I'm really pleased to see Titan Books reviving their Dan Dare collections after a 6 year gap with the already released 'Mission of the Earthmen' and the upcoming 'Earth Stealers' due in May. Can we expect a third?
Some of the previous 13 volumes are still in print but the majority are not, and I was wondering if Titan Books plan to re-release some if not all of these volumes. I have all but one volume and I would love to have a complete collection of these.
Can anyone shed some light to the above queries? Thanks in advanced!
Hi Gary.
I don't have that info but I wanted to add how good Pete Milligan's recent Dan Dare series was. It was more suited to the new Eagle but had a good plot with an imprisoned Mekon playing a 'Hannibal Lector' type game behind glass.
One observation about Dan is that his original audience born in the 40s/50s are unfortunately in their very Senior years and I've noticed more Dan Dare artwork come back on the market. I guess what I'm saying is I doubt Titan would do a full reprint. Which book do you need?
I'm slightly surprised they've not reissued the line in some form – some kind of doubled volumes (as you see many publishers do, notably Image), or big ol' paperbacks. Perhaps their take is to just continue getting existing collectors (which must be diminishing in number) to buy each new book. I'm quite interested in Dare myself, but having missed the first few, I never got around to bothering with the others.
Indigo - if you've not yet started I'd say opt for the Hawk reprints
They are now pretty affordable on eBay and really well done.
The old days of £80 a book are well gone and you can get them all from £10 - £30 each
I was thinking of collecting the dare titan hardcovers...whats the difference between these and the Hawk reprints?
Quote from: Mute77 on 14 February, 2018, 12:34:07 PM
I was thinking of collecting the dare titan hardcovers...whats the difference between these and the Hawk reprints?
It's about a different character, for starters!
The Hawk books are larger, so the pages are printed exactly the same size as the original issues and vary wildly in page count as they reprint whole stories.
Whereas the titan books reduce the page size and on occasion split the story across books so the books are even sizes. But the titan books do have great intros.
An interesting one is the first Dragon Dream's reprint where Don Harley replaced the Eagle logo with amazing new artwork / expansion of existing panel. Unfortunately after this, the editor weirdly just zooms in on the frame to replace the logo.
Ah cheers for that matty. Ill check out ebay.
It's also worth bearing in mind that the Hawk Book series stopped well before the end of the original Eagle run with a very selective closing few volumes. Not sure how Titan have covered this. Would have to go back and look at my collection. I did look a couple of times at switching from the Hawk to Titan reprints but stuck with the Hawks. Glanced at the Titans a couple of times and decided they were slightly inferior but you have this gap issue to deal with.
What would be really nice if Titan would take advantage of their license and reprint the eighties Dare strips in hardback. Ian Kennedy's artwork desperately deserves that sort of treatment. That NBC suit cover is iconic.
Ill probably opt for the occasional titan hardcovers (They did a fab job on charleys war). Are there any stand out story arcs or books anyone could recommend?
I have the first 11 Titans then foolishly decided that since they weren't continuing, I would stop with Hampson.... bah! If they do some reprints of the first 13 (or at least those last two!) then I'm back on board!
I'm sure I read (or heard) somewhere that the resumed Titan reprints plan to cover the stories omitted by Hawk Books, but I can't find any reference to it now. I'd think they're still two or three volumes away from reaching them though.
The gaps in the Hawk Books series are largely from the late 1960s when the series was in b/w and/or printed across the centre-spread or other variations. In the final Hawk volume (12) they said they were skipping these as they didn't fit the format of their reprints.
If you can't wait for the Titan volumes to fill the gaps the Spaceship Away (http://spaceshipaway.org) folk have 7 A3-ish sized volumes that cover these stories. They're stapled paperbacks (with laminated covers) and reprint complete stories, so range from 40 to 90 pages, costing around £20 each. The extra "Mekon's Revenge" volume reprints the three Keith Watson drawn stories from when the original Dan Dare returned to the New Eagle in 1989/90.
I thought the new Titan volume had great reproduction of the artwork, and the feature material was an interesting read. If you're looking to continue on from the older books it's worth knowing a few changes seem to have been made - the dust jackets have been ditched and (*obscure detail alert*) the story titles, recap boxes and cover-lines seem to have been recreated, rather than reprinted (the same cover-lines are used throughout, rather than being the original Eagle covers). I guess some of this was done to improve readability, as the original typed text on the recap boxes is quite small. (The spines are fine, btw ;).)