Garth Ennis Chats Up Dan Dare
Dan Dare is “The Quintessential British Hero” in the eyes of Garth Ennis.
Dan Dare #1
November 28th, 2007 - I’ll admit, I had no earthly clue who Dan Dare was. Kind of a catchy name, I suppose, and conjured up vague images of a square-jawed pulp hero from the Golden days of fantasy on the printed page. Turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark. Of course, my American mind just assumed I was conjuring up, well, an American. Mr. Dare is, in fact, a character that Garth Ennis has called the “the quintessential British Hero. He's our Captain America, our Superman, our Batman, he's all of them rolled into one. He's the original and the best.", according to their press release.
He started out in 1950 in something called “Eagle” magazine as a comic strip, detailing the adventures of a “pilot of the future” in the then-far-flung 1990’s. He worked for England’s Spacefleet as its top pilot and gets involved in all sorts of spacefaring derring-do. He didn’t have superpowers, but he did some pretty amazing things, including freeing Venus (yes, the planet) from an evil being known as “The Mekon”, who became Dare’s arch-nemesis. But I feel a little dishonest passing all of this information on as if I know what I’m talking about, so check out this wikipedia entry about Dan Dare to get it straight from the source.
The Comic Collective was lucky enough to be able to get some quick answers from the ‘Preacher’ man himself, Garth Ennis, regarding this latest incarnation of “one of the original great aviators”
TheComicCollective.com: Who is Dan Dare in your eyes?
Garth Ennis: The quintessential British hero, the stalwart, noble, incorruptible Englishman who stood tall before the mast at Trafalgar, held the line at Rorke's Drift and led a squadron of Spitfires in the summer of 1940. In other words an ideal, and all the more fascinating for it.
No room for irony here (which is not to say that the man himself doesn't have a rather wry sense of humour).
TheCC: When you where approached by Virgin to write Dan Dare, how long did it take you to say yes?
GE: I can't actually remember who mentioned it to who, but probably about 0.2 of a second.
TheCC: What characters from Dan Dare’s past stories will we be seeing? Will any of them be drastically changed?
GE: There's his loyal sidekick Digby and the beautiful Jocelyn Peabody, and his arch-nemesis the Mekon. The latter two are pretty much the same people we're used to from the original strip; Digby required a little bit of work. The classic Digby I find little more than a buffoon, and I can't really write a character like that without going "retro"- which is not my department at all.
TheCC: You’ve worked with Gary Erksine before. (Who’s also a Dan Dare fan) What do like about his style that he brings to the page? And how much did he contribute to the look?
GE: Gary's contribution to the look of the strip can't be underestimated.
Not only did he have to update Dare and his supporting cast, he's had to visualise a ton of stuff with only the vaguest suggestions from me: space ships, colony planets, hordes of monsters, new supporting characters and both the Royal Navy and Treen battle fleets. He seems to take it all in his stride.
Understandably, Mr. Ennis is a busy man, so that’s all we were able to get out of him at the moment. But I believe the proof will be, as the English say, ‘in the pudding’ (the Brits have a strange idea of what pudding is, by the way), when you pick up the first (and hopefully second, third, fourth, etc.) issues of the comic and check it out yourself.
As for my two cents, I’m looking forward to it. We don’t have enough of the bare-bones, non-superpowered Pulp-y adventurers running around in comics these days and I think we should. He’s a little bit Hal Jordan (fearless pilot), a little bit Batman (self-made hero), a little bit Blackhawk—who may have been derived from the original Dan Dare, I’m not sure. The point is—this certainly has promise. And with Garth Ennis behind it, it has more promise than 90% of the books currently on the market. Watch the skies…
For more information, check out the Virgin Comics website.
Image Gallery:
