I may be in the minority here, but I loved the 2000 AD incarnation of Dan Dare. Sure, he was a lot different to the original version from Eagle, but in the early days I wasn't familiar with the 1950s version and, more importantly, I was eleven.

As I write this, I'm about 130 issues into my Big Reread of 2000 AD (only another 1500 or so issues to go!), and I've just passed the point where we were told that Dan Dare would be "taking a break" for a while, and that he would return soon. Well, that was 29.5 years ago and I'm still waiting.

Of course, Dan Dare has returned since, in the pages of the new Eagle comic (in the form of his grandson or a different incarnation of his original self or something; I can't actually remember because I stopped buying it after the first few issues), in the deservedly short-lived Revolver (written by Grant Morrison who gave us an alternative look at the latter days of the original), in the Planet newspaper (which lasted exactly one issue) and, more recently, in Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine's revival for Virgin Comics (which shows us how good the Revolver version could have been if it hadn't been an attack on Thatcherism disguised as a Dan Dare story).

But he never returned to 2000 AD. Grumble, grumble.

Anyway. The 2000 AD version was a tremendous amount of fun, and contained some truly fantastic artwork. The first two "sagas" were drawn by the late and much-missed Massimo Belardinelli - visceral, organic, gorgeous and often quite disturbing - while the long-running "Lost Worlds" serial was drawn chiefly by Dave Gibbons, an obscure artist of whom little has been heard since (except for Watchmen, Give Me Liberty, Thunderbolt Jaxon and about a hundred other examples of the finest comics ever created).

Gibbons' artwork blew me away when I was a kid, and now, on the Big Reread, it's blown me away all over again. Some of his spaceship designs are breathtakingly elegant, and I've now got a whole bunch of 'em lined up for conversion to 3D.

Dan Dare's Eagle shuttlecraft from the very early days of 2000 AD. It's a very simple design, but elegant. Unlike most of my other models, almost all of the detail on the Eagle is created by texture-mapping. In fact, the seats (barely visible under the canopies) are more complex than the whole rest of the ship.

The Venusian arch-enemy of Dan Dare (and everyone else on Earth, actually), flanked as always by Treen bodyguards. The Mekon's flying seat thingy is often depicted with a little "M" on the front, but I decided not to include that... It's just like Galactus's "G" on his belt: how does he know the English spelling of his name?

The flesh-eating, lazer-sword (sic) wielding Rok appeared only in the second Dan Dare adventure back in 1977, depicted by Belardinelli, but he made quite an impact on the fans: thirty years later he's still recognised. The most difficult part of this model was attaching his head to his body - it seemed to take forever to stitch the neck to the torso. And then when I adjusted the lighting and rendered the image I discovered that his neck would always be in shadow so I needn't have bothered.

After Dare's first two adventures in 2000 AD the story was revamped a little: Dare was sent on a mission to uncover the mystery of the "Lost Worlds", a region of space where all sorts of interesting adventures could take place. The Space Fortress was his ship... It's big, clunky and not particularly attractive, especially not when compared to all the other ships designed by Dave Gibbons. However, I decided to give it a go anyway.

I started work on this model about five years ago, but it defeated me because, hey, I'm figuring out this 3D stuff on my own, you know! I came back to it recently during my bout of Martian Death Flu when I was too sick to concentrate on writing. Texture-wise, this is one of my most complex models: it's got bump maps, specularity maps, luminosity maps... the works.

A prototype ship stolen by Dan Dare shortly before the series came to an unexpected and premature end.

In my opinion, this is the most elegant and beautiful starship ever to appear in 2000 AD, which really is saying something considering the calibre of the comic's artists over the past three decades.