| Posted: 09 July 2011 at 9:43am | IP Logged | 6
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"... Calling Controller, Spacefleet H.Q. - 'SPA-ONE' Calling Controller..."•• Here Bill quotes the opening lines from what I have noted is perhaps my favorite DAN DARE story, PROJECT NIMBUS. More scrumptious art by Bellamy: 
This was the page on which Hamson fans, many of whom had not been happy with Bellamy taking over the strip, now got the second Frank in full force. The editors had instructed Bellamy to "update" DARE -- Hampson's Space Fleet had been very much modeled on the RAF of World War 2 -- and he took them at their word. On this page we saw the new uniform tunics, for instance, no longer looking like they would have been quite at home on an airfield during the Battle of Britain. SPA-1 was a far cry from Hampson's school of space tech, too. Notice also the redesigned SF badges, on Dan's cap in the title blurb, and on the shoulder flash of the jackets (seen also in my drawing, above). Look familiar? Curiously, when Bellamy departed the ships and uniforms and other such designs began morphing back to the Hampson models -- most likely because it was Hampson's studio (minus Hampson) that took on the art chores. The following page includes a short sequence leading to the weekly cliffhanger that was one of the most chilling I had read in a comic up to that point. Not much since has done much to eclipse it, either! People who feel they need to "write down" in order to write "for kids" should look at some of this EAGLE stuff!!
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