The latest issue of Spaceship Away, the science fiction comics magazine inspired by and featuring the original Dan Dare, includes the first part of the Ex Astris strip “Homecoming”, set in the story’s 2511 time period, on an Earth devastated by both environmental and man made disaster.

The magazine has just gone to the printers and will be on sale in all its usual outlets, and online, soon.

Spaceship Away readers will soon realize that our latest episode of Ex Astris for the magazine is a very different beast to “Secrets of Ceres”, which ran in previous issues. This story, reflecting the huge scope of artist Mike Nicoll’s vision for the strip, is set in the 26th Century, at a point where Earth has long been a wasteland caused by a combination of environmental and other disasters, but humans are now fighting to reclaim their planet of birth from mysterious aliens and antagonistic descendants of the survivors of the world’s destruction some centuries previously.

While “Secrets of Ceres” is set before Earth is finally beset by disaster, Sarah Blake lives on in Katherine Blake in ‘Homecoming’, the all-action leader of an elite military squad aboard the Armstrong spaceship. Is she a direct descendant of Sarah, or are there other secrets yet to be revealed? More to the point, is Captain Charles Bryant the same Bryant followers of Ex Astris have seen in “Ceres” and “Return to the Moon” and, if so, how has he survived for almost five centuries? ↓ Read the rest of this entry…