Today is Dan Dare's 60th Anniversary!

On April 14th, 1950 the first ever issue of the Eagle comic appeared in newsagents in Britain, and its star feature was the now classic sci-fi comic-strip series "Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future".

Dan Dare was created by the late, great Frank Hampson, recognised by his peers in his own lifetime as one of the world's greatest ever comic-strip artists. Every week he and his studio team produced fantastic space adventure stories for the Eagle comic with amazingly detailed and realistic colour illustrations. Almost one million copies of Eagle were sold every week at the height of Dan Dare's popularity in the 1950's, and the character has continued to be very popular in a variety of "rebooted" forms ever since.

Rather than fill up this blog with further illustrations and details of the history of Dan Dare, which would require many pages, please follow these links instead - I think they will prove to be very interesting to you, and will give you an idea of just how brilliant Dan Dare was, and still is:

A complete brief history of Dan Dare

Some original Dan Dare comic-strip reprints in full

A "Dan Dare through the years" picture gallery

An extended alternative Dan Dare gallery

A showcase of original Dan Dare artwork samples

To commemorate Dan Dare's 60th Birthday, I have commissioned a brand new Dan Dare Flash online game called "Dan Dare MatchIt", which is a fun picture card matching memory game. You can play it online here:

Dan Dare 60th Anniversary MatchIt Flash online game

The game is completely free to play and distribute, so if you would like to add it into your own web space or site, you can download the .swf Flash game file and an example .html page (with useful notes) to run it here:

Dan Dare 60th Anniversary MatchIt game download

Enjoy! :-)

(See also here)