Space Travel’s In My Blood: DAN DARE ’78

This is a post in the series Discourse 2000, exploring 2000AD year by year and story by story. It contains spoilers for Dan Dare’s run in the comic.

Which Thrill? Dan Dare boldly goes where no pilot of the future has gone before, exploring the “Lost Worlds” with a crew of ne’er-do-wells.

A NEW TROPE

Dan Dare opened his second year in the middle of an epic – the longest continuous story, excepting Flesh, that 2000AD had run. Writer Gerry Finley-Day had spent a couple of months establishing a supporting cast of motley spacers for Dare, and now dropped them into the middle of what one might call a Star War, leading a rebellion against an evil Empire. Nobody would have imagined this was a coincidence.

Dare’s position in the comic was always one of symbolism and pragmatism. He was certainly a passion project for artist Dave Gibbons, a boyhood fan of the Eagle, but mostly Dan had been the hook the nascent comic needed to get press coverage (and perhaps loosen a few Dads’ wallets). He was also the most traditional sci-fi story in 2000AD. The idea of a coming wave of interest in sci-fi had been a key argument in getting IPC to launch the comic in the first place. Now, with the UK release of Star Wars in December 1977, the wave was about to break. Dan Dare stood ready.

The gap between the US and UK releases of Star Wars created an opportunity. Many of the 2000AD staff had seen previews over the summer of 1977, certainly including sub editor Nick Landau, who made regular transatlantic trips to SF and comics conventions in his other job as a distributor. Promo photos from the film were everywhere (including a very grimy looking “photo review” in 2000AD itself). Word of mouth was strong and getting stronger. Cinema audiences thrilled to the Star Wars trailer, and the hardest core of fans might even have got hold of imported copies of the Marvel Comics adaptation. 

So the Dare “Star Slayers” story exists in a weird limbo where it’s doing a crib of something most readers would know about but none of them would have seen. It’s a story that’s obviously “post-Star-Wars” in the sense that it wouldn’t exist without it, but it’s technically pre-Star-Wars in that it was about halfway through its run when the film’s wide UK release finally happened. By that point the most obviously derivative elements in the strip were fully established – “laser swords”, space battles and dogfights between ships; a colossal, round, killer satellite (with a separate superweapon called “Star” for good measure) and the helmeted “Dark Lord” ruling the Starslayer Empire from the planet Starslay and its dozen “slave worlds”.

Dan Dare has the honour of being one of the very first non-Star-Wars media to try and do Star Wars, and as such also has the honour of being one of the very first to get lots of important things wrong. The Star Slayers saga is the worst Dare story of its first couple of years, and the reasons illuminate why Star Wars was such a challenge for 2000AD to deal with.

For a start, Star Wars has a badly misleading title. Only in its closing act is it any kind of war story, with a heroic rookie pilot making a life or death raid to cripple the enemy’s war machine. Finley-Day’s Dare strips, though, are full of pitched battles. The basic structure of “Star Slayers” finds Dare moving from slave world to slave world, finding a demoralised population and inspiring them to heroic rebellion by some good old Dan Dare grit. It’s repetitive, and if you could bring yourself to take it seriously it might even be uncomfortable: does every alien race long for a gutsy human leader?

There is no Dan Dare equivalent in Star Wars, or anything near. The movie is the story of a farmboy becoming a hero and discovering his unique gift (with no freight of dynastic background at this stage), and as he discovers his place in the universe the viewers get to discover the wonders of that universe with him. Star Wars is a series of remarkable tonal shifts and visual reveals, each of them making the world wider and wilder for Luke and for us.

This isn’t just something Dan Dare couldn’t imitate. It’s something 2000AD itself was specifically created to be the opposite of. There is exactly one wide-eyed young rookie in the launch strips of 2000AD – the young time cowboy we meet in Flesh Episode 1. A few months later we see him becoming a meal for spiders. 2000AD is what I’ve called ‘Sweeney-Fi’ – science fiction about hard bastards and anti-heroes, rooted more in the dystopian SF of the ‘New Hollywood’ mid-70s than in the matinee vibe George Lucas wanted to capture. There was a place for that tradition in Star Wars too – Han Solo and Chewbacca are very much 2000AD characters when we first see them, except they’re gradually reshaped by the sheer force of the heroic narrative they find themselves in.

Star Wars, like American superhero comics, was at heart a heroic fantasy, though one with enough hinted-at texture and mystery and villainous charisma to lure in viewers who thought Luke was a bit of a sap. But heroic fantasy was what the entire Mills/Wagner/Finley-Day project had set itself against: plucky youngsters succeeding against the odds was the stuff of the Boy’s Own Paper, not Battle or Action. 70s kids wanted redder meat, until suddenly they apparently didn’t.

Star Wars could absorb 2000AD heroes: 2000AD could not yet assimilate Star Wars. Ironically, the closest Dan Dare ever came to matching Lucas was when Massimo Belardinelli was drawing it in early 1977, before anyone had seen the film. Belardinelli revelled in the fantastic side of space opera, drawing freaky aliens any Cantina would welcome into their Jizz ensemble. Gibbons, on the other hand, produces some of his least charismatic work on this phase of the strip – chunky, inelegant spaceships which look like they’re made from duplo blocks; aliens from mediocre B-movies; and a “Dark Lord” with a ludicrous helmet and joke shop moustache. “Star Slayers” ends up becoming the worst thing a Star Wars lift could be: charmless.  

That’s not to say Star Wars didn’t end up influencing 2000AD. The centre of gravity in visual science fiction shifted overnight: Star Wars eventually influenced everyone. What the Dan Dare strip proved is that the space operatic component of Star Wars wasn’t something 2000AD could successfully imitate and keep its tone intact. But Dan Dare had always been an awkward fit with that tone, and the rest of what made kids love Star Wars – weirdo aliens, a wild west galaxy, droids aplenty – could absolutely chime with the 2000AD way of doing things. Over the next couple of years we’ll see a far more successful post-Star-Wars style filter into the comic. “Star Slayers” stands as an awkward, failed, but necessary prototype. 

GALACTIC GOTHIC

Having made an intriguing try at being Star Wars before people really knew what Star Wars was, Dare switches back to its previous setting: being Star Trek instead. The original series of Star Trek found a basic structure for episodic science fiction that works extremely well. First the cast meets an exotic, dangerous or inexplicable situation, then a set of reveals or reversals uncover the true nature of the conflict, and finally we have a resolution.

The middle stretch of 2000AD’s Dan Dare borrows the format wholesale, though Trek has a fairly obvious advantage – even James T Kirk has more of a personality than Dare, not to mention the rest of his crew. So Star Trek stories gain an extra dimension from seeing how these particular people react to the strange worlds they find (and, of course, the worlds themselves can be engineered by writers to play off particular aspects of the crew’s personalities). But nobody reading Dan Dare is thinking “I wonder what Hitman and Bear will make of this”, and Dan has no character to speak of either, just a limitless fund of resourcefulness and determination.

Still, it’s unfair perhaps to criticise Dan Dare for what it isn’t, when his Trek mode does actually deliver entertaining stories. In the last Dare entry I talked about the first bits of the Finley-Day/Gibbons run, where the various pieces – tough guy characters, space opera hardware, whimsical plots – didn’t quite fit together. After the Starslayers story, Chris Lowder (writing as Jack Adrian) becomes the main scripter and the stories find more solid footing.

Lowder had been at IPC since the late-60s, one of the first fans to break into professional UK comics alongside his friend Steve Moore. By the time 2000AD launched he had a decade’s experience and a reputation for speed and reliability when other writers were having deadline trouble. A major writer for Action – the notorious Kids Rule OK was his strip, and he delighted in having Dredger shoot a priest – Lowder felt less affinity with science fiction but his versatility still means he has a rack of late 70s 2000AD credits.

Lowder’s take on Dare is an immediate step up after the starslayers sprawl, opening with a tight story where a floating space sarcophagus unleashes a body-stealing menace on Dare and his crew. Some of the improvement is simply down to Lowder taking more episodes to tell each story: in the opening “Lost Worlds” strips Finley-Day favoured two-partners, which don’t allow much more than a twist and resolution. Lowder’s are often twice as long, which creates a lot more room for the reader to feel like they’re exploring a planet and figuring it out at the same time Dare is.

Look at the 6-part “Garden Of Eden”, which has the same basic story to the 2-part Finley-Day one about the idyllic planet secretly run by vampires. Both tales telegraph strongly that the planet is a false paradise, but Lowder includes a lot more bizarre detail, at the expense of sense but not of entertainment. Why the carnivorous worm aliens disguise themselves as 17th Century pilgrims who were abducted by a UFO is open to question. But it makes for a great fake reveal while the wider background problem of their treachery bubbles away. It’s typical of Lowder’s work on the strips, which often recasts images from 20th century horror – zombie-like clones, undersea monstrosities, a morass of tentacles – in sci-fi dress.

The other thing Lowder gets right goes back to Dare’s initial success in 2000AD, when Belardinelli was providing the art. He gets that Dan Dare is the one regular 2000AD strip which can give readers a weekly dose of wildly alien visual weirdness, and he makes sure to pack his scripts with memorable things for Dave Gibbons to draw. Rotting vegetable duplicates of Dare and his crew! An ice pyramid the size of Everest! The mountainous Slurrg Mother – not the first terrifying maternal figure the 2000AD boys had served up. All of them with a fair chance to scorch the brain of the excited reader, even if the plots were borrowed from the SF pulps.

Not everything Gibbons cooks up is a success – it’s hard not to laugh when the script expects us to be terrified of the flying mouth “Snappers”. But his clean-lined, muscular style works well for Lowder’s well-paced storytelling. Dan Dare at this point is finally beginning to feel like an update of the old heroic figure, rather than a punky reaction against it. Whether that’s a good fit for 2000AD is open to serious question – by definition, Dare was always likely to feel like the most old fashioned thing in the comic, and under Lowder and Gibbons his adventures seem to have slipped back half a decade. 

But as we’ll see, by the spring of 1978 the comic badly needed a strip like this, an anchor that could serve up reliable adventure stories with strong art so Dredd didn’t have to carry the title alone. And despite the editorial team’s constant clashes with IPC management over content, the 2000AD of early 1978 was less radical than the comic that launched a year before. When I talked earlier in this post about how the “sweeney-fi” vision of 2000AD as a gritty action comic clashed with the more optimistic tone of Star Wars, I was being a little disingenuous. By the time Star Wars was released, 2000AD was already veering away from that concept.

The editorial team of Kelvin Gosnell and Nick Landau were firm comics and science fiction fans – the original concept of doing a sci-fi comic in the first place was Gosnell’s. But to run a sci-fi comic you need to answer the question, what is sci-fi? And more specifically: what kinds of sci-fi work best in a weekly, serial, visual format? Sweeney-fi had been an excellent, but idiosyncratic answer to that, born out of the skills Pat Mills and the initial writers honed on weekly war and action titles.

With 2000AD’s initial stories winding down, and Starlord’s chaotic launch meaning he suddenly had to fill two weekly sci-fi comics, Gosnell didn’t have the luxury of such a definable vision of what science fiction was. Maybe his own ideas were less radical too. In any case, the scramble for new stories from IPC’s stable of creators meant falling back on a more generic version of SF. And because comics are a visual medium, that meant not just Star Trek but the B-Movies of the 50s and 60s. The planetary romance of Dan Dare and Death Planet shared space with the pulp invasion and monster stories Colony Earth and Ant Wars. Dare had gone from being the odd man out in an aggressively 70s comic, to a reliable fixture in something which seemed far less brutally modern.

BUCCANEER BANZAI

But not for long. Dare had the pulling power (or more cynically, the grandparent recognition power) to secure an annual of his own in Autumn 1978, but it came just as he was losing his slot in the comic. When 2000AD and Starlord merged Dare took a break for several months, before returning in the spring for one last attempt to make a version that worked for 2000AD. His final two 1978 stories – the last of the Lowder/Gibbons work and a concluding all-hands-on-deck rush job mostly scripted by Nick Landau himself – are an unceremonious end to the Trek-influenced era, a poor reward for helping hold the comic together alongside Dredd for so long. Thirty issues before, Dare had been the regular cover star. Now he got the Inferno treatment – stories designed to bring his adventures to a brutal end, wiping out Finley-Day’s supporting cast to a man.

It’s doubtful anyone shed tears for “Pilot” Polanski, Hitman and the rest, and they do at least get moderately heroic death scenes – Bear, whose personality never developed beyond “big guy with a Russian accent”, gets to fight an actual space bear, which is more exciting than he probably deserved. Dare himself is left abandoned in space, ready to be picked up by some other creators. His peremptory treatment is likely another reflection of the tensions in the 2000AD office, where Landau – who had objected to the Dare story spilling onto the cover – was in control while Gosnell struggled with Star Lord. 

Landau didn’t have a lot of comics experience but he had a taste for edgier, more violent stories where twists and surprises counted for more than sense. His “Doomsday Machine” storyline (with Henry Miller and Roy Preston co-credited) is a narrative mess, full of arbitrary shifts in focus and story elements that go nowhere. And yet however technically incompetent the results are, there’s an intensity to this story of Dare exploring a colossal, abandoned spaceship, drawn by Trevor Goring and Garry Leach as full of shadows and ancient horrors. “The Doomsday Machine” reminds me of the earliest Dare in 2000AD, heavy on spectacle, but with a cosmic horror twist. Even as he throws around fannish in-jokes for the real heads (the lone survivor of an ancient race is called “Moebius”), Landau is at least trying to communicate the sense that a Dan Dare story could have stakes.

In the 75-year history of Dan Dare it’s unlikely many readers place the Lost Worlds ‘saga’ at the top of a favourite story list. But it has a place in that history. Whatever the contingencies of Dare’s arrival at 2000AD, whatever his exact role in that or any comic, Dan Dare the character is always a cipher key for Britishness; his origins as an expression of space-age British confidence linger. Even swinging fists in a pilot jacket he’s an imperial symbol, and his later comics history addresses that directly.

Lost Worlds doesn’t exactly, but the simple presence of Dare makes that a lens we should look at the story through. How does this incarnation of Dare relate to Empire? The exact political status of the Lost Worlds is deeply unclear, as are the precise objectives of Dare and his space fort. He’s being sent out to them officially, but with a crew of the discredited and criminal, under a flag of convenience, and his mission is – or turns out to be – a suicide run. 

Dare in these stories has a freebooter’s license, and his exploits hark back not to the Empire but to pre-Imperial Britain, casting Dare as a kind of Francis Drake of the stars, raiding and ultimately overthrowing a rival power while swashbuckling his way across perilous lands unknown, filling out the map of space. Like an Elizabethan buccaneer he faces mutiny and strife, with the final stories casting Dare as a driven martinet, leading his crew ultimately to death and disaster. But unlike Drake, Dare is denied a heroic ending to his grand adventure. The late 70s is no time for golden voyages, and in its chaotic, cynical finale this version of Dan Dare becomes one the era deserves.

HOW TO READ IT: These Dan Dare stories are split across two volumes of Dan Dare – The 2000AD Years. The Star Slayer epic is in Volume 1, and the Lowder and Landau stories are in Volume 2.

RECOMMENDED?: Star Slayer is for completists only, but there’s a couple of solid SF adventure strips in the Lowder run where Dave Gibbons gets to have more fun – try “Doppelganger” and “Garden Of Eden”.

NEXT PROG: Pat Mills and artist Trigo bring us a story which was slated for Prog 1 of 2000AD but dropped. Body horror, insanity and rage in the short but very intense The Visible Man.