punk rock had Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Ari Up among its creative forces; alternative comedy had Dawn French and Lenny Henry. Those scenes were hardly perfect but the British comics industry was much less integrated: in this sense, comparisons like the punk one are 2000AD flattering itself.

I don’t want to single 2000AD out here – it reflected its industry, and its industry would not even have framed this as a problem (IPC girls’ comics were often, if not mostly, written and drawn by uncredited white guys too; early female Marvel UK editors were made to assume male pen names). Attempts to change were undermined by management anyway – Deirdre Vine became assistant editor of 2000AD early on in 1977 but was quickly reassigned to girls’ photo-strip paper My Guy. So I’m not going to hammer on this point every entry, but I wanted to make it upfront. 2000AD is and was a tremendous achievement. But one of the things it managed was to introduce fresh voices and perspectives into comics, and from that angle its lack of diversity on most axes is a real shame – it changed so much; maybe it could have changed even more.

BIRD OF PRAY

Dan Dare was a figure from a previous revolutionary era in British comics. Every new cycle of titles designed for mass appeal to boy readers builds on and reacts against the previous one – Eagle, Dan Dare’s home, was no exception. The model Eagle was pushing back on was the boys’ story paper, which mixed illustrated stories of Imperial pluck with educational and uplifting features. Invented by the Boys Own Paper in the late 19th century, this format was modernised by DC Thomson’s story papers in the 1930s – Rover, Hotspur, and others. By the 1950s, they dominated.

Eagle was a simultaneous step back and forward. Back, in that it was as explicitly didactic and Christian as the BOP ever had been, even if the vision was of a newer, muscular and relatable Christianity. But forward, in that Eagle was an actual comic, with unrivalled production values, meticulous story research and astonishingly high quality art. Founder Rev. Marcus Morris played up the respectable Christian angle to get it past concerned parents, but the contents sold themselves – particularly Frank Hampson’s gorgeous, clean-lined Dan Dare. Morris talked about how American horror comics had woken him to the potential of something more high-minded, but Eagle’s obvious contemporaries lay across the channel, with Spirou and Tintin magazine. Eagle’s luxuriant size and paper quality, its deft, detailed, illustration-standard cartooning and its balance of humour and adventure made it the UK’s answer to Tintin, with Hampson as its Herge.

Eagle was a landmark. It was also, according to 2000AD legends Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore, “the dullest comic in Christendom”. The art of Hampson, and later Frank Bellamy, won deserved respect. But Eagle as a whole was, as Moore and O’Neill said, “middle class”, vicarish in its bones. As for Dan Dare itself, Elizabeth Sandifer, whose TARDIS Eruditorum is an obvious inspiration for this blog, has suggested that all space opera is rooted in imperialist fantasies, whether it endorses them or critiques them. This is certainly true of Dan Dare, born from the already collapsing Space Age dreams of a country struggling to wake up to the fact that it simply couldn’t afford to be important any more. (The struggle continues). Dare’s star-straddling Space Fleet is in sharp contrast to the cycle of bold plans followed by discreet, red-faced cancellations that make up the real 50s and 60s British rocket program. 

The last of these space projects was quietly put down in 1971, by which time Eagle had already gone to Earth. By now an IPC title, it was merged in 1969 with Lion, a couple of features from the old comic continuing to the new, as was the way of these forced marriages. Dan Dare, already reduced to a reprint, did not make the cut.

All this makes Dare’s headline status in 2000AD eight years later even odder. But the generation who’d grown up on him were culturally prominent now. Elton John recorded an ode to Dan on a 1975 album. The same year saw talk begin of a movie, which would rumble on for years, but influenced IPC’s willingness to bring the character back. One thing that comes across, though, is that while management were excited enough to tease a Dan Dare revival to the fan press in 1976, the creative team on 2000AD were a little lukewarm about his return. Some were actively unhappy – Kevin O’Neill dismissed Dare as being for “middle-aged Dads” – but most creators talk about him more with regret than resentment. Mills and others describe returning to the old Eagle strips not expecting much and being struck by how good Hampson’ and Bellamy’s stuff really was. But while they gave it several good shots with top talent, a feeling lingered that no, he really didn’t fit with 2000AD, especially as the new title started to build an identity of its own. 

STAR WHYS

But while 2000AD might not have wanted Dan Dare, it needed him. There were three reasons: the first is a negative one, but still important. As we’ll talk about in later write-ups, 2000AD’s radicalism co-exists with an atmosphere of intense caution at IPC. For one thing, IPC  management were far from convinced a science-fiction comic was a good bet. More importantly, the company had just dealt with bad publicity and censorious attention around 2000AD’s brashly violent predecessor, Action, and the new comic involved most of the same people. A big, safe name who parents might remember with fondness was at least some insurance against fiasco.

The second reason is that Dan Dare filled a real and crucial gap in the comic’s line-up. Ask people in 1977 what science fiction meant to them, and you’d most likely get replies about robots, aliens, spaceships, and time travel. There’s a time travel story in the launch Prog, but it’s more of a dinosaur one. But otherwise, there’s future war, future sport and future spies – all the IPC boys’ comics standbys, with a light sci-fi spin. Dan Dare is the only strip in 2000AD which is giving kids space, and aliens, and other planets. It’s the most visible sci-fi story in a sci-fi comic. The need for these elements will become more acute once Britain goes Star Wars crazy in 1978, but even by 2000AD’s launch in February 1977 hype around the film based on pre-release images is building. Dan Dare gets its first, none too subtle, mention of a Star War on the cover of April’s Prog 8: by his second story he’s picked up a shaggy humanoid companion with a “laser sword”, and as 1977 ends he’s using it on an evil Empire.

And the third reason 2000AD needed Dan Dare is Massimo Belardinelli.

Probably Pat Mills’ single best and most consequential decision in developing 2000AD was to move from the standard 3-page story lengths to 5 or 6. Fewer stories, longer episodes. This eventually allowed for greater depth of storytelling, should writers want it, but that wasn’t the point. The extra length was more a blessing for the artists: it meant they could stretch out, with half- and full-page panels to make the comic visually explode. And on the full-colour centre pages – the most valuable real estate in the Prog – artists were set free to design really eye-popping two page wide spreads.

Belardinelli understood the assignment, providing the first ever 2000AD with an incredible piece of work. A spaceship dominates Dare’s opening centre-spread: a vast cylindrical freighter running into desperate trouble in Jupiter orbit, as tendrils of energy reach up from the red spot of the planet, seeking to pull the ship down. Belardinelli draws space as full, a cosmic soup of weird energy, galactic filaments and stellar nimbuses lighting up the crowded spaceways. The colouring on the spread mixes solar yellow, eerie metallic blue and lashings of angry alien red, the shading on Dare’s crew shifting blue to red as they come within range of the planet’s malign power. Dare himself is seen inverted, falling between panels as he’s drawn into the Red Spot.

Belardinelli would become a mainstay of 2000AD until the end of the 80s. He cut his teeth in Italy at Studio Rosi, working on soft-porn horror and crime comics called things like Jacula. As part of a studio, he didn’t get individual credit – I’ve looked at the examples I can find online of Jacula pages, hunting for telltale Belardinelli poses; the round faces staring straight to camera; the straight limbs with sharp-angled joints. I can’t find any. It’s possible his anatomic idiosyncrasies developed later, as he leaned more into the side of his art that won him most fame and fondness in the UK: his rubbery, freakish, thoroughly alien creatures and his chunky, imposing, often battered space vehicles.

That first spread, just on its own, is a manifesto for the new comic – a statement, just as plain as anything in the 1950 Eagle, that this comic is bringing you things you simply cannot get anywhere else. Week after week, Belardinelli is able to cut loose on the centre pages – at this point he’s the only artist in the paper getting an on-page credit. The berserk tempo of Pat Mills’ and Kelvin Gosnell’s initial 11-part story seems mostly driven by the opportunity to give Belardinelli something new and insane to draw every week. The Red Spot coming to life! Dare hijacking a ship commanded by a Martian! The gloopily insectoid Shepherd aliens and their slug-like masters the Biogs! We’re still only halfway through, with a full-scale space war, an all-devouring mothership and a kamikaze plunge into the sun to come. With that story done, Belardinelli delivers yet another all-timer – a vertical double spread of Dan’s return to a 21st century London transformed into a verdant alien tourist spot.

There’s a lot to admire about the other launch strips in 2000AD in terms of concept and plot, but Dan Dare is where the new comic most fully delivers visually on the promise of thrill-power; Belardinelli’s psychedelic science-fantasy visions (allied to much tighter storytelling than he’s often given credit for) are like nothing a British kid could have bought prior to February 1977. Not all said kids appreciated this bounty: Belardinelli was always a divisive illustrator. His stylised, slightly stiff human anatomy works best as a contrast to the madness of his bulbous, misshapen, tentacular, comical alien bodies, but those bodies also faced criticism, as there’s always a disdain for representation which chafed with the more serious SF fan. Belardinelli’s art is spectacular, inventive, often gross and funny (the artist he reminds me most of is Basil Wolverton). His alien visions were so visceral an office rumour held he spent his evenings dissecting stray cats to get inspiration for the hideous biogs. But while his art can be as grand and cinematic as post-Star Wars tastes demanded, its grotesque, organic flavour was a harder sell for readers who wanted some level of illustrative realism.

THE DAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

Mills’ and Gosnell’s writing for Dare successfully bombards the reader with new ideas and wild visions every week, always giving their artist bizarre new things to draw. This means it’s badly served by collections, as it’s so breathless it can be exhausting – an issue shared with most of these early stories, which were never designed for collected reading. But the breakneck pace disguises a deeper problem: Dan Dare’s debut is all icing, no cake, dazzling events happening to a central character with no purpose. 

The strip as executed – dizzying alien adventure – fills a vital niche in the comic; but it’s almost nothing to do with Dan Dare as was. Mills opts for a scorched-Earth approach, ditching Spacefleet, loyal companions Digby and Professor Peabody, and really everything bar the Mekon, who shows up a few months in. All that’s left is the name, but the name actually holds back the strip from having much of an identity. Everyone else in 2000AD has a direction you get right away – MACH 1 and Dredd have jobs; Harlem Heroes and Bill Savage have an impossible goal; in Flesh the entire world of the comic is tilted towards a coming conflagration. But what’s the point of Dan Dare, other than to be Dan Dare? Who is this guy?

Mills has two possible answers for this, but before we get there it’s worth thinking about what he couldn’t do with Dare, because it fills in more of the lines around what 2000AD was. Mills didn’t just want to do a traditionalist Dare – the first set of pages he got in, from an unnamed Argentine artist, is detailed and cleanly laid out, with hardware extrapolated from real-world moon and space missions. But if a traditional space-adventure Dare still appealed to kids, Eagle wouldn’t have been axed the year men landed on the moon.

At the same time, there’s no way an iconoclastic Dare would have worked. By 1990 a dark, impotent version of Dare, drawn in poignant mockery of Hampson’s clean lines by Rian Hughes, would seem an obvious way to launch a new, adult British comic (the ill-fated Revolver). But it’s equally obvious this was never on the cards for the 2000AD version, firstly because the revisionist and fan-centric trends which allowed for treatments like that weren’t in place, but secondly because 2000AD was never an iconoclastic comic. With one exception – which we’ll get to in the Tharg post – its relationship to the boys’ comic landscape of the 70s, and to the rest of IPC, was impatient and sometimes contemptuous, but not adversarial. Mills, O’Neill, Gosnell et al knew they were creating something better than Tiger or Valiant, but they were no more hostile to them on the page than The Beatles were to, say, Frank Ifield. The objective was to create something relevant and exciting and fresh – any critique of what came before was strictly implicit.

So Mills had two solid ideas about how to make Dan Dare work in 1977. The first is to borrow Buck Rogers’ and Captain America’s origin story – we’re two years off Rogers actually showing up on screens again – and make Dare a man out of time, a 20th Century guy in a 22nd Century world. This cuts him off from the iconography of the old series and gives him a source of conflict, in the one-man-against-the-system mode Mills loved – Dan’s no-nonsense ways rub up against the complacent bureaucracy of the 22nd Century.

The problem is that the stories are so packed there’s barely time to establish this background – it’s not even mentioned in the opening episode, only in a data page at the front of the comic. And there’s no real space for the texture of the 22nd century to come to life – Dare may say stuff like “Meet a 20th Century weapon – it’s called FIST!” but it’s not like the 22nd century, with its instant-kill “mole guns” is any less of a violent place. There’s an unnamed bureaucrat who obviously has it in for Dare, court-martialling him after he saves the Solar System (ain’t it always the way?) but he’s transparently a device to make Dare a free agent by the end of the first story. And Dan is certainly tougher than the Star Trek derived spaceship crew he hooks up with for the main plot, but that’s mostly just because he’s a Pat Mills hero and that’s the contrast Mills liked to draw at this stage. The result is the wildest visuals and ideas in the earliest Progs, but backing up the most generic action (or indeed Action) hero.

Could there have been another way? Probably not – as we’ll see in 1978, the meteor that was Star Wars was about to hit science fiction, irreversibly deforming expectations of what a space adventure story was. But one possibility lies in the second way Mills tried to make Dan Dare distinctive, the way the new Dare is separated visually from his Dad-friendly predecessor: Belardinelli was told to make him look like David Bowie.

Now, there are conflicting accounts of how much this was actually followed up, and certainly readers coming new to 2000AD’s Dare don’t all go “aha! David Bowie!”. For one thing, you can reasonably ask “which Bowie?” The skeletal, cocaine-and-milk-fed David of 1976 isn’t out there punching Biogs, but there’s something of glam-era Bowie in the haughty, slim-faced Dare we see from Belardinelli – check the final panel of his first strip, in which Dare has a date with the sole woman supporting character in those first Progs (coincidentally or not, she’s called Ziggy).

The Bowie connection is intriguing because it’s a reminder that science fiction in the 70s had guises beyond what was obvious from film and TV. As an SF figure, Bowie feels strongly aligned to the New Wave – The Man Who Fell To Earth is an alien-as-alienation study; Diamond Dogs and Ziggy Stardust imagine glam apocalypses, sex and fandom as proper subjects for speculative pop; “the papers want to know whose shirts you wear” is a wonderfully Ballardian one-liner in a bleak New Wave short story.

2000AD, as Mills envisaged it, vigorous, populist and action-packed, was not best placed to engage with the self-consciously modernist New Wave. The closest the comic came at launch was Michael Moorcock writing to the Guardian to complain about it. But it was hardly aligned to traditional, Golden Age, science fiction either. And if the in-your-face tone of the stories wasn’t likely to excite adult SF fans, some of the settings and content was a lot more intriguing: time travel as a satire of capitalist exploitation in Flesh, or the fully mediated dystopia of Mega-City One, concrete islands and high rises and all. Dare-as-Bowie was a red herring, but it was a reminder of possibilities beyond the adventure strip, beyond even Star Wars. The New Wave is a door left tantalisingly ajar.

ANOTHER TREEN WORLD

Belardinelli would have drawn the hell out of fleas the size of rats and rats the size of cats but his actual next assignment was rather more obvious: the Mekon. As soon as 2000AD launched with Dan Dare returning, a Mekon story was inevitable. No need for a makeover here – Frank Hampson’s design for the villain is unimpeachable. But conceptually, while Dan Dare has adjusted to a violent new future (so much so that the conceit of his jump forward in time is barely mentioned again), the Mekon feels an uncomfortable addition. Like Dare himself, the Mekon has lost his original entourage – Venus and the Treens are long gone. Instead incoming writer Steve Moore wastes no time in pairing him off with a second antagonist, two-bodied warlord the Two Of Verath. Moore and Belardinelli seem far keener on their creation than on Hampson’s, who gets almost no memorable scenes and is fooled repeatedly by the feeblest of ruses. Even his reunion with the hated Dare is a damp squib, pointing up the change in the hero’s looks: the Mekon can’t actually recognise him.

Understanding why the Mekon doesn’t work in 2000AD’s take on Dan Dare illuminates something about 2000AD as a whole. The comic’s early style is ultra-tough characters and a furious pace of invention – something new in almost every story, every week. This combination means there’s very room for recurring villains, let alone an arch-nemesis, because when 2000AD protagonists get the opportunity, they make sure the bad guy won’t be coming back. The logic of the Mekon – an enemy who can return again and again to menace the galaxy – fits with American super-hero comics, not this violent new world. Dare and allies are molecularising anyone who gets in their way and sucking whole space fleets into the sun: why are they going to spare one scrawny dude who lives in a bowl? Even in 2000AD, the Mekon can’t be killed off, but he can be – and is – thoroughly humiliated over the course of Steve Moore’s story. 

But Dan’s victory is a pyrrhic one: with the Mekon vanquished, the strip takes its first break and comes back with its first major change of direction, less than 6 months into the new comic’s life. Gerry Finley-Day takes over as writer, and Belardinelli, whose art had lost some of its spark by the end of the Mekon saga, changes places with Dave Gibbons; the Italian going to Harlem Heroes sequel Inferno and the Heroes’ British artist taking on Dan Dare.

In theory it’s a great match, and it was something of a dream assignment for Gibbons, one of the few 2000AD creators who really liked and cared about the character. He drops the lanky Bowie element right away, styling Dare somewhere between the clean-cut hero of 50s Spacefleet and a beefed-up 70s action brawler. In comparison to Belardinelli’s psychedelic sci-fi visions, Dare and his supporting cast are aggressively unfuturistic, the kind of toughs you might see hanging around a boxing gym. Dare wears a donkey jacket, and looks more like he’s negotiating a tricky Isthmian League Cup tie than the far reaches of the galaxy.

As we’ll see, Finley-Day had been doing sterling episodic work on Invasion. His big idea for the strip is to send Dare on a Star Trek style exploratory mission but with a hand picked crew of violent rogues, all won over to Dare’s side by, in essence, him being harder than they are. These characters aren’t particularly interesting, and you feel Finley-Day hasn’t exactly stretched himself in their creation – there’s a pilot called Pilot, for instance. But it’s a viable structure for the tough-guy Dare the comic is still looking for.

I’ll talk more about Gibbons himself in the Harlem Heroes post and his Dan Dare run in the 1978 blogs, as it’s the 2000AD strip where the influence of Star Wars is most quickly and obviously felt. But it’s obvious early on that something’s not clicking. Gibbons’ work looks great, of course, but Finley-Day’s stories don’t try to take advantage of the hard SF edge the artist is bringing, and they don’t even follow on from the writer’s own hardmen-of-space set-up (Dare’s supporting cast quickly blend into a mass). Instead he gives us whimsical shorts that feel more like the Future Shocks the comic had begun to run, like a planet of vampires who invite Dare to a fairytale feast.

With a mismatch of concept, script and art, 2000AD’s supposed flagship strip heads for the end of its first year as something of a mess, badly in need of firmer direction. But it had done its job, giving respectable cover to the comic as it launched and found its own identity and footing, and giving early readers eye-popping visions courtesy of Belardinelli. Dare is no classic, and feels increasingly out of place as the comic develops, but it’s the booster rocket that got early 2000AD off the launchpad. This version of Dare is recognisable now as a typical anti-authoritarian 2000AD hero, but putting one into a psychedelic space opera didn’t click. To understand how this type of character worked – and why the comic caught on – we need to go back to that besieged Post Office Tower, and see one in his more natural environment.

HOW TO READ IT: The stories I’m talking about appear in Prog 1 to Prog 35. These are all collected in Dan Dare: The 2000AD Years Vol 1 available digitally from the 2000AD webshop.

RECOMMENDED? If you’re going to read any of these, the first Belardinelli story (Progs 1-11) is the one to go for, mostly for the cosmic madness of his centre-spreads.

NEXT PROG! Bill Savage takes on the FILTHY VOLGS in Invasion!, the launch strip that defines 2000AD’s distinctive style. Shotguns! Women’s wrestling! The Russian Embassy!

Dan Dare (c) The Dan Dare Corporation plc. 2000AD (c) Rebellion