Dan Dare

[Brightonian]

Comic heroes are getting revived and reinvented on a weekly basis, and now it's the turn of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Dare's adventures in the Eagle were a staple of my boyhood, and it looks as if the creators of the new comic intend to keep faith with the original characters. I've only seen issue #1 and the ingredients are pretty standard - a hero called from retirement in his country's hour of peril; yet another world-wide catastrophe which has somehow left the UK intact, this time a nuclear war between China and the US, which we survived thanks to "shields" developed by Dare's old buddy Jocelyn Peabody. The original Dare was essentially a RAF fighter ace from a WWII movie pitted against Venusians rather than Nazis, and it looks like the new comic series aims to explore the tensions between his old-fashioned morality and the corruptions and compromises of the third millennium. Anyway, I'll be looking out for issue #2.