GoCompare homages Dan Dare

The creators of those annoying Opera Singer insurance adverts for GoCompare.com have redeemed themselves, in part, with this clearly Dan Dare inspired plug for their services - complete with comic-style speech balloons, weird aliens and Space Fleet uniforms.

'Gio Compario' is again played by real life Welsh opera star Wynne Evans,  one of the UK’s leading Tenors, having sung as a principal with most of the major opera houses and orchestras.

While the ads may be annoying, GoCompare say the response to their film related ads has been very positive,

"It’s fair to say that Gio Compario has become one of the most recognisable and talked about figures on British television," says Gocompare.com’s head of marketing, Nick Hall. "Whether you’re an opera fan or not this campaign has made a massive difference in terms of brand awareness and recall and that has translated directly to a big uplift in site traffic.”

• For all of GoCompare's other annoying other TV Adverts, visit the Gio Compario YouTube Channel. Who needs meerkats, eh?

Commando Webbing: Ian Kennedy, Ken Barr and More Reprint Books

It has been a while since we did a Commando Webbing and there is rather a lot to get through...

Two weeks ago DC Thomson's Dundee Courier ran an interview with Commando cover artist Ian Kennedy on his long career in UK comics. The article, entitled "The Art Of The Illustrator", took a full page of the Courier's broadsheet Weekend section with photos of Kennedy and six unlettered versions of his Commando covers. The interview is now online both on the Courier website and the Commando website with different illustrations on each site.

Despite having done some 1200 Commando covers Kennedy did not start on the title until it was in its ninth year of publication. Before that time Ken Barr was the pre-eminent Commando cover artist with covers just as action packed as Kennedy's, albeit not as accurate. Peter Richardson has been choosing some of his favourite Commando covers by Barr and now has a string of articles showing them off over on the Cloud 109 blog - here, here and here.

From old covers to new books and the set of new Commando reprint books from Carlton that editor Calum Laird mentioned when he was interviewed on downthetubes at the start of January have made an appearance on Amazon UK. Unlike the previous Commando reprint books which were true doorstops with 10 or 12 stories each and which retailed around the £15 price point, these new books will have three stories in each and a £4.99 price point. They will also be published the same size as Commando as opposed to the 125% size of the thicker tomes. Each of the four books has a theme - Action Stations! will be naval warfare, Tally Ho! will be aerial warfare, Achtung! will pit British troops against the Germans while Banzai! unsurprisingly will set them against the Japanese. All four books will include an introduction by Calum Laird and will feature a Commando 50th anniversary logo. With 208 pages each, Amazon lists their publishing date as 7 July 2011.

The next of the new big Commando reprint books from Carlton is Rogue Raiders priced at £15.99 and due on 12 May 2011. Before that however is a reissue of D-Day: Fight or Die! originally published with 12 stories in 2009 and boasting a D-Day 65th anniversary logo. The new edition due on 5 May 2011 will not just loose the 65th anniversary logo but two stories as well - the 2011 edition will have 10 stories for the same £15.99 price as the 12 stories of 2009 edition.

Better value can be found in The Works bargain book shops with the reappearance of the SevenOaks versions of the big Commando books. When Carlton originally started publishing the big books they also did bargain versions of the first few under their SevenOaks imprint. These versions were the same size and had the same contents as the Carlton versions but used different covers and normally dropped the main title using instead the subtitle of the Carlton books. While they had the full Carlton price on the back cover they were normally discounted to around £7. There were at least five Carlton Commando titles given the Sevenoaks treatment some of which are mentioned over on Bear Alley. The second of the Carlton books to be published was Commando: True Brit with a cover of a marine firing a 20mm Oerlikon cannon which became The 12 Toughest Commando Stories Ever when SevenOaks published it with an Ian Kennedy cover of a paratrooper firing a PIAT. Just to confuse matters even further True Brit has now been re-released as a 10 story SevenOaks version with the original Oerlikon cover but the title has now become True Grit.

After all that we must have earned our compo rations for the day.

There is more information on Commando at the official Commando website.

There are more details of the Carlton Commando books on the Carlton website.

Motton's Memories: an interview with one of Dan Dare's early writers

Thanks to a chance discovery on the Internet, downthetubes is pleased to be able to present a rare interview with comics writer David Motton, whose career spanned three decades of British comics publishing, but is probably best known for his Dan Dare stories for Eagle, most drawn by Keith Watson.

Before he went freelance as a writer, David worked for the Fleetway on the editorial staff of The Sun Comic, becoming its editor in its final years, after which he took over the editorship of Knockout and Film Fun - simultaneously for a while. He also scripted many stories during his staff years, notably Jet-Ace Logan and Max Bravo - The Happy Hussar.

As well as Dan Dare (and at the same time), David's many credits include Skid Solo for Tiger, The Guinea Pig for Eagle, Burke's Law for early editions of TV Century 21, The Woodentops for Pippin, Space Patrol and some Doctor Who stories for TV Comic.

"I produced much other work too, both before and after," he says. "As time went by and jobs moved on in the nature of things, I wrote many articles for Tell Me Why and Look And Learn.

"In the early 1970s the London markets for my work closed down and I then spent a good few years, until the end of my writing days, working for D.C. Thomson of Dundee. My work spanned a wide range of their publications including among others Commando (I actually wrote the opening issues of these under a pseudonym back in the early 1960s), Wizard, Hotspur, Valiant, Mandy, Bunty, Debbie, Judy and, finally, Desperate Dan in The Dandy."

David's time on Dan Dare is considered controversial by some, but it's clear he remembers working on the strip with fondness -- and is somewhat stunned by the sheer volume of inaccurate information about him and his work on the web. We're delighted to be able to present David's account of his comics career, together with questions posed about his work by several British comics fans.

• You can read the full interview on the downthetubes main site here

Dan Dare and Eagle © Dan Dare Corporation

Print Media to publish Dave Morris and Leo Hartas Mirabilis project

Print Media Productions has announced it will be publishing hardcover editions of Mirabilis: Year of Wonders -- a huge graphic novel project by Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, also available on iPad and soon to debut on digital platforms Graphic.ly and Comics+.

Mirabilis is a fantasy adventure story for young adults which opens New Year’s Day 1901, when a green comet appears in the sky. As it gets bigger, the line between reality and fantasy blurs. Soon there are mermaids in the Thames, elves in Parliament and a dragon roosting on Big Ben. But then the comet rounds the sun and starts to fade. Will the world be able to go back to a life without magic?

The full-colour graphic novel was originally serialized in The DFC, the weekly print comic published by Random House UK, who financed the production and has been released as a digital edition for iPad.

Published by Random House, The DFC treated several thousand devoted subscribers to the very best in British graphic fiction, with stories by top-name talent like Phillip Pullman and Harry Potter artist Adam Brockbank.

The biggest single project among all The DFC's ongoing stories was unquestionably Mirabilis, a hugely ambitious comics saga planned to span almost 200 issues. Billed as "a modern Tintin", Mirabilis's planned 800 pages equals more than a dozen volumes of Herge's classic comic series.

When The DFC closed, Mirabilis creators Dave Morris and Leo Hartas had barely begun to tell their epic yarn. The next two installments appeared on the Mirabilis website (www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com) and drew almost 8000 hits. That's when Hartas and Morris realized they could be onto something.

"We couldn't bear to end our story there," explains Morris, a bestselling UK author and a mentor with the American Film Institute. "You have a duty both to your readers and to the characters you've created not to leave them in the middle of a cliff-hanger."

"The question was how to finance the project," says Hartas, the award-winning illustrator who draws the Mirabilis comic. "It's a recession and nobody was investing in anything. Then we decided, to hell with it – rather than looking around for new work, we'd just get our heads down and complete the story."

Dragon Rides - art for Mirabilis by Leo Hartas

The new Mirabilis

The first season of Mirabilis is now ready. Mirabilis: Winter is a whopping 200-page book whose eight chapters comprise the first act of Mirabilis's year of wonders. Morris and Hartas had several discussions with David Fickling, The DFC's ebullient editor, about releasing it through his book imprint. But the tortuously slow progress of print publishing meant that the first volume wouldn't appear until late 2012 – and Fickling and his Random House paymasters couldn't commit to future books until they saw the sales figures.

"In the end, much as we would have loved to stay with the Fickling label, we decided to keep doing it our way," says Hartas. "We just wanted to get the work out there in front of readers as soon as possible."

Two events provided the key to achieving that ambitious goal. First with the release of the iPad, which allowed Morris and Hartas to launch a digital version of the comic in time for Christmas 2010, and then in a deal with Print Media Productions, who have signed up Mirabilis: Winter for release as two prestige-format hardback volumes that will be in UK bookshops in 2011.

Morris and Hartas had already had offers from digital publishers to release Mirabilis on iPhone, but were reluctant because the small screen didn't do justice to the fabulous full-colour artwork. "A graphic novel page is not merely a storyboard sequence of panels," says Morris. "On a phone screen you lose too much of the full reading experience of a printed book. The iPad, though, that's another matter."

Teaming up with Brighton-based TDB Software, Morris and Hartas drew on both their creative and entrepreneurial experience to set up Mirabilis on iPad through their own Mirus Entertainment label. The Mirabilis app is free and comes with the first 25-page chapter already loaded. Subsequent chapters are $1.99 and have been crafted to evoke the experience of collecting a set of comic books, right down to the covers and letters page.

"A comic is more than just a novel with pictures," says Hartas. "It's about community, it's about being drawn into a completely immersive fantasy world."

As inveterate comic and book collectors, Morris and Hartas were not content for their story to only appear digitally. “That’s why the offer from Print Media Productions came at such an ideal time,” says Hartas. “Print Media have their own print works in Europe, meaning that we can work closely with our editor, John Freeman and publisher Ivo Milicevic, to get the production quality tuned to perfection without the long delays that other publishers have to suffer with books being printed out in the Far East.”

The first volume was printed last week in Bosnia, and Dave and Leo were involved in pre-production every step of the way.

The Print Media edition of Mirabilis: Winter is being published as two top-quality hardback books, each of 112 pages, at the large-format album size traditional for European graphic novels that can be seen in a series like Charley’s War and the company's first graphic album release, The Iron Moon.

Mirabilis: Year of Wonders Volume 1 is now being solicited by Diamond (Order Code FEB111949), joining Keith Page and Stephen Walsh's Iron Moon title as the first graphic album projects from the new British company.

• More information on the Print Media web page: www.stripmagazine.co.uk

• Mirabilis: Winter Book One can be ordered via Diamond Previews, Order Code FEB111949.


• Mirabilis on iTunes . Versions for Graphic.ly and Comics+ will be announced soon

• Learn more at www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com