Rarity: The Dan Dare Comic Strip
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Except…
The Menace from Jupiter was the last Dan Dare story to appear in Eagle, but before we end this sequence, there’s an oddity to consider. Not a story from one of the Annuals, nor any of the other Eagle-related publications that came out from Hulton, or Odhams, or Longacre. But a genuine, little-considered but authentic Sixties adventure.
Mission to the Stars was the only Dan Dare adventure to appear outside Eagle. From 20 April to 4 October 1964, 29 weeks in b&w, three tiers a week, Dan’s extraneous adventure appeared in the Sunday People, drawn by Don Harley and written by William Patterson, best known as the scripter for Sydney Jordan’s Jeff Hawke strip in the Daily Express.
As far as I am aware, the only place in which this story can be read, outside of those who carefully clipped each instalment out of the People, every week, and preserved them carefully in their collections, is in The Dan Dare Dossier, a wonderfully informative book published by Hawk Books as a companion to their Facsimile Reprint Series.
Ten years later John Freeman at downthetubes more fully explains the Dan Dare newspaper comic strip:
Dan Dare‘s appearances outside EAGLE across the decades since his debut have been various – in audio adventures, advertising and animation – but how many of you recall his appearance in a newspaper strip story, “Mission to the Stars“, which was published in Sunday issues of The People in 1964? The strip was the work of writer William Patterson, perhaps best known for his stories for Sydney Jordan’s “Jeff Hawke” strip, published in the Daily Express, and drawn by Don Harley, one of the great “Dan Dare” artists.
The strip was announced in the then broadsheet newspaper’s edition of 26th April 1964, followed by a 29-week run from 3rd May – 15th November…
The weekly comic strip by Willie Patterson and Don Harley was only available in The People newspaper. That problem was resolved in 1990 with The Dan Dare Dossier. Back to John Freeman:
To date, the strip has only been republished in English in Hawk Books’ The Dan Dare Dossier, published in 1990, the publisher clearly utilising newspaper clippings rather than original art to represent the story, but making the best of the reproduction as they could, given the print quality of its original run – which doesn’t look that great, judging from copies held by the British Library used in its British Newspaper Archive project.
John Freeman’s conclusion:
Don Harley’s art on the project, given the limited format, is to his usual high standard, although his robot villains, which look a little reminiscent of Doctor Who‘s Daleks and Mechanoids, could, perhaps, have been more scary, given the story was presumably being aimed at an older audience.
Martin Crookall’s review:
To be honest, it’s a dull and uninspired story, unable to rise above the central improbability of robots, with no apparent creator but themselves, turning out to be identical to cheap, dictator obsessed human villains…
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