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 "Eagle", on 14 April 1950. There were two large colour pages of his story per issue. The artwork was of a high quality, the product of artists in a studio called the Old Bakehouse in Churchtown, Southport, Lancashire. The Eagle's founder, the Rev John Marcus Harston Morris, was vicar of the Southport church of St James at the time. It had scale models of spaceships, and models in costume as reference for the artists. Occasionally, "Eagle" incorporated "centrefolds" of the fictional spaceships, such as Dan's ship the "Anastasia", reminiscent of cutaway drawings of aircraft in aviation magazines or even "Eagle"