Dan Dare Mekon. The initial artist was Gerry Embleton, who drew Dan to resemble the original exactly, but he was quickly replaced by Ian Kennedy, who gave the hero a younger look and blond hair. The opening "Dan Dare" story was an epic, lasting 18 months, written by Pat Mills and John Wagner. It opened with a flashback to the unseen final defeat of the Mekon by the original Dan, after which he was sealed inside an artificial asteroid and exiled into space. Centuries later he was accidentally freed and returned to conquer Earth. A few years later the descendant of his
Dan Dare also continued in "Spaceship Away", a mail-order magazine created by Rod Barzilay. Its mission statement is to continue the original Dare's adventures where the original "Eagle" left off, in a style as close to that of the classic strip as possible. To that end, Barzilay originally hired former Eagle artist Keith Watson, and following Watson's death Don Harley, both of whom had drawn Dare in the 1960s, to work on the strips which are written very much in the style of the Fifties stories. Dan Dare appeared on the cover of the first issue of the weekly comic strip magazine,