Review by Frank Plowright

Set in the future of 2000, Mike Butterworth’s 1968 plot has Earth invaded by alien tyrant Ratta. He claims that in fifty years his planet, Dort, will collide with their sun, and has identified Earth as the ideal home for his people. Unfortunately for humanity, his plan involves wiping them out, but rather than unleashing a disease on Earth, by the logic of 1960s boys comics, his plan is to cause 10,000 disasters to get the job done.

Having 10,000 disasters awaiting, Butterworth was obviously angling for a long run of two page instalments, and with the quality art of Luis Bermejo and José Ortiz on board he might have had a chance. On the page the world’s best hope was Britain’s top scientist Professor Mike Dauntless, inventor of such wonders as the one person helicopter.

It’s all very silly, although Butterworth is imaginative with the succession of threats, which eventually stop being numbered. In the event the strip managed a dozen in a six month run (including entries from annuals) before cancellation. However the artists are obviously having a ball drawing giant zoo animals rampaging through a generic Melbourne, an Arab terrorist armed with a gun making planes disappear, and Rome enveloped by ice, and the art is why enough readers still remembered the strip as a lost classic.

Unusually, Butterworth was able to end the strip, having Dauntless and his boy sidekick Gaston confront Ratta for a definitive finale. It’s rushed and barely credible, but does the job. Perhaps recognising the ending was weak, when the strip was reprinted in the mid-1970s a new ending was commissioned. It’s not much better, so the creators being unknown is probably for the best.

A quarter of a century beyond the future Dauntless lived in, The 10,000 Disasters of Dort is only a curiosity, recommended to fans of the artists, with the caveat that was wondrous in 1968 no longer thrills.