On the front cover, Eagle featured Dan Dare, the lantern jawed squeaky clean hero:
He could easily dominate the whole front page:
He was always helped, and occasionally hindered, by Digby, his rather podgy sidekick:
Presumably, he was named after an extremely obscure aircraft called the Digby, which was the name given to the Douglas B-18 Bolo in Canadian Air Force service. You can see this lost aircraft in action in the Powell and Pressburger film “49th Parallel” made in 1941 with Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier. It’s a thriller well worth keeping an eye out for, and a film which portrays perfectly the repulsive attitudes of the Nazis:
Here’s another picture of Digby:
And, yes, he is using an electric hairdryer as a weapon:
I shouldn’t poke fun, though. Some of the science was years ahead of its time. Who else had heard of nuclear fusion in 1950?:
Dan Dare and Digby had their nemesis in the extraterrestrial figure of “The Mekon”:
Dan, Digby and the Mekon caused a revolution in the unchanging comic world of Weary Willie and Tired Tim. Issue N0 2 of Eagle came out on April 21st and the comic was on its way. Here’s the top half of that second issue:
And the bottom half of the same page:
Sometimes the price of the comic was rather strange. This issue cost 4½ old pence which even in the days of a pound made up of 240 pence was an unusual price. I can’t get enough of that eagle personally:
On the other hand, there was a 4½d stamp at the time. Here’s a special one for National Nature Week:
The Eagle went from strength to strength, with its brightly coloured, vigorous art work…
It always had futuristic machines…
Here’s that orange caption:
There are occasional monsters…
And the Dan Dare stories always had lots of alien species. Was it this type of picture that inspired the bars and cafes of “Star Wars” ?
Why, they even had girls from time to time…
John Knifton 