Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 6 of 42  'Eagle Club News', The Eagle (1952), an article about the fan club, one of tbe earliest of its kind. Whatever its 'improving' intentions, The Eagle was a soaring success. Far from being restricted to a middle-class audience, as its publishers had expected, the comic picked up a sizeable working-class following, and was soon selling nearly a million per issue. In the process, Dan Dare became a national hero, inspiring an enormous quantity of toy merchandising, and even a radio serial: his influence on future science fiction movies, novels and, of course, comics would be very considerable. In short, The Eagle made adventure commercially viable, and in the process spawned a flood of imitators. As DC Thomson and the Amalgamated Press/IPC entered the fray in earnest, so a circulation war was initiated in much the same fashion as had happened with the humour comics. Once again the companies went toe to toe, producing adventure anthologies in The Eagle mould. These, however, were typically designed for a more wide-ranging readership. Consequently, they were less expensive, and generally produced in the same format, and on the same cheap paper, as The Beano and its ilk. Similarly, the tone tended to be much tougher than The Eagle, and more down to earth - in other words, death and destruction without the moralizing.  'Captain Hurricane', Valiant (Fleetway, 1966). Art/script: Anon. By the 1960s, adventure comics had gone downmarket: war had taken over as the dominant theme, and obnoxious characters such as this had overtaken the more 'decent' Dan Dare in popularity. |