The Eagle Has Landed

I've spent quite a bit of time this past week engrossed in two compilation annuals of the Eagle comic which collect together various strips and features from the publication in the 1950s and 1960s respectively.  It really was a different world back then!  It is the features rather than the strips which I found fascinating, the subject matter and tone clearly indicating the target audience for the comic: middle class or aspirational upper working class children.  Actually, to be accurate,middle class or aspirational upper working class boys.  Although there was the occasional letter from a girl, the focus was firmly masculine.  The letters pages are very strange to read now, full of highly respectful letters about newts, tips on navigating and the like.  The letters pages where readers have been invited to air their opinions on a specific subject now seem very quaint, especially one from the 1960s about Cassius Clay (as he was then), with some readers opining that his world heavyweight title was just a fluke and that all his banter showed that he was of low intelligence!  Thankfully, the issue of race wasn't brought up.

Some of the features seem simply bizarre, none more so than the competition to win a bike, in which all readers had to do was correctly identify the make and model of half a dozen electric ovens from a series of very small photographs.  A long-running feature seemed to be 'The History of Weapons' - every week a new means of dealing death explained in loving detail!  This week: the flamethrower.  I'm pretty sure you'd never get away with such a glamourisation of weapons these days!  You definitely wouldn't get away with offering a jack knife as the prize for the best letter of the week, but apparently back in the 1950s that was considered a suitable thing to give to young readers.  Like I said, it was a different world back then.

Of course, the most striking thing about the Eagle, embodied in both the features and strips such as Dan Dare, was the faith in technological advance and the idea that this could only lead to a better world.  This undoubtedly had its roots in the dark years of World War Two and the subsequent years of drab austerity.  All those gleaming futuristic airliners and pristine cities of tomorrow, full of monorails and moving walkways, were obviously a reaction to these traumatic events and a desire to believe that a better world was possible.  It is this positivity and belief that the future - via the march of technology - could be better than the present that characterised the comic throughout its near twenty year run.  The faith in technology, expressed through all those detailed and lovingly drawn cutaways of ships, power stations and jet planes, seems touching and more than slightly misplaced at this distance in time.  But hell, it was a different world back then.