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.

Beyond Borehamwood: The Champions

Back to the ‘60s again.

The British television production company ITC, run by the flamboyant Lew Grade, had a big hit with its adaptation of Leslie Charteris’s stories of The Saint, starring Roger Moore. It spent the rest of the decade producing imitations about globetrotting adventurers (as well as financing Gerry Anderson’s puppet fantasies, but that’s another story). Danger Man, The Baron, Man in a Suitcase - all shared The Saint’s conviction that there was no country in the world that could not be replicated by stock footage, the parkland around Borehamwood studios, and a population of British character actors.

In 1968, The Champions stretched ITC’s resources further, by endowing its lead characters with super-powers. Craig Sterling, Richard Barrett and Sharron MacReady, agents of the international secret police organisation Nemesis, crashed their plane in the Himalayas, and were rebuilt by the inhabitants of a hidden city. Unfortunately, although their powers supposedly included super-strength, there was little more money in the budget for stunts and special effects than for foreign travel, so the stories tended to rely on such less visually interesting powers as super-hearing and telepathy instead. What feats and fights as we saw were largely hogged by Sterling and Barrett, either because of assumptions about gender roles, or because of the shortage of stunt women to double for lead actress Alexandra Bastedo.

The comics faced no such constraints.



Sadly, comics adaptations didn’t always take this sort of opportunity. The later ITC television series Department S involved a team assembled by Interpol to solve unsolveable crimes. It consisted of dogged investigator Stewart Sullivan, wild theorist (and novelist) Jason King, and rational researcher and computer expert Annabelle Hirst. Although Jason King was clearly the stand-out character, and eventually got his own spin-off series, the three principals treated each other as equals, and needled each other constantly.

Which is why the disappointment of the only comic strip adaptation of Department S that I have seen lies not just in Annabelle’s demotion to secretary, but in her deference to the menfolk.


Win one, lose one. But the win has that lovely sleek shiny artwork by Ron Turner, so I’ll read that one more often.

Panels
The Champions “Error of Judgement”, art by Ron Turner, Joe 90 Top Secret Comic Annual, Century 21 Publishing/City Magazines, 1969

Department S “The Silent Men”, writer and artist unidentified, Thunderbirds Annual 1971, City Magazines, 1971

Tune In! Turn On! Exterminate!

For this week’s Doctor Who-related post, I had planned to bodge together a brief history of the Daleks in comics. But the fine fellows at Altered Vistas have already done that – and a much more thorough job than I could have managed, too. They also have a history of Cybermen in comics.

The greatest of all these comic strips was, without a doubt, The Daleks from TV21. The strip was written by David Whitaker, who was the first script editor for the Doctor Who TV series – a much more important post then than now. As a freelance, he wrote two of the best Dalek TV serials ever for Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, and a whole wodge of ancillary fiction, including the novelisations Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Crusaders, the stage play Curse of the Daleks and The Dalek Book.

In the comic strip, Whitaker and his artistic collaborators, Richard Jennings, Eric Eden and Ron Turner, traced the history of the Daleks from their original war with the Thals, which mutated them from small blue smurf-like humanoids into nasty green blobs in armour, through to their discovery of the Earth. Along the way, they delineated a richer and more detailed Dalek society than anything we ever saw on screen – and they did it in just a page a week.

As a boy, I preferred Richard Jennings’ artwork, because his Daleks were more faithful to the appearance of those on TV, and such things mattered a lot to me then. Now I am swept away by Ron Turner’s dynamic layouts, lush colours and smooth chromed finish.

Turner was a veteran comic strip and cover artist. There is a splendid gallery of his book and magazine covers here.

By the mid-1960s, Whitaker and Turner were both middle-aged, and must have been as bemused as any by developments in popular culture. But they did the sensible thing and built it into their comic strip. Obviously, Daleks couldn’t grow their hair, smoke dope or listen to rock music. But flower power? Now, that was a possibility.

One day, the Dalek Emperor is giving orders for a new construction project when the unthinkable happens – a Dalek questions him.



Unsure of which Dalek questioned the order, the Emperor has their “rest-compartments” searched (and I just love the idea that Daleks have bedrooms, don’t you?).



But the rogue Dalek has been gathering followers as well as flowers.



He tries to stage a coup.



But his support literally wilts away.



So there you have it: a culturally relevant political thriller, all done in four pages. And it carries a point that is relevant to the 2007 TV series of Doctor Who. At the end of last week’s episode, we saw the Daleks apparently abandon their age-old mission of racial domination. But as Whitaker and Turner remind us, it doesn’t matter what Daleks are trying to achieve, if they remain devious, murderous conformists. If the means are bad enough, the ends are irrelevant.


Panels
The Daleks by David Whitaker (story) and Ron Turner (art), TV Century 21, 1966, reprinted in The Dalek Chronicles, Marvel Comics UK, 1994

The Bellamy of the Daleks

The Daleks are back again on Doctor Who on Saturday. Their appearances are now so frequent that they are in danger of overexposure.

They hadn’t been on screen for the best part of six years when “Day of the Daleks” aired in 1972. The Radio Times marked the event by putting this Frank Bellamy drawing on the front cover. It is, perhaps, my favourite piece of Doctor Who artwork ever.


(In case you're wondering, the band around the Doctor’s head is part of the mind probe the Daleks used to establish that this Doctor was the same person as the others they had met.)

I wasn’t the only one to be impressed. A year later, Target Books acquired the rights to reprint three Doctor Who novelisations written in the 1960s, and they chose to copy Bellamy’s design for their covers. They couldn’t get Bellamy himself to do the work, so they hired the younger Greek artist, Christos Achilleos, to impersonate him. The reprints were a hit, and Achilleos went on to draw a couple of dozen more covers in the same style, as Target started commissioning new novelisations. But here is that first cover.



Frank Bellamy wasn’t Achilleos’s only inspiration. He must have lacked photo-reference, because those two Daleks are swiped from Ron Turner’s 1966 artwork for The Daleks comic strip in TV Century 21.



The Radio Times commissioned a good deal of Doctor Who art from Frank Bellamy in the 1970s. The listing for each Saturday’s episode was accompanied by a small, postage-stamp sized, illustration, like these from the six-part “Planet of the Daleks”.



The most striking of Radio Times’s commissions from Bellamy was a four-page comic strip adaptation of the opening of part 1 of “Colony in Space”. The page layouts were startling even by Bellamy’s standards.



After Jon Pertwee left the part, Radio Times cooled on Doctor Who, and the show was only given the cover once in the last fifteen years of its original run. So this terrific illustration for “Terror of the Zygons” appeared on an inside page.



By the time of the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann, attitudes had changed again. Not only did it make the cover, but Radio Times commissioned a half-page comic strip, written by Gary Russell and drawn by Lee Sullivan, which ran for the best part of a year. The strips can be found at the Doctor Who Cuttings Archive.

Today, Doctor Who can count on being on the RT cover several times each series. But it’s all photographs nowadays, inside and out.


Pictures and Panels:
Doctor Who illustrations by Frank Bellamy, Radio Times, 1971-1975, reprinted in Timeview: The Complete Doctor Who Illustrations of Frank Bellamy, Who Dares Publishing, 1985

Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, 1964, cover illustration by Christos Achilleos, Target Books edition, 1973

The Daleks by David Whitaker (script) and Ron Turner (art), TV Century 21, 1966, reprinted in The Dalek Chronicles, Marvel Comics UK, 1994