This has to be Virgin Comics' strangest project to date - a revival of Dan Dare, by Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine.

When I think of possible writers for Dan Dare, Ennis doesn't exactly spring to mind.  Too adult, too warped.  Not usually that interested in the square-jawed classic heroes.  It doesn't seem like a book that would appeal to him.  But Ennis seems more at home here than you would expect.

Dan Dare is a tricky character to revive.  His heyday was in the 1950s, and he's very much a product of his time.  As the original title (Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future) indicates, he was basically a classic war hero, relocated to space.  And it was very much a 1950s British version of space, in which everyone is terribly English, and the space fleet is a modified version of the RAF.  Dan is the sci-fi counterpart of Biggles, and still has one foot in that genre.

This makes him very difficult to update.  The setting of his original stories is now incredibly anachronistic.  A straight revival would be bizarre.  But if you reinvent him from scratch, you lose sight of the point.  Dan Dare isn't a character, it's a strip.  On his own, shorn of his supporting cast and of Frank Hampton's designs, he's a generic pilot hero.  You need the whole package to make it interesting.  The question is how you update the package.

Ennis's approach is to make Dan the embodiment of a bygone and superior era.  This series is meant to be a sequel to the original Dan Dare stories.  Fortunately for Ennis, those stories notionally took place in the 1990s, meaning that the characters are still a sensible age a decade later.  In the intervening time, Britain has become the most powerful country in the world - not through being especially good, but by virtue of having the only effective missile defence system when everyone else blew themselves to smithereens.  But despite economic prosperity, modern Britain is apparently a bit of a soulless place, run by mediocrities.

So when the Mekon shows up again, Dan Dare gets to return, in the style of King Arthur, to put things right.  He's openly presented as a 1950s throwback, embodying everything that was warm and comfortable about rural Englishness as adored by John Major and Sunday evening dramas on ITV.  More to the point, we're not invited to treat that with any degree of irony.  Ennis clearly wants us to accept that Dan Dare embodies values that are timeless, British and wonderful.  He is everything that was good about the establishment.

This is a tricky angle to pull off, but Ennis largely manages to make it work.  He seems to take Dan Dare seriously, treating him in the same way that he writes Superman.  This is not a post-modern reinvention and it is not a parody.  The concept allows him to serve as one of Ennis' stock protagonists - the wise military veteran beset by mediocre functionaries.

Gary Erskine hits the right tone with the art.  His English countryside is utopian, while the visuals for his space fleet look like the modern Navy transplanted into spaceships.  It isn't retro, exactly, but it has the feel of present-day Britain in space.

This may sound like a ridiculous mismatch of creator and character, but it works unexpectedly well.  Where it could head in the long term, I'm not sure, and there are real challenges in doing this particular take on Dan Dare without coming across as reactionary.  But I liked it, and it's actually something a little different for Ennis.

Rating: A-

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