The Parent of Modern Comics?

Some will disagree (and they have every right to do so, even if they’re wrong) but it seems to me that the first mass-market comic that really understood its readers without patronising them was Eagle.

First published in on April 14, 1950, at a price of three pence (equivalent to about US$192.72 in modern money, probably), Eagle was a boys’ magazine that featured quite a few comic strips, so it qualifies as a comic by all reasonable standards. (Leonia and I had a debate about this sort of thing yesterday, after she listed Jackie as one of the many girls’ comics she’d read in her formative years. I took the position that only a title that features more pages of comic-strips than pages of articles counts as a comic. Leonia counter-argued that she was right. That settled the matter quite neatly.)

Most of the fondly-remembered comic strips from Eagle are fondly remembered by people who never actually read them. People who did read them generally only remember “Dan Dare.” There’s a reason for that: “Dan Dare” was genuinely good stuff.

The majority of the other material in Eagle… is interesting. It’s not terrible, but it wasn’t ground-breaking either. Wikipedia lists about twenty-seven adventure strips, humour strips, two literary adaptations, nine biographical strips, four Bible stories, and one reprint of a Tintin adventure (“King Ottokar’s Sceptre”). Yes, I did say “Bible stories” – Eagle, you see, was created by Marcus Morris, a vicar who realised that then-current comics weren’t giving the readers a positive message, and, being a clergyman, he had very much his own ideas of what constituted the right sort of message.

The flagship character, Dan Dare, was originally conceived as a chaplain in the Space Fleet, but somewhere along the way it became clear that the only way to keep that particular lead balloon afloat would be to make the character a pilot instead.

In some ways “Dan Dare” is rather dated now, of course, but it’s weathered the passing decades a lot better than pretty much any other comic of its era. Chiefly, this is because the writers had a good grasp of both science and fiction (always handy if you’re writing a science fiction strip), and because the artwork was stunning. And so was the printing, come to think of it. All that great artwork wouldn’t have looked nearly as attractive if the publishers hadn’t stumped up the cash for top-quality paper and printing.

The first writer / artist on “Dan Dare” – and consequently the man most closely associated with the strip – was Frank Hampson. Though he later employed a small army of apprentices to work on backgrounds and so forth, Hampson brought the then-future year of 1999 to life with his meticulous draughtsmanship, well-crafted characters, and smart, long-running tales.

Other artists who worked on the strip over the nineteen years of Eagle’s run include Harold Johns, Don Harley, Bruce Cornwell, Greta Tomlinson and Keith Watson, but the one that stands out most for me is Frank Bellamy. He drew the page above. Gorgeous, isn’t it? But it’s still not as gorgeous as page two of the same story…

This is why Frank Bellamy is one of the greats! It’s also a great example of why Dan Dare, sixty-four years after he first appeared, is still a classic character.

Eagle folded its wings in 1969, but a mere eight years later Dan Dare was revived for a new generation (literally) in the first issue of 2000AD – my own first exposure to the character. Though at first this new version was Dan Dare in name only, I absolutely loved it.

Dare didn’t survive 2000AD’s merger with Tornado in 1979, but three years later another version of the character appeared in the revived Eagle comic, this one a lot closer in look and feel to the original.

In 1990 the original character was revisited in the short-lived adult-oriented comic Revolver, though that version was pretty much ignored in the seven-issue Virgin comics run in 2008.

Dan Dare also appears in new adventures in Spaceship Away, a still-running magazine that’s devoted to the original character and is well worth a look.

But getting back to Eagle… Aside from Dan Dare and a large assortment of mostly unmemorable other strips, the comic’s strongest legacy is the legion of top creators who were inspired by it as children. They grew up with the understanding that quality and passion will endure, and that comics are not for kids any more than television is for kids: comics are a medium, not a genre.