This article first appeared in the comprehensive COLLECTING BOOKS and MAGAZINES website, details of which may be found here

What was the magic of Dan Dare? It's difficult to tell retrospectively, but it seems that he was the hero in the right place at the right time. The 1940s had seen huge leaps in the science of rocketry and man's ability to split the atom had been terrifyingly proved in Japan in 1945. The end of the war (the one hoped to end all wars) was the beginning of an uphill struggle to rebuild life throughout Europe, the echo of which continued through the 1950s and really only have such a profound impact in the early 1960s and the baby boomer era.

During the late 1940s -- nick-named the Age of Austerity -- life was not easy. Everything was still on the ration and many factors combined to make life a little drab. Taking just one tiny slice of this, we had a ban on importing children's cartoons, so you could not even see Mickey Mouse at the cinema if you were a kid despite the fact that he had his own comic (Mickey Mouse Weekly). Instead, you had home-grown cartoons created by ex-Disney director David Hand (Animaland being the most famous of his series). There were dozens of black and white films shot in the UK to fill the gap left by Hollywood, and it was impossible to import those colourful comic books that had started up just before the war. We had our own, but they were poor by comparison.

Around the turn of the decade, things started to brighten up, it was a new decade for starters, a chance to put the war behind you. Food and clothing rations became a little less strict. You could get real eggs, not just the powdered variety. People wanted things to be brighter and more colourful.

Teenage delinquency was a big problem in the late 1940s. Some people (one being the Rev. Marcus Morris) pointed to comics and story papers as a source of delinquent ideas. The book market was flooded with the likes of tough crime writers Hank Janson and Ben Sarto, and copies were passed around under desks -- often with the sexy covers torn off -- for all schoolboys to thrill at.

Enter the Eagle. Bright, colourful, edited by a man of the cloth. Expensive compared to other papers, but the first issue was a sturdy 20 pages (only 16 in #2 which was to become its normal size except when advertising pushed it back up to 20). Parents are trying to put the past behind them, looking to the future -- and there's Dan Dare, pilot of the future, in a 'future' that was built strictly along the lines of the R.A.F. (by 1950, books about the war were just beginning to appear, including accounts of those brave fighter pilots who fought the Battle of Britain). Eagle was heavily advertised by Hultons, who gave away tens of thousands of copies at schools, via a newsagents token campaign, and from cars that cruised through many large cities with a huge eagle mounted on the roof.

Nearly a million children spent the week wondering what would happen to the spaceship just launched for Venus at the end of episode one. I doubt if any of them had ever quite dreamed of this kind of adventure in such vivid colour. Add to this the fact that the paper also carried bible stories in picture strip form on the rear, which would have been another plus point to wary parents, although the children would probably be more excited by seeing their radio hero P.C. 49 in strip form. The Eagle from the start was attractive to all ages: an exciting weekly as far as its readers went but with a wide-ranging educational bias to attract parents.It was in the right place at the right time.

Reproduced with kind permission of Steve Holland of Story Paper Index. For lots more information about comics, visit these sites

http://www.penrithcity.nsw.gov.au/usrpages/collect/welcome.htm