39. THE MEKON (Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future)

Take that, Dan Dare. You may be the one who gets to save mankind all the time, but it's your arch-enemy, the mega-meloned Mekon who makes our list! As created by Frank Hampson in the pages of venerable British comic The Eagle, The Mighty Mekon of Mekonta is an emotion-free genius, always coming up with nifty weapons (a weaponised black hole is one of his latest whizzes) with which he spectacularly fails to kill pilot-of-the-future Dan Dare and his chubby pal, Digby.

Trademarks: A giant swollen green head to accommodate his mighty, over-sized genetically engineered Venusian brain; a levitating chair to hump his atrophied limbs around on. Oh, and lots of evil plotting.

On Screen: The Mekon has yet to be brought to the big screen, though there was talk of a Dan Dare movie, with Garth Ennis rumoured to be working on the script. If it ever happens we're sure it'll be CG, but we'd love to see someone in heavy-duty prosthetics, to be honest. And that man is... David Thewlis.

Did You Know? Elton John's song, Dan Dare (Pilot Of The Future), contains the Bernie Taupin-penned line, "Dan Dare doesn't know it, but I like The Mekon!" In retaliation, Dare produced a single containing the line, "Elton John doesn't know it... but I like his partner, David Furnish."

Buy Dan Dare Omnibus now on Amazon