Ring Raiders

Round about this time last year, I posted a bloglet, Fly Past in which I looked at some diecast stealth aircraft. As an aside, I mentioned the appearance of one such design in the Dan Dare strip in the new Eagle comic. Since then, i've found the relevant issue and in the search, came upon a mini comic which came free with the Eagle, promoting another short lived comic, Ring Raiders. Amazingly, the Ring Raiders comic shows the same aircraft again, all illustrated by aeronautic specialist, Ian Kennedy.

 As I recall, the Dare strip preceded the Ring Raiders insert by some months, but its basically the same plane.

Ring Raiders was a line of tiny Micro Machine size aircraft made by Matchbox, which were mounted on a thing stand attached to a ring, to facilitate a child 'flying' a squad of planes around attached to their fingers. The comic only lasted a few issues, especially after the free gifts dried up! The front cover of the mini comic shows the large carrier aircraft and Kennedy has depicted it accurately enough that you can see the two carry handles at either end!