JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 8

"THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS" | "OCTOPUSSY"
"THE HILDEBRAND RARITY" | "THE SPY WHO LOVED ME"
September 12th, 1966 - November 12th, 1966 | November 14th, 1966 - May 27th, 1967
May 29th, 1967 - December 16th, 1967 | December 18th, 1967 - October 3rd, 1968
Written by Peter Lawrence | Illustrated by Yaroslav Horak

"The Living Daylights" was a short story by Ian Fleming, loosely adapted and greatly expanded into a 1987 film of the same name starring Timothy Dalton as Bond. As usual, the comic strip adapts the original story far more faithfully than would the eventual film. The story is simple: a British agent in East Berlin plans to cross the Berlin Wall with Russian nuclear secrets, but the Russians' best Sniper, "Trigger", is tasked with stopping him. But MI6 gets wind of this, and Bond is dispatched to West Berlin to snipe Trigger before the Russian can snipe Agent 282. Bond realizes Trigger is actually a beautiful woman, and rather than kill her, simply shoots the rifle from her hand. But she's killed in the end anyway, in an "accident" arranged as punishment for her failure.

And that's it! The film version of the story uses this entire sequence, in modified fashion, as its cold open. The short story is finished before the opening credits roll, save for Trigger's death, and the remainder of the movie is an original story about Bond locating her and eventually working with her to take down a drug lord.

"Octopussy" was another short story by Fleming, but the newspaper adaptation is quite long, running just over six months in length. In it, Bond is approached by Trudi Oberhauser, the daughter of a man who was like a second father to him. The elder Oberhauser's body has been found with a British service revolver's bullet in his head, two decades after he disappeared in the Swiss mountains. Bond plays detective, working this personal mission with Trudi, following a trail from London to Jamaica, where he reunites with Mary Goodnight for assistance. Eventually, Bond determines that Oberhauser was killed by a British officer over some Nazi gold in the final days of World War II -- and the officer, Major Smythe, now lives on a seaside estate in Jamaica. But Bond fails to capture Smythe, as the villain instead meets his end at the hands of his own humongous pet octopus, which he has nicknamed "Octopussy" (a much better way to integrate the title into the story than in the motion picture, where "Octopussy" was a nickname Smythe gave his daughter).

The various adaptations are a little weird on this one. All versions of the story begin basically the same way, with Bond seeking to investigate someone's murder -- only in the film, that deceased party is agent 009 -- while in the short story and newspaper strip, it's Trudi's father (though so far as I can tell, Trudi herself does not exist in the source material). The original version sees Bond corner Smythe and take pity on him, allowing him to choose suicide over arrest. This is referenced as backstory for the character of Octopussy in the film, which otherwise goes off in its own, typically over-the-top direction, sending Bond to India to investigate a cult led by Smythe's daughter, who is involved in a scheme to steal Russian nuclear secrets.

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 7

"YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE" | "THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN"
May 17th, 1965 - January 8th, 1966 | June 10th, 1966 - September 9th, 1966
Written by Henry Gammidge & Jim Lawrence
Illustrated by John McLusky & Yaroslav Horak

As Bond's next adventure begins, eight months have elapsed since the murder of his bride, Tracy. Bond is in bad shape, and M decides to snap him out of it with a new, extremely difficult mission: he is to purloin a Japanese code-breaking device. Bond travels to Japan and links up with his contact there, an Australian MI6 diplomatic agent named Dikko Henderson. Soon after, Bond meets M's opposite number in the Japanese secret service, Tiger Tanaka. Right off the bat, the film adaptation differs from the source material. As usual, Fleming's original work is much more down-to-earth. Bond is simply trying to obtain a decoder device, and in order to do it, he agrees to a favor for Tanaka -- breaking into a compound where a Westerner named Doctor Shatterhand has set up a sort of amusement park of suicide, and assassinating Shatterhand. Compare that with the film, where Bond travels to Japan to try and find the source of a giant rocket that swallows space shuttles!

(I don't know what to make of the premise, by the way, that scores of Japanese people are flocking to Shatterhand's castle so they can kill themselves in interesting ways. It's very clearly presented as a common shared interest among the Japanese; it's not a few odd apples out to off themselves. This is possibly one of the biggest instances of what I once saw described as the commonplace "weird racism" in Ian Fleming's works.)

However in both versions of the story, the villain is the same: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. Though SPECTRE no longer exists here; indeed it's notable that in Fleming's original works, the organization only existed in THUNDERBALL, where it was basically disbanded by the end. The stories then followed Bond's search for Blofeld in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, and his final encounter with the villain here, in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE -- and that's it. One story with SPECTRE proper, followed by two more with Blofeld more or less alone. Meanwhile in the films, SPECTRE exists as an organization in four installments: DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, THUNDERBALL, and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, with Blofeld operating solo or with a pared-down organization in two more films, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, afterward.

LOOK UP! LOOK DOWN! LOOK OUT!

JAMES BOND IS BACK!

(With all due apologies to the THUNDERBALL movie poster.)

Back in 2018, I started looking at the James Bond newspaper strips originally syndicated in Britain's Daily Express in the 1950s and '60s. I got about halfway through the series, and then was forced to stop due to a number of factors in my life at the time. It was the first retrospective series I ever failed to complete, and it has bothered me ever since. I vowed at the time that I would finish my originally intended run (all of the strips that adapted Ian Fleming's original novels) someday. And now, five-and-a-half years later (seriously?!), it's time.

There are eight storylines left, but a few are based on short stories -- so I've broken it out to three posts in total, which will take us right up to the end of the year. And I know we're going to sail right through to the end of this thing, because unlike last time, I've already written up all the posts! As previously, the main crux of these posts will be to compare and contrast the quite faithful newspaper adaptations with the typically more loosely adapted (or in some cases totally made up) films.

For those who need a refresher, or perhaps weren't even born yet those many years ago when I started this project, here are the first five posts in the series:

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 1
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 2
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 3
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 4
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 5

And with that, we'll reconvene next week to get to it. See you then!

THE SUMMER OF 007

This summer season, we'll take a look at one of my favorite fictional characters in a format (and, in a way, in stories) where I've never seen him before.

I became a James Bond fan at a pretty young age. My dad was big into the movies, so I started watching them too whenever they aired on TV (one of the cable channels -- I think maybe it was TBS? -- used to do a Bond marathon every Thanksgiving, as I recall). These days I have pretty much all of the "classics" (Connery) memorized, and I'm pretty sharp when it comes to Moore and Craig, as well. Dalton and Brosnan, however, I think I've only seen one to two times each (though I did see all the Brosnans in theaters, at least).

Anyway -- over all these years of loving the character and watching the movies, I never looked at the source material, Ian Fleming's novels, until relatively recently. It was about two years ago that I found the full run of Bond novels free in Amazon's Kindle lending library, so I started checking them out with a plan to read every last one -- but I only made it through three before stopping, for whatever reason.

Which brings us to The Summer of 007. As I started getting into newspaper strips (which I may have mentioned here once or twice in the past), it came to my attention that Britain's Daily Express published a Bond strip for over twenty years, beginning in 1958 -- and that the first ten or so of those years were comprised of relatively faithful adaptations of Fleming's novels.

So here we are! Over the next several weeks, we'll look at eighteen of the strip's story arcs at a pace of approximately two arcs a week. I may not have read Fleming's actual books, but for me, at least for now, this will qualify as rectifying that oversight.