Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Absoluite, alex de campi, dan dare, james gunn, marc laming, ultimate

Dan Dare Returning As "Absolute, Ultimate, James Gunn's Superman"

Dan Dare is returning as "Absolute, Ultimate, James Gunn's Superman" from Alex De Campi and Marc Laming

Bleeding Cool previously mentioned that Rogue Trooper, Grindhouse, Blade Runner, and Judge Dredd writer Alex DeCampi, and American Century, Flash Gordon, Red Sonja, Star Trek, and James Bond artist Marc Laming were bringing back British sci-fi hero Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, in a new series of graphic novels. Their new project, Dan Dare: First Contact, the launch of a planned trilogy published by B7 Comics, isn't a recreation of the original fifties classic, nor a grim and gritty cynical update, but an attempt to recapture the optimistic, high-stakes space adventure for today's readers. And on a recent Word Balloon podcast with John Siuntres, Alex De Campi spelt it out directly, comparing it to James Gunn's Superman, also DC's Absolute and Marvel's Ultimate line, having just met their goal on Kickstarter.

"I'd always been a big fan of Dan Dare, and I moved house about a year ago. So I was unpacking the books, triaging which ones I wanted to keep and which ones I wanted to put away. And also just sitting in the middle of the floor reading books because that's what happens. And I pulled out some old Eagle compendiums and started flipping through Dan Dare and was just like, "God, this is so good." Like, why hasn't anyone done a kind of James Gun Superman style version of Dan Dare?"

"There have been several reinventions of Dan Dare, and there's Spaceships Away that continues the story, but nobody's done a kind of Ultimate Absolute DC movie Superman story with it where you don't have to know anything going in ahead of time, and you lean into the space adventure, action, suspense side of it. And modernise the characters a bit. Frank Hampson's work is really stunning; it is darker under the surface than you think it is, but there are elements of it that, initially, unless you are very open-minded, are very difficult to modernise. Like, Digby is Dan's batsman. He's this kind of like middle-aged, overweight comedy working-class guy from Wigan in the North. And no one knows what a batsman is anymore. The enlisted man who's assigned to an officer to kind of take care of their stuff and be their assistant. They don't exist in modern culture. So you have to figure out what to do with Digby. That's one of the many considerations."

"But I just started out from, what if I could make a story that I could hand to anyone, whether they know Dan Dare inside and out or they've never heard of it at all, and go, hey, do you like comics about spaceships, and they go, yes. I wrote to The Dan Dare Corporation and said "hi, I have actually written comics before. I'm not completely random, but I'd like to do this. And they said, oh, we'd love that, too. And then the project just went from there. Mark suggested B7 Comics because they've done the Dan Dare radio adventures on the BBC, it all just went from there."

"Ridley Scott's a massive Dan Dare fan. George Lucas loved Dan Dare, C3PO is basically Al Digby but wit an RP a posh accent. There's a lot that that inspired the original Star Wars that came straight out of Dan Dare. It's got its fingerprints in so many different things. It echoes."

While Marc Laming had his own journey,

"Dan Dare has always been a thing. Some of my earliest comic memories are Dan Dare. My dad was a huge fan and had The Eagle as a kid. So, whenever I'd had my comics at home, it'd be #it's not as good as The Eagle#. And for years and years and years, I didn't see it. I just got told that my comics were rubbish, you know. And then round about 1977, he turned up with the Best Of The Eagle and it was love at first sight from there. Also being a fan of old World War II films, the whole Battle of Britain feel, Dan Dare was very appealing to me as a a kid. And at the same time, you had the 2000 AD relaunch, which was kind of like the punk rock version of Dan Dare. So, I had to sneak that one into the house. That couldn't be seen. That lived in a box under the bed."

"Rather than it being, as I was saying before, the Battle of Britain, I'm thinking of this more as Top Gun and that level of excitement, we want kids to be reading this as well as adults, you know, I want to have the same appeal that the original strip had. Frank Hampson, if he were doing it now, wouldn't be setting it within the sort of parameters that he did in the 50s. So that's my thought process, if I were Frank Hampson now, what would I do?"

Alex looked at how things have changed, technology, society and assumptions.

"Hampson kind of assumes the Earth comes together in this kind of United Nationsesque one world, you know, international space fleet, which obviously lke isn't looking like it's going to happen right now.. The United States is now the United Corporations of America.  Dan has two friends, Hank and Pierre. Hank is American, Pierre is French. Hank's aeroplane. I was like, draw it like a giant SUV with NASCAR stickers all over it. It's got advertising all over it. And then Pierre's is more like a French sports car, but with very subtle branding like a French football team, much more sleek and smaller."

"The British Space Fleet, the one nonprivatized space force because everything else has been privatised, doesn't have the resources, and they do like a lot of emergency search and rescue interception of people who are getting into trouble in space because, you know, there's no money in that. Want to launch a satellite? Yeah, there are twenty countries that will bid on that. Butwant to go retrieve somebody who's gotten who's whose engines have fouled and they're going into an asteroid belt, call the British, maybe they'll do it. Of course, the Earth is suffering from climate change, and if you notice on page one, the water goes right up to the Parliament buildings. The Houses of Parliament were built on a swamp, and it's returned to the swamp because the water level is up, and the embankment's gone. The first couple of levels of Parliament are all underwater."

To be fair, it feels that way right now… Dan Dare was created by Frank Hampson and appeared in the Eagle comic book weekly anthology from 1950 to 1967, as well as daily on Radio Luxembourg from 1951 to 1956. And now he's back… and according to Kickstarter, before the end of the year, as well.

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