Monday 7 June 2021

Comics of the 1950s Part Two

“No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet. But of the conceptions of the past we make a future.” Thomas Hobbs


Which is a pretty neat way of summing up how comics like the Eagle described the future.

 In their flagship story featuring Dan Dare Pilot of the Future were accounts of how the future would play out sometime in the 1990s.

The vision was bold enough and the art work by Frank Hampson and his team both innovative and quite stunning, but the technology belonged to the late 1940s and ‘50s. So state of the art spaceships were operated by leavers and dials and uniforms of Space Fleet resembled those of the British armed forces circa 1950.

This was a Solar System where cold cruel dictators existed but were no match for the values, pluck and determination of the united peoples’ of Earth, and once defeated they too came to adopt our values and worked together to build a peaceful future.

It was a vision arising directly from the turmoil of the Second World War and incorporated the ideals of the newly formed United Nations Organisation.

And the great problems from famine to other natural as well as human made disasters could be solved without  resort to war and conquest.

Not a bad vision for the future.

Picture; from the front of the Eagle February 11 1952

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