HOW VERY DARE YOU?
THE EAGLE HAS LANDED… AGAIN!
Re-inventing Dan Dare (twice), forgotten Alan Moore stories, home to refugees from cancelled comics and virtually the last comic standing from the IPC stable... It can only be the second version of the Eagle, fondly remembered by readers from the 1980s. Ian Millsted explores what made this title unique...
Theoriginal Eagle comic was the stuff of legend, running from 1950 to 1969 and generating 997 weekly issues, plus annuals and other spin-offs. It was, of course, the home magazine of Dan Dare and so much more. Even after dwindling sales led to the cancellation of the title, it was still seen as the gold standard, both within and without the comics industry, of what a boys’ comic should be. However, the 1970s was the decade of comics launches that bucked the traditions which Eagle was seen, rightly or wrongly, to represent. Battle, Action, Jinty, Misty and 2000AD were all, to some extent, anti-establishment. So, could there ever be another flight of the Eagle? If so, it would need to be different again
The initiative to make this happen came from long-time IPC/Fleetway editor Barrie Tomlinson. In his own memoir of his days in the comics field, Comic Book Hero (2017), Tomlinson remembered the chain of events. “It had long been my ambition to relaunch Eagle. I wanted to do something completely new, and we decided that some of the Eagle stories would be told in photographs, rather than drawn. Photo-stories were extremely popular in girls’ comics, and we felt we could make them popular with Eagle readers. So, photo stories it was, much to the angry reaction of the regular artists we used in our comics.”
REVIVING DAN
Launching a new Eagle was always going to get plenty of attention and the likelihood was that plenty of dads would be willing to buy the comic for their kids, the product needed to be both good and innovative if they were going to keep, or even grow a readership. IPC had, in recent years, had two unsuccessful launches from the boys’ division in Tornado (1979) and Speed (1980). So, what would go in the new Eagle?
The obvious first decision was to revive Dan Dare. In fact, the Dan Dare character had never really gone away. After the original Eagle ceased publication, there had still been Eagle annuals for several years with new Dare stories. More significantly, Dan Dare had been an integral part of 2000AD when it launched in 1977. That was a very different version of the character which was too different to satisfy fans of the original and not new enough to become a favourite of the 1970s kids who favoured Judge Dredd and other antiheroes for which that comic became known.