Last Dan Dare Post for Now

It occurs to me that, of the list I posted of Gary Erskine’s illustrious predecessors on Dan Dare, the work of Ian Kennedy might not be well known outside the UK.

Kennedy has been a professional comics artist since the 1950s, lately noted mainly for his covers for DC Thomson’s long-running digest-sized war comic Commando. His entry in the Lambiek Comiclopedia can be found here. Below is a page from one of his Dan Dare stories.


That story, and the cover, were Ian Kennedy’s contributions to the Dan Dare Annual 1987 (published by Fleetway in 1986). Dan Dare was appearing in a revival of the weekly comic Eagle at the time. Two other strips in the annual were drawn by Kennedy’s fellow veteran comics artist, and sci-fi illustrator, Ron Turner.


Turner’s style hadn’t changed much since his work on Rick Random thirty years earlier. As a result, his Dan Dare looks less like a 1980s revival than a comic from the 1950s of some parallel world in which Dan Dare was created by an artist with more Vargo Statten than Biggles in his bloodstream. Though Kennedy's comics career had started only four years after Turner's, there seem to be decades between them.