PREVIEW: Dan Dare And The Dame

Here's a little bit of Work In Progress for you from the first entry in the upcoming 2000AD blog. I've chosen this cos it's actually (well, tangentially) about pop music as well as comics...

Everyone else in 2000AD has a direction you get right away - MACH 1 and Dredd have jobs; Harlem Heroes and Bill Savage have an impossible goal; even in Flesh there’s an outrageous situation that you want to see resolved somehow. But what’s the point of Dan Dare, other than to be Dan Dare? Who is this guy?

Mills has two possible answers for this. The first is to borrow Buck Rogers’ and Captain America’s origin story - we’re two years off Rogers actually showing up on screens again - and make Dare a man out of time, a 20th Century guy in a 22nd Century world. This cuts him off from the iconography of the old series and gives him a source of conflict, in the one-man-against-the-system mode Mills loves - Dan’s no-nonsense ways rub up against the complacent bureaucracy of the 22nd Century.

The problem is that Mills’ stories are so packed there’s barely time to establish this - it’s not even mentioned in the opening episode, only in a data page at the front of the comic. And there’s no real space for the texture of the 22nd century to come to life - Dare may say stuff like “Meet a 20th Century weapon - FIST!” but it’s not like the 22nd century, with its instant-kill “mole guns” is any less of a violent place. There’s an unnamed bureaucrat who obviously has it in for Dare, court-martialling him after he saves the Solar System (ain’t it always the way?) but he’s transparently a device to make Dare a free agent by the end of the first story. And Dan is certainly tougher than the Star Trek derived spaceship crew he hooks up with for the main plot, but that’s mostly just because he’s a Pat Mills hero and he has to be. The result is the wildest visuals and ideas in the earliest Progs, backing up the most generic action hero.

Could there have been another way? Probably not - as we’ll see, the meteor that was Star Wars was about to hit science fiction, irreversibly deforming expectations of what a space adventure story was. But one possibility lies in the second way Mills tried to make Dan Dare distinctive, the way the new Dare is separated visually from his Dad-friendly predecessor: Belardinelli was told to make him look like David Bowie.

Now, there are conflicting accounts of how much this was actually followed up, and certainly readers coming new to Dare don’t all go “aha! David Bowie!”. For one thing, you can reasonably ask “which Bowie?” The skeletal, cocaine-and-milk-fed David of 1976 isn’t out there punching Biogs, but there’s something of glam-era Bowie in the haughty, slim-faced Dare we see from Belardinelli - check the final panel of his first strip, in which Dare has a date with the sole woman supporting character in those first Progs (coincidentally or not, she’s called Ziggy).

The Bowie connection is intriguing because it’s a reminder that science fiction in the 70s had guises beyond what was obvious from film and TV. As an SF figure, Bowie feels strongly aligned to the New Wave - The Man Who Fell To Earth is an alien-as-alienation study; Diamond Dogs and Ziggy imagine glam apocalypses, sex and fandom as proper subjects for speculative pop; “the papers want to know whose shirts you wear” is a wonderfully Ballardian one-liner in a bleak New Wave short story.

2000AD, as Mills envisaged it, vigorous, populist and action-packed, was not best placed to engage with the self-consciously modernist New Wave. The closest the comic came at launch was Michael Moorcock writing to the Guardian to complain about it. But it was hardly aligned to traditional, Golden Age, science fiction either. And if the in-your-face tone of the stories wasn’t likely to excite adult SF fans, some of the settings and content was a lot more intriguing: time travel as a satire of capitalist exploitation in Flesh, or the fully mediated dystopia of Mega-City One, concrete islands and high rises and all. Dare-as-Bowie was a red herring, but it was a reminder of possibilities beyond the adventure strip, beyond even Star Wars.