2023 has been a great year for expanding my experience of writing comics, with the Rivers of London: Here Be Dragons miniseries published this past summer. But I couldn’t miss an opportunity to do another story for Commando, my sixth for D.C. Thompson’s long-running war comic series – and out today is issue #5707, a Cold War-era story set during the early years of the Space Age entitled “Duel in the Dark”…
In the early years of the Space Race, as the United States of America and the Soviet Union challenge one another for dominance of the ‘High Frontier’, two Air Force astronauts find themselves trapped in a dying space capsule when an out-of-control Russian weapon threatens to spark World War III…
For those of you unfamiliar with Commando, it’s one of Britain’s longest-running comics, first published in 1961. Four issues are published every two weeks in a ‘digest’ format, each featuring a single, complete 63-page story – two all-new tales and two reprints. Commando carries on the tradition of two-fisted, action-packed adventure comics, with wartime dramas in the tradition of movies like Where Eagles Dare or 633 Squadron.
The cover for “Duel in the Dark” is another great piece of work by Neil Roberts, with interior art by Gary Welsh.
I’d been kicking around the idea of pitching a space age Commando story for a while, after reading about the aborted space programs of the US Air Force from the late 1950s and early 1960s – specifically the Dyna-Soar spaceplane and the “Blue Gemini” and Manned Orbital Laboratory. At the time, the USAF were developing their own military space projects alongside the civilian NASA agency, born out of the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, who at that time were the world’s only space powers.
Based on NASA’s two-man Gemini space capsules, the plans for the so-called Blue Gemini were to create a larger, modified version of the craft for USAF operation – perhaps, as some observers suggested, one that might eventually be equipped with weapons! In tandem, the USAF were working on the Manned Orbital Laboratory (or MOL), a small space station that purported to be a base for low gravity science experiments – but this was the cover for the MOL’s true mission as a space observation platform, from which America could spy on the USSR. Russia also had its own military space projects in development, including the Almaz, an armed platform designed to destroy enemy satellites in orbit, which was allegedly live-fire tested in space in the 1970s.
Perhaps for the better, Blue Gemini, the MOL and the Dyna-Soar projects never went the distance, cancelled when it became clear that unmanned spy satellites could fulfill the same missions for a fraction of the cost – and the high frontier of space did not (at least for now) turn into another Cold War battleground, with many of the astronauts trained for the project transferring over to the early Space Shuttle program at NASA.
I was inspired by watching the brilliant alternate-history space drama series For All Mankind (currently in its 4th season on Apple TV+) and I returned to my original idea for a story. My Commando comic posits a different take on real events, where the US and Soviet military space programs continued onward, leading to the deadly confrontation that takes place in “Duel in the Dark“.
Although the story is fiction, I tried to draw from reality wherever I could – for example, the scene where KGB agents secretly record their conversation with the American astronauts and run out of tape is based on a moment that actually happened to some of NASA’s Apollo mission crewmen. I took a few dramatic liberties to make the narrative flow, but in the writing of this comic I had a great time delving into the history of these lost space endeavours and I hope that shines through in the story.
If you’d like to know more about these programs, check out this Discovery Channel documentary on YouTube. For more in-depth detail, I recommend reading The Dorian Files Revealed from the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance and Bill Rose’s Secret Projects: Military Space Technology, both of which were invaluable resources while researching this story.
For more about “Duel in the Dark”, follow this link or go here to visit the official Commando website. You can also check out details of the other Commando stories I’ve written here; and I’m pleased to say I’ll be back with more Commando adventures in 2024 – keep an eye on this blog for further information…
