Spaceship Away!
Rod Barzilay is a popular figure in Dan Dare fandom and has just launched one of the most exciting Dan Dare projects in recent years in the form of a new magazine, Spaceship Away. Rod's aim is to bring brand new Dan Dare stories to the general public which are very much in the style of the 1950s original, and he has achieved that by bringing some of the original Dan Dare artists on board.
In
1990, Rod began work on a story called The
Phoenix Mission and asked
original Eagle artist Keith Watson to bring the story to life. When Keith
sadly died, another former artist, Don Harley, took up the challenge. Spaceship
Away, issue one of which has already been published, will bring us
this story along with background information and a sequel called Green
Nemesis. Other stories by new, younger artists will follow and there is
also a witty back-up strip called Dan Bear by Andy Boyce.
Rod is a long-time fan of Britain's top space hero. "I was seven when I first saw Dan Dare", he recalls. The first Dare story he read was Operation
Saturn and he was captivated, saying that the stories were "big boy stuff". He was particularly fascinated by the colour and says that although he "didn't understand all the dialogue, this added to the appeal!".
Rod hugely admired the artists' attention to detail
and says "you could go back and look at it again and again and start to notice other things in the background".
It has taken Rod many years to get Spaceship
Away off the ground. Did
he ever lose faith? "No," he says emphatically. "Every setback
made me more determined. There was a lot of fan encouragement and I couldn't
let them down".
He's delighted to see The Phoenix Mission in print at last and only
wishes that Keith Watson had lived to see it.
Rod is also pleased that Dan Dare fans have been
so enthusiastic about his publication and so keen to get involved. The
UK Comics Festival, science fiction magazine SFX and Comics
International have also been very supportive.
Rod feels that the concept of Dan Dare touches those who were children
when it first came out and that excitement about the project is snowballing.
So what his plans are for the future? "The main thing," he ponders, "is to get the magazine up and running economically. We hope to have more pages, more stories, more extras. There are eight more pages in Issue Two – we might up it again. We have lots of ideas involving other artists and writers. It's very much a team effort and I'd like it to go on and on. Bill Naylor's doing something and Martin Baines, too. You need fresh blood in there, giving us different aspects of it. Martin's strip is starting in the next one and is quite incredible".
Rod has not enjoyed every version of Dan Dare and
feels that the 2000AD version was ‘really off the wall'. He is
supportive of the 1980s Eagle but "didn't
like them meddling with Dan's history.
"
I thought that was a bad move," he feels. "That wasn't really our Dan Dare. Dan became a gun-toting guy with muscles, shooting everything in sight. Every time they re-invented it, they threw all the past away".
Rod also disapproved of the shorter story format in the later Eagles.
He prefers stories to run for a long period of weeks and says that "if
the story's good, the readers won't get bored with it.
We feel sure that they'll be very few Dan Dare fans getting bored of Spaceship
Away!
Ian Wheeler, with thanks to Rod Barzilay.