The permission from the Hampson family to revive Dan Dare rested on its being completely compatible with the original Hampson stories. Sydney paid me to research them and I identified the available time-frame for new stories between ‘The Ship that Lived’ and ‘The Phantom Fleet’. As I previously said, the second story which I was writing would have been about clean-up operations in Earth orbit, removing leftover armaments from the battle in which the Mekon conquered Earth while Dan Dare was on Cryptos.

But if Venus was left uninhabitable at the end of the first story, Hampson fans would have been writing in droves. Venus is definitely habitable at the start of ‘Safari in Space’, where – to quote Norman Wright’s “Dan Dare Dessier” – “while taking a well-earned rest on the uninhabited island of Maraku, in South Venus, Dan, Digby and Flamer are kidnapped. The same fate befalls Lex, Sir Hubert and Jocelyn Peabody, who are enjoying their leave in the north of Venus.” If the Sunday Planet strip had gone ahead as planned, we would have had a problem talking out way out of that!