A Month of... Board Games! Day 22: It's coming up / It's coming up / It's coming up / It's coming up / It's coming up / It's coming up

Dan Dare! Pilot of the Future! uture uture uture uture Hero and champion to all British kiddies the United Kingdom world over! But despite some decent attempts (by Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis) at publishing him in America (by, of all disparate comics companies, Fantagraphics and Virgin), Mister D. has never become the cult hero here in these here United States the way he is in England. We tend to prefer our own homegrown iconic, ultrapopular space heroes like Harry Broderick, Shane Vansen, Dan Holland, William "Hawk" Hawkins, Dylan Hunt, Joel Robinson and William Anthony Rogers. Maybe it's just that Dan Dare didn't have his own annoying robot sidekick voiced by Mel Blanc! I'd get on that problem right now, Fleetway. Or perhaps the BBC could jumpstart interest in "Biggles in Space" by commissioning a television or movie series, probably starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dan, James Corden as his batman Digby, Greg Davies as Colonel Wilf Banger, Alex Kingston as Professor Peabody, Jon Langford as the Mekon, and some CGI as the good ship Anatasia. I do believe I've just started writing some Dan Dare BBC fan fiction. And of course, the signature tune could be that Elton John classic track "Dan Dare (Pilot Of The Future)!"


Or, y'know, we could just all get to know Dan Dare a little better simply by sitting down around a table of the future and playing his game.

"Dan Dare: Journey to Venus" from Eagle Annual 1986 (IPC Magazines Ltd., 1986); creators unknown
(Click picture to dare-to-compare-size)

Here's the too-complicated-for-their-own-good instructions for getting to the apparently twin planets of Venus and Venus II:


Dare!
(Ah-ahhhh!)
Pilot of the futureverse!
Dare!
(Ah-ahhhh!)
He'll save every one of us!