By: Ian Fleming (writer), Henry Gammidge & Jim Lawrence (adapters), John McLusky & Yaroslav Horak (artists)
The Story: Only one man can survive explosions with his tux intact. Only one man can make a weapon out of a cocktail glass. Only one man can make love so often and never get VD. The name’s Bond—James Bond.
The Review: We have something a little different on the docket today: Titan Books’ second collection of James Bond strips, which adapt Fleming’s novels into essentially years’ worth of dailies. The comic strip certainly is the precursor to comic books, and though they continue to exist side-by-side today, strips have pretty much narrowed strictly to comedy. The James Bond Omnibus is a good reminder of when newspaper strips had action and drama to rival the stuff in comic books.
Altogether, the strips collected here cover On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Living Daylights, Octopussy, The Hildebrand Rarity, and The Spy Who Loved Me. The titles alone should tell you how jam-packed with old-school action this book is. I’ve only read a couple of Fleming’s novels and seen one or two of the films with Roger Moore, who was a decent Bond, but these strips seem like fairly faithful adaptations.
To enjoy these, you just have to sit back and let the conventions of the period wash over you. The sixties was, after all, a pretty bizarre decade. The readers were Americans who still thanked God for Mom and apple pie, but were becoming more adventurous where sexual and scientific thought was concerned. As a product of that era, these strips go for splashy, complicated, drama-ridden adventures, but are also endearingly unsophisticated in their storytelling.
Just take the dialogue, with all its corny exclamations: “Ah—that is la Contesse Teresa di Vicienzo. She is a lady, Mr. Bond, who lives life to the full!” The narration can really get on your nerves after a while as almost every strip (at least in the first half of the collection) gets a long, expository caption. But you have to keep in mind the words had to do double-duty back in their day, recapping events from the day before and advancing the scene at the same time.
In fact, reading all at once what was mean to be read day-by-day gives you some pretty weird pacing. It’s fast and slow at the same time. Each strip advances the story by pretty big leaps at times, occasionally to the point of being overwhelming. And yet the story within the strip itself gets so limited by the two to three panel space that the tension doesn’t get much of a chance to build, and you rarely feel a sense of action to it.
The art is very typical of dramatic black-and-white dailies of that period: melodramatic close-ups, sketchy movements, stylishly shadowy. McLusky goes for bigger panels and thinner lines, so his action and detail are great, but Horak’s noir shading does a much better job conveying drama within the confined space. Neither cartoonist offers much variety to their character expressions; they all tend to have the same, grim face regardless of what they’re doing at any given moment.
Conclusion: A fun read, if you’re willing to forgive it for being made in a very commercial, cheesy period and medium. They definitely have the same unashamedly bombastic flavor of their cinematic counterparts. What can you do? It’s Bond.
Grade: B
- Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: - Also, be prepared for some hilariously unflinching racism: “The men he had seen there were all pro crooks—Russians, Slavs, Corsicans.”
- And here’s Bond’s makeover into a Japanese man: “The girl carefully dried his hair, brightly oiled it, and cut it into a fringe that reached halfway down his forehead. With his eyebrows carefully shaved so they slanted upwards, the transformation was complete.”
Filed under: Other, Reviews Tagged: | 007, Bond, Henry Gammidge, Ian Fleming, James Bond, Jim Lawrence, John McLusky, M, Octopussy, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Q, The Hildebrand Rarity, The James Bond Omnibus 002, The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me, Titan Books, Yaroslav Horak, You Only Live Twice
