Dan Dare art up for sale on eBay

A page of Dan Dare artwork from the original Eagle is currently up for sale on eBay, on offer from American comics creator and editor Scott Dunbier.

The art is a page from the story The Phantom Fleet, first published in Eagle 50 (volume 9) in 1950.

Written by Alan Stranks, the artists credited for this story are Dan Dare co-creator Frank Hampson, Keith Watson and Desmond Walduck, but the Scott says "there’s probably more Duck here than Ham".

In the story, radio and television transmissions are being disrupted throughout the Solar System by an unknown force. Spaceships are disappearing. After a rocket ship carrying Sir Hubert Guest goes missing, Dan and crew set out to discover what has happened to it.

They find a fleet of huge alien craft containing peaceful aquatic creatures called Cosmobes who are fleeing from another aquatic race, the warlike Pescods, whose "Crimson Death" weapon destroys all metals on contact.

Attempts to destroy the Pescods' pursuing fleet fail, and they dive into the Earth's ocean and begin to build themselves a city. Fortunately for Earth the Pescods' settlement is on top of the submerged volcano Krakatoa, and when it erupts due to seismic disturbances from the pesky Pescods, they are all destroyed.

A panel from the offered Dan Dare page

The art measures 9.5 x 12.5 inches on large illustration board; the art is in nice shape but has some staining (perhaps no surprise given the many horror stories told down the years about how such art was treated by some publishers) and shows some age.

Scott previously bought and sold original comic art since the early 1980s, but "gave it up full time in 1995 to work in comics publishing."

While we were on eBay, we also came across seller "alanb1109", who regularly sells copies of Eagle and has announced he is about to offer quite a substantial collection in coming weeks.

Could be worth keeping an eye on.

• View The Phantom Fleet art here on eBay

• Dan Dare comics checklist (GoogleDoc, corrections, additional information welcome)

In Review: Cinebook Recounts The Wright Brothers

Cinebook return to their historically factual series Cinebook Recounts with the story of the first manned flight of a powered aeroplane at Kitty Hawk in America in 1903 with The Wright Brothers, written by J P Lefevre-Garros and illustrated by Marcel Uderzo.

Engineers Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their money printing newspapers in Daytona, Ohio and, by the turn of the twentieth century, had moved on to manufacturing the new craze of the day, bicycles. However their real desire was to fly and leaving their sister in charge of the bicycle business they used the winters to travel to the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, were they flew firstly large kites before moving on to gliders. With the experience of designing and flying the gliders, their next task was to design a light but powerful engine that they could fit to their aircraft to power it. But they were not the only engineers around the world with similar plans.

This book has a bit of tortuous history. It was originally published in Europe as Biggles Raconte Les Frères Wright in 2005, part of a series of factual aviation history books themed around WE John's pilot character but not actually featuring Biggles himself. Cinebook managed to release two of the books from this series, Biggles Recounts The Falklands War and Biggles Recounts The Battle Of Britain, in 2007 and 2008 with Biggles Recounts The Wright Brothers due for 2009 but issues arose between the estate of WE Johns and Lombard, the original French publishers. This lead to Lombard loosing their Biggles licence, meaning that Cinebook could no longer release any Biggles titles. While this stymied further releases in their fictional Biggles series, as the character was not in the factual series they retitled it as Cinebook Recounts and started again.

With Battle of Britain and The Falklands War rereleased under the new series title, The Wright Brothers is the first of the "new" Recounts books, albeit with an English translation dating from 2008.

This was originally the sixth book in the Biggles Raconte series and by this point the French series had covered mainly war topics with their inherent action and adventure, so the tale of two engineers who designed big kites and then incrementally modified their designs until they reached a controllable, manned aircraft was a change of pace. This is not a dull book by any means but readers expecting a tale of adventure and daring pilots will be disappointed. Lefevre-Garros gives the background to the brothers work, setting the historical scene by mentioning some of the other people working towards manned flight at the time and even suggesting in the second panel of the book that a Frenchman beat them to it (Clement Ader did just struggle into the air in 1897 but it was an uncontrolled hop). While many others appear to have started by jumping in the deep end and building a powered aircraft that they didn't know how to fly, the Wrights started with kites to learn aerodynamics and then moved on to gliders so that they knew how to control an aircraft in flight before finally progressing to a powered aeroplane.

Backed up by Marcel Uderzo's detailed and accurate artwork, Lefevre-Garros takes the reader through the years of test flying the kites and gliders and the Wrights' redesigns on them as they found the weaknesses of each stage of their development before reaching the morning of 17 December 1903 when Orville Wright lay down in the pilot's position of the aircraft they simply called Flyer but we now refer to as Wright Flyer 1, turned the engine on and literally flew into the history books.

Cinebook Recounts The Wright Brothers is not an action packed tale of daring pilots but it is a detailed and well illustrated account of the logical design steps of two engineers that lead up to a moment in history - and that is what makes it worth reading.

There are more details of Cinebook Recounts The Wright Brothers and the other titles in the Cinebook Recounts series on the Cinebook website.

There are more details of the original French Biggles Raconte books on the International Biggles Association website.

Put some dinosaurs in your Christmas!

Here's something that might make for a great last minute stocking filler - Dinohistoria, a different, fun and entertaining, educational card game for all the family.

Dinohistoria has 56 playing cards, each with an illustration licensed by the Picture Library of the Natural History Museum, London featuring over 30 different dinosaurs. Many of them are familiar, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Iguanodon, Triceratops and Pteranodon, but there are over 20 other animals too, including Smilodon (Sabre-toothed Tiger) and Mammuthus primigenius (Woolly mammoth), with facts about them.

Although it's aimed at kids of 7+ the publishers, Educational Learning, have have added rules for additional games to the company's website, www.educationallearning.co.uk, so younger children from 5+ can play.

Also on sale is the Wildcat game, featuring photographs of wild cats from around the world.

Age of the Wolf set to return to 2000AD

The claws are out for the return of post-apocalyptic werewolves series, Age of the Wolf, to 2000AD early next year.

Lycanthrope-hunting heroine Rowan Morrigan is to return to the weekly comic in February 2012 in Age of the Wolf: She is Legend.

It's the second chapter in the fast-moving fantasy series – in which a spellbound moon has turned half the earth’s population into ravenous werewolves – by writer Alec Worley (Dandridge, Six Brothers) and Eagle Award-nominated artist Jon Davis-Hunt (Judge Dredd, Transformers), and it stars one of the strongest female characters to emerge from 2000AD in recent years: a reluctant action heroine who’s more than a match for the ‘Big Bad Wolf’.

In the series, London has become a primordial forest in which surviving humans are being hunted to extinction. And there are worse things than lycanthropes lurking among the overgrown ruins of the city. The fortified remains of Buckingham Palace have been taken over by a ruthless gang of slavers, the Skinners: Harry, a hulking neo-Nazi with a sinister secret, his sister Kate, a sadistic huntress with a score to settle, and their merciless matriarch ‘Granny’.

While the forest community face slavery or death, the only thing standing in the Skinners’ way is a mysterious red-haired woman known among those she protects as ‘Little Red Robin Hood.’

With this and more thrill-drenched series launching in 2000AD over the coming year, now’s the perfect time to jump aboard and buy this year’s 100-page Christmas special.

Prog 2012 features a circuit-shattering line-up of seasonal thrills including classic titles Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Nikolai Dante and Sinister Dexter, alongside stories from newcomers Dandridge and Absalom.

This issue also sees the launch of two brand new thrills: sci-fi drama Grey Area by Dan Abnett and Karl Richardson, and ancient Roman action fantasy Aquila by Gordon Rennie and Leigh Gallagher.

• 2000AD Prog 2012 is now on sale. For print and digital subscription details visit www.2000adonline.com