Dan Dare and Daine Sarrasri
I grew up with Dan Dare. Not literally. Dan Dare was the hero of ‘Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future’, the front-page story on Eagle, an English comic. Described as ‘The New National Strip Cartoon Weekly’ when it appeared on 14 April 1950, Eagle was priced at thruppence (three pence in the traditional pounds, shillings and pence currency of the time). Writing from the Editor’s Office at 43 Shoe Lane, London, just off Fleet Street, (now close to the headquarters of Goldman Sachs International), Marcus Morris advised purchasers to complete an order form to ensure their continuing supply of future issues. That first edition introduced a two characters who were to continue in Eagle for years. One was PC49, a police strip based on a popular radio series of the same name; the other Captain Pugwash, the bad buccaneer (often redeemed after one of his failures by his young cabin boy). Other highlights for early readers were ‘Professor Brittain Explains’, a series on scientific inventions, and the wonderful series of cutaway pictures of steam engines and other massive pieces of machinery. Technology was everywhere.
The editor made it clear Eagle aspired to be more than just a weekly comic:
“The EAGLE CLUB is going to be one of the most important features in the paper and we’ve got a pile of ideas for making it a really good Club to join. It has very definite aims and standards. To begin with, a member has to agree to the Club Rules. Here are the most important of them. Members of the Eagle Club will:
(a) Enjoy life and help others to enjoy life. They will not enjoy themselves at the expense of others.
(b) Make the best of themselves. They will develop themselves in body, mind and spirit. They will tackle things for themselves and not wait for others to do things for them.
(c) Work with others for the good of all around them.
(d) Always lend a hand to those in need of help. They will not shirk difficult or dangerous jobs.
The other main aims are: First, to link together those who read and enjoy Eagle. Second, to organise meetings, expeditions, holidays, camps, etc., for members. Third, to make special awards to members who achieve anything really worthwhile.”
For boys wanting to join a club, it sounded great (though I think little of this actually happened).
I read my Eagle avidly. Although later in appearance, two of my favourites were Storm Nelson – Sea Adventurer and Harris Tweed – Extra Special Agent. Storm Nelson became predictable, but Harris Tweed was wonderful, a dreaming nitwit whose adventures always turned out to be wrong or non-existent, each time to brought back to reality by a youngster (his son?). Cleverly done, you could identify with Eagle’s heroes, or with the teenage boys who appeared in several stories to keep foolish characters in their place, or helped serious ones find crooks and evil doers.
Let’s get back to Dan Dare, as it was those beautifully illustrated colour story panels that took up the first couple of pages, and Dan Dare was a compelling hero! He flew rocket ships to other planets in the solar system, faced amazing dangers, rescued shipwrecked crews on alien lands, and, most important of all thwarted the dreaded evil Mekon, a super-intelligent Treen determined to conquer the earth. Gripping, so much so did I even notice there were almost no women? Just Professor Peabody, the inventor relied on to create new weapons, better rockets, and other extraordinary technologies. No, the key characters were Dan Dare, Digby his overweight and slightly slapdash batman (batman?!), and Sir Hubert Guest, commander of the Space Fleet (I felt he looked rather like my dad). This comic was for middle class English boys, and many like me would have skipped over the Cowboys and Indians strip, as well as the dutiful series of biblical stories. [i] It was a major step up from Thomas the Tank Engine books by the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, about talking steam engines, and awful diesel engines, which I had read and reread.
Looking back, I can see I didn’t identify with Dan Dare, or any of the others for that matter. Dan had no inner life, no personal side: his adventures were about technology, rockets and ray guns, and the lurking dangers of the solar system. In fact, Eagle stories were all about technology, with those other sections delving into science and inventions often taking up half the content. When it came to learning about people, there was little there. That was to be addressed by my visits to the local library, where I was introduced to novels. Even then, it was the story in the novel that mattered far more than all that stuff about feelings (let alone passions!). I progressed from reading Wind in the Willows, the two Alice books, to the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and R M Ballantyne, and then to Rider Haggard and Bulldog Drummond.
Eagle was for middle class English boys living in the sheltered decades after the Second World War, a time of growth and opportunity. Science and technology were making the world a better place to live. Boys could aspire to be men who would conquer new frontiers, through travel, through science and technology, through our natural leadership abilities. Like joining the Cubs, (and then the Scouts), we were expected to look after others (but in those two cases, you could get badges as well!!). We would do our duty, as the Eagle’s editor requested, and as expected of boys like us. Eagle suited the times, only to disappear as Britain declined as a world power (despite efforts to keep it going). I smile reading extracts, but it is wildly anachronistic now. [ii]
Eagle is a symbol for me about my childhood: the challenges and opportunities in science and technology, pushing back frontiers, and doing good. The world has changed irretrievably since then, and so has children’s publishing. Picture books for young children were flourishing as my first children were getting older: the number of titles quickly surged, the quality and depth kept increasing. Who would have imagined, back when I was a child, that Pamela Allen would write Black Dog, an imaginative picture book about depression and love? Or that children’s author Margaret Mahy would write The Changeover in 1984, a powerful fantasy addressing girls’ adolescence (preceded, on the same theme, by her earlier novel The Haunting)? We had moved a long way on from Golden Books and The Little Engine That Could.
I loved reading as a child. Today, I think I would be overwhelmed by the thousands of great titles waiting in bookshops and on library shelves. I’d have to give up school, for a start! I am sorely tempted to go on a rant about how reading is declining (it is), and how those with less education read far less than others (that’s true, too). I might also want to grumble about the ways in which visuals (films, videos and television) are replacing reading time, often flattening out the books on which they’re based. (yes, there is evidence for that, too) [iii]. But I won’t. Various media offer alternative ways to learn about life, other people, even your own feelings. Indeed, while writing this, I listened once again to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, communicating with a total emotional immediacy in a way very hard, possibly impossible, for a book to convey.
Instead of grumbling, I want to dwell on what would be like to be a young child today, finding myself reading a really good book for the first time. I’m not thinking of simple stories, the adventures you find in the Nancy Drew Mysteries or Paddington Bear. Instead, I am imagining myself in a totally different world for the first time, living for a while in a fantasy universe. So many places to start: there are the Harry Potter books, that sit alongside C S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia; Eion Colfer’s series about Artemis Fowl; and the continuing saga of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, first introduced by Rick Riordan in The Lightening Thief. The list is vast, from Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Secret Garden, or E B Whites’ Charlotte’s Web, through to Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K le Guin, or the Cornelia Funke series starting with Inkheart.
There’s more, those I will, for the sake of brevity, call the heavy-duty brigade. J R R Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, Philip Pullman and His Dark Materials (now with The Book of Dust, his three-part sequel partly released). Some others are sneaking in, like Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom collection, or the infuriating Patrick Rothfuss, whose series started with The Name of the Wind, and, years later, still to be completed (when will that third book ever appear?). Let’s not waste any more time on book lists: add your own fantasies, ignore mine: there’s a multitude on offer.
I believe fantasy is important, especially today. In an environment where we seem to want to protect children and students from anything that is upsetting, confronting, or ‘appropriated’ from other cultures, many steps are taken to shelter younger people from the uncomfortable realities of our world’. [iv] Fantasy writers are free from many of these constraints, and can explore the effects of hatred, violence, warfare, death, ethnic and racial tensions because none of it is about here and now; not literally, anyway, as no world is being explored which is our own. We live through the experiences, the felt experiences, of people, not always human, who exist in another realm. We encounter cruelty and punishment, and survive the traumas of malevolence, regret and fateful errors. Far more nuanced than the regular fare of rape, murder and brutality on television and in the cinema, we are able to confront the nature of being human in a complex, messy and inchoate world. Alongside this, Dan Dare reads as a carboard actor in a weak science fiction adventure.
Imagine reading one of the great fantasy stories for the first time, to live inside Bilbo Baggins’s head as he bumbles along, making mistakes, sometimes doing the right thing without knowing why. Or to discover, to our amazement, a world made up of many worlds, where you are able to cross from one to another with the aid of a subtle knife: rather more interesting than reading about the ‘many worlds theory’ of particle physics! Or to find yourself living in Tortall.
Why Tortall? I was introduced to Tamora Pierce’s books several years ago by my youngest daughter. I read the Circle of Magic books back then, loved them, but, despite strong hints, stopped there. Early this year, I decided to read all nineteen of her books set in Tortall. These stories present a vivid alternative to Dan Dare (or Long John Silver, or Ralph Rover for that matter). To make my point that children today are fortunate to be able to read such insightful and absorbing fantasy, I am going to use her second series, The Immortals as my example. I suppose my choice might seem odd, as they are, after all, fantasy stories predominantly written for younger teenage girls! Despite being the wrong age and gender, the series holds a fascination for me, far more than my childhood comics ever offered. [v]
The books cover four years in the life of Veralidaine Sarrastri (Daine). When we meet Daine she’s a thirteen-year-old orphan running away from her past in Cría, on the road that leads to Corus, the capital of Tortall. Tortall is rather like a European country a few hundred years ago, one of several kingdoms, often at war with one another. It is one of the most powerful, ruled by a monarchy, with courts, knights, strategic alliances and strategic marriages. Unlike Europe, however, magic is everywhere, real, and very practical, with every kind of practitioner from minor witches dealing with cures and potions through to powerful mages who can command oceans and storms. There are special forms of magic, and Daine is unaware she possesses a skill in wild magic, an ability which led to some of the past she is now trying to deny and escape.
While packed with adventures, the series also tracks Daine as she grows older, discovering more about herself as she works her way through relationships, expectations, embarrassments and love, at the same time confronting the challenges of being caught up in a country at war. Anyone can read these books (and I wish they would!), but the focus on Daine makes them especially accessible to teenage girls, as is also the case with most of Pierce’s other books and series. Like Margaret Mahy in The Changeover, she is exploring a transition, illuminating the tensions, anger, shyness and withdrawal, in fact all confusions of going from child to adult. The surface adventures are compelling and scary at times, but the underlying story is just as magnetic.
My questions was what is it like to read a series like this as a young person? I can’t imagine the excitement of first being drawn into this colourful, exciting, dangerous world. Perhaps I would find it hard to sleep at night, as I would wrestle with events, and worry about what would happen next. I would certainly be living part of my life in Tortall, walking the streets of Corus, going on quests to other parts of the empire. Whether or not I knew it, I would also be learning by gaining insights into people, enhancing my awareness of the ways men and women can behave, and the reasons they do both wonderful things and horrible things. I would be growing, not in a physical sense, but in my knowledge of the world of humans, and even acquiring some wisdom. Much I absorbed from a series like this would be hard to learn from films or television series, music, or even ‘talking books’. The ‘magic’ has to happen reflectively, often imperceptibly, in the brain.
I know it is easy to paint things in extremes. Comparing a comic from the postwar period with a contemporary fantasy series is unfair. What is driving this commentary is partly envy: how wonderful to have access to the literature a child can read today, to be young and begin to read and explore anew. It is also a way to emphasise the wealth of experiences available in books, as opposed to movies and television series. For me, literature remains the epitome of culture.
If I were a young boy, would I read Eagle today? Possibly not. Would I read The Immortals? Perhaps not, but I would be a fool not to!
[i] Eagle did put out a second comic, Girl, in 1951, for 4.5 pence. It had an alternative to Dan Dare, Kitty Hawke and her all girl crew running a charter airline. Apparently, it was seen as too masculine and banished to the back!
[ii] One of the few frustrations from those years that I no longer have my treasured Eagle Annuals: where did they go?
[iii] Children still read, but see, for example, Children, Teens and Reading, A Commonsense Media Brief, 2014. And it’s got a little worse. See: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/08/teenagers-read-book
[iv] See ‘How Comfort Conquered College’ by Steven B Gerrard, Bloomberg Opinion, September 10, 2019, for an analysis of how this is working out, drawing on the author’s recent experiences
[v] The other medium to successfully use fantasy is animation: Miyazaki’s films especially, with such classics as Princess Mononoke, Laputa, and Spirited Away; and the studio’s confrontingly realist Grave of the Fireflies.
