Dan Dare: Spacefleet Operations Manual (Owner's Workshop Manual)

A great store of memories in the style of an old "look and learn" book....and the instructions that used to accompany an "Airfix" kit.Along with the original "comic style" stories....... a great book...

Some very good valve-punk spaceship plans, all part of the Dan Dare Universe.

Chaps of a certain age will remember April 14, 1950 when the first edition of the Eagle blasted off with the galactic adventures of Dan Dare. Now everytime I see the first issue cover reproduced somewhere I glance down to the bottom left corner to the see the Kingfisher zooming away from the headquarters of the Interplanet Space Fleet and I'm back in 1950 (with a few coupons for something or other still left in my ration book).The book is stuffed full of cutaways (I suppose it was a bit unrealistic to expect them all to be colour) of spacecraft from Dan's adventures over past decades. The illustrator Graham Bleathman has done a brilliant job creating these vehicles and a really nice touch is that they not super slick digital images as you would expect from, say, Daniel Simon but sort of up-to-date contemporary versions of those great Eagle centre-spread cutaways. All of them have numbers and captions explaining what everything does, there must be several hundred of these throughout the book.Apart from the cutaways there are plenty of pages covering what's going on in space: Treen craft; alien identification; hand weapons, Space Fleet equipment; space stations; commercial craft (including one with pin-up nose art) and near the front of the book a couple of spreads with mug shots of the twenty-five leading characters, including Digby's aunt Anastasia.Overall a lovely bit of nostalgia for those of a certain age.***LOOK AT SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

Colourful and informative, and brings back memories. A pity some of the Dan Dare adventures are either unavailable or ridiculously priced too high. I still believe a Dan Dare film could be made - amalgamating several storylines from Eagle.

If like me you grew up with Dan Dare, then this book is a must. It extensively covers the period when the brilliant Frank Hampson was responsible for the saga, and also the less inspired post-Hampson period. There are cutaway drawings of the Anastasia, a Telezero ship, the Valiant. Tharl's flagship, Lero's starship, a Spaceshark, Galileo McHoo's Galactic Galleon, the Zylbat and the Tempus Frangit, just to mention a few. Space stations such as the Mars J-series and M.E.K 1 are included, and are space bases on Earth, the Moon and Mars. As one might expect from Haynes, the cutaways are superbly detailed, and would not have disgraced the middle pages of Eagle.Space suits, weapons alien races and the major characters are well covered, and the history of the Space Fleet is very convincingly described. As might be expected, the author is well-versed in the Dan Dare canon, and readers will get a great deal of pleasure from the text.

I have most of Dan Dare in published book form. Certainly all the classic series I remember. I am a child of the fifties after all. This book completed the story for me in a witty, tongue in cheek fashion. It’s of ‘facts’ I knew and many I didn’t. I loved it!

A bigger format (I remember the size of the original comic) would have suited the illustrations better.But for the sale price it's great stuff.It shows just how good the original Eagle comic was, each relaunch of the comic or the Dan Dare stories getting progressively lower, in quality of the artwork and poorer in story line.A real tour down nostalgia lane.My only complaint is not about the book, but that it took a second attempt to get the order to me, still not heard what happened to the first one just disappeared once it was in the hands of the delivery (well none delivery) service.

Nostalgic! Great gift.