Dan Dare Space Fleet Operations Manual

Dan Dare Space Fleet Operations Manual.
Edited by Rod Barzilay. Illustrated by Graham Bleathman
Published by Haynes Books
128 pages, colour throughout.

ISBN: 978 0 85733 286 8

Review by Mark Yon

Readers of previous SFFWorld reviews may be aware that I have a soft spot for British comic-book heroDan Dare, Pilot of the Future,
and especially the version from the 1950’s from the magazine Eagle (Review here, for example.)

So I was looking forward to this release enormously. This is a colour coffee-table book, with new drawings, but in the style of the famously detailed Eagle cutaway drawings from the 1950’s, rather than the later versions of DD from the 1980’s.

The book is published by Haynes, a company best known in the UK for its owner’s workshop technical manuals, with a reputation for producing detailed information and complex exploded diagrams for cars and other vehicles. Recently the brand has been extending its range (quite successfully) to fictional universes such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Thunderbirds and even Wallace and Gromit.

Within such a context, the Space Fleet Operations Manual allows us to look in such a manner at the technical optimism of the 1950’s world of Dan Dare, his friends and enemies, their retro-futuristic technology and the worlds they lived on. The cutaways are drawn by artist Graham Bleathman and reflect the (some would say obsessive) style and detail of the original comic. You can spend, as I did, hours looking at the details in these drawings. Below is one example, Dan’s spaceship, the trusty Anastasia (click on the picture for a bigger version):

As you can see from the example, there’s enormous use of colour throughout here, as the original drawings did so, that make the book a pleasure to read. The main downside is the fact that, as the diagrams usually cover a double-page spread, some of the detail becomes unclear in the centre margin, although it is not as bad as some books of this nature.

You do not have to have a detailed knowledge of the original strips, for what is here is explained by Rod Barzilay, the creator of retro-tribute fanzine Spaceship Away!, written and designed to imitate the much-missed style of the Eagle comic. Rod brings to the book a degree of knowledge about the Dare universe and manages to explain key aspects of the original plots and the relevance of the spaceships, characters and places to both the knowledgeable reader and the casual layman. If you’ve never come across Thorks, Therons, Pescods, Verans, Pittars, Cosmobes, the Treen or the Rootha before, it’s not a major issue. It was also nice to see some scans from the original Eagle to illustrate some points (again, please click on the picture below for a bigger version):

In addition, on the endpapers, there are two full page episodes of the comic strips drawn by acclaimed 1950’s Eagle artists Don Harley, written in the style of the original comic. From what I’ve read here,Phoenix Mission and Green Nemesis are worthy additions to the DD canon, although unfortunately only the first two pages of each are shown. (The rest was originally in the Spaceship Away! fanzine.)

The world of Dan Dare in the 1950’s and 1960’s was a glorious technicolor experience, filled with imagination and detail. From a 21^st century perspective, it gave the reader a tantalising and exciting glimpse from a time when the future seemed limitless and yet secure in the hands of loyal and honourable characters. The Space Fleet Operations Manual reminds us of that time, and allows us to walk the corridors and investigate the worlds of Dan Dare created by his imaginative writers.

This book will be a delightful nostalgia trip for some and a useful introduction for those wanting an idea of what all the fuss is about. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it from cover to cover, and then went off to find my copies of the old comic strip.

Recommended.

Mark Yon, June 2013.