For many of us outside the United Kingdom, the comic series "Dan Dare" is mainly known for its influences on British rock. Pink Floyd, Bowie and Elton John have all included lyrical refs to the character, while the punk band Mekons memorably took their name from the sci-fi series' primary villain. Yet for many young UK readers in the fifties and sixties, Frank Hampson's "Dan Dare" was a major gateway into science fiction. Serialized in the weekly comic Eagle from 1950 to '67, the series recounts the adventures of the "Pilot of the Future" and his friends, most notably his rotund batman Digby and the inevitable nosy boy tagalong (Flamer, so named for his red hair, not any theatrical behaviors).

Dare's gosh-wow adventures, set in the far-off world of 1997, were serialized in two-page chunks in Eagle, with storylines lasting up to a year. While Hampson's strips were clearly aimed at a kid audience ("Golly!" and "Crumbs!" are the most intense interjections uttered in the strip), they were complex enough to engage older readers, while the art (courtesy of Hampson and a studio known as the Old Bakehouse) was meticulously detailed in its renderings of a futuristic Britain. (Hampson reportedly had scale models of many of the ships and cities built so they could be used as references in the actual artwork.) Beautifully realized and colored, the Dare strips are a pleasure just to pore over by themselves.

Titan Books has been reprinting these classic strips in handsome hardbound editions over the last few years, and their latest reissue, The Phantom Fleet, captures Hampson's penultimate Dan Dare adventure. (He left the series in 1959.) The story centers on two aquatic alien races, the Cosmodes and the Pescods, who come to Earth from a "system beyond Earth's scientific knowledge" after their own planet I-Cos starts drying out. The Cosmodes, who are shrimpy enough to stand on an adult human's hand, appear to be friendly, while the larger-sized Pescods are right bastards from the get-go. Utilizing a vaporized acid called the Crimson Death, they plan to conquer Earth and make its oceans their home.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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