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Classic Dan Dare: The Red Moon Mystery

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"The dream of space travel is glorious, the contemporary reality is dismal," remarked William Sims Bainbridge in 1976. But nowhere was it more glorious than on the front page of The Eagle, a weekly British boys' paper, in Frank Hampson's visionary comic serial, Dan Dare. The Eagle was published from 1950 through 1969 by the Christian Publicity Society and Hampson also drew a never-rivaled story comic of the life of Jesus of Nazareth called "The Road of Courage." As he says in an interview in this volume, Hampson wasn't religious, but he felt that "young people were getting a rough deal in those years so soon after the end of the war...I wanted to give them something that made the future more hopeful, in human terms."

Hampson gave unstintingly, creating one of the most visually arresting comics ever, until the Eagle was taken over by corporate raiders, and the job fell to his friend, an equally fine artist, Frank Bellamy. As with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Dan Dare spun off numerous toys highly valued by collectors (Young, Duin and Richardson devote an entire chapter to Dan Dare in their book, Blast Off!: Rockets, Robots, Ray Guns, and Rarities from the Golden Age of Space Toys, Dark Horse Books), and in its heyday, 60,000 junior spacemen pledged their loyalty in the Eagle Club.

Titan Books, UK, has launched an ambitious publishing project to reprint all the color, two-page Dan Dare cliff-hanger strips in beautiful 9" X 12" hard cover, coffee table hardbacks. "The Red Moon Mystery" was the second Eagle serial, after "Pilot of the Future," and was originally published from vol. 2 #26 - vol. 3 #11 of the Eagle. As comic artist Cliff Claremont (X-Men) writes in the introduction, the weekly arrival of Dan Dare was one of the few things to lighten the gloom and doom of post-war Britain. As such, many now- grown fans will welcome his return. Amazon's low price makes Dan Dare the gift book of the year, and a new generation may find themselves captivated by Hampson's visions of the future.