Packed with great new strips, stories and articles, the full-colour Eagle comic landed in the grey post-war gloom of Britain in April 1950. It lit up schoolboys' lives across the land with features on hobbies, sporting personalities and space travel. Weekly features included the resident Professor Brittain explaining radar (in the first issue; he'd later go on to tackle particle theory, splitting the atom and the inside of a London Underground ticket machine), and the legendarily detailed cutaways. The first cutaway featured a jet-black 'New Gas Turbine-Electric Locomotive' emerging at speed from a tunnel; later everything from the manufacturing of ice cream to the workings of the Quebec Bridge would be forensically dissected in beautiful Super-8 colour. Other stalwarts included PC49, Harris Tweed and Jeff Arnold (basically Dan Dare in a checked shirt and cowboy hat). There was also the intrepid MacDonald Hastings - a willing knife-thrower's target and human firework, and, of course, the greatest comic strip of all time: Dan Dare, Frank Hampson's painfully detailed Pilot of the Future...
