JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 1

“CASINO ROYALE” | “LIVE AND LET DIE”
JULY 7TH, 1958 - March 29th, 1959
Written by Anthony Hern & Henry Gammidge | Illustrated by John McLusky

The comic strip adventures of James Bond begin, as they did in novel format, with "Casino Royale", a tale that sees British agent Bond dispatched to the French town of Royale-les-Eaux with a mission to gamble in high-stakes baccarat against Le Chiffre, a Frenchman in the employ of Soviet spy organization SMERSH. It seems Le Chiffre lost the Russians some money, which he now intends to win back on penalty of death -- and Bond's job is to see to it that he fails in this last-ditch gamble to save his own life.

It's kind of impressive how closely to the original novel the Daniel Craig CASINO ROYAL film hewed. As noted on Sunday, I did read the first three Bond novels a few years ago, and with them reasonably fresh in memory, I can say that this adaptation is quite faithful -- and that, aside from the entire first act, which fills in a lot of background for Bond's mission, such as how the secret service learns of Le Chiffre and his intentions, the movie follows the plot of the book very closely as well.

And that plot is relatively simple: Bond arrives in Royale-les-Eaux, is joined in his mission by assistant Vesper Lynd, French operative Rene Mathis, and CIA agent Felix Leiter, survives a handful of assassination attempts, defeats Le Chiffre, is kidnapped and tortured for his trouble, sees Le Chiffre assassinated by SMERSH, recuperates in the hospital, vacations with Vesper, falls in love with her, and then finds her dead of suicide, having left a note explaining she's actually a double-agent for the Russians.

It occurred to me while reading this one that you don't usually consider (or at least I don't) how much of James Bond not dying comes down to dumb luck. In both books and movies, he finds himself in near-death situations and frequently escapes not through skill, but through someone else's incompetence or a simple twist of fate. Case in point, "Casino Royale" sees two of Le Chiffre's agents attempt to kill Bond with a grenade, but he only survives because the thing is defective and goes off in their hands before they can throw it. Later, when Bond is captured by Le Chiffre, he undergoes some brutal torture (toned down considerably for the comic strip), and only gets out of it because a Russian agent barges in and kills everybody.

Speaking of the Russians, it was only relatively recently that I learned the organization SMERSH was real. It' such a funny-sounding word, I figured Fleming had made it up -- but, per Wikipedia, it's actually "...a portmanteau of two Russian words: "SMERt' SHpionam" ... meaning 'Death to Spies'." Fleming's SMERSH was apparently considerably larger and more sinister than the real thing, however.

Moving along, "Casino Royale" is followed, as in novel continuity, by Bond's second outing, "Live and Let Die". This tale finds our hero sent to New York City on the trail of a stash of British gold which recently turned up there. Bond teams up with Felix Leiter to investigate crime boss Mister Big, and the action travels from New York to Florida, then eventually to Jamaica for a climax which sees Big killed by Bond. Along the way, Bond hooks up with Mister Big's soothsayer and lover, Solitaire, while Felix is maimed when the villains toss him into a shark tank.

Reading these stories, based as they are on the original books, it's interesting to see certain sequences that the Bond filmmakers excised from one book or another, only to use them later in other films. "Live and Let Die" features two of these: Felix's maiming is cut from the LIVE AND LET DIE film, but is ultimately used in the otherwise original (i.e. not adapted from anything) LICENCE TO KILL. And "Live and Let Die" also features a scene in which Mister Big ties Bond and Solitaire together on a rope, then drags them in the wake behind his yacht, intending to kill them by dashing them across a reef. This didn't feature in the film version, but later turned up as a sequence in the big screen adaptation of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.

This storyline, scripted by Henry Gammidge (as will nearly all the rest that we look at), is much better written than "Casino Royale". Royale is written by Anthony Hern in a very matter-of-fact fashion, almost clinically, by an omniscient narrator, with dialogue that isn't particularly engrossing. "Live and Let Die", on the other hand, is narrated from Bond's point of view and, while the dialogue still isn't top-notch, it's certainly better than in "Royale".

That said, both stories suffer from some pacing issues. In most of the American adventure strips I've looked at, the action sequences are usually drawn out. A fight can last for a few days, maybe even a week or more, of daily strips. But these Bond strips feature entire fights resolved in only one day's strip, usually by way of clumsy exposition explaining what happens around a single panel of a punch being thrown or a gun being fired. I don't know if this is a difference in philosophy between British cartoonists versus Americans or something else, but I much prefer what I've seen in the American strips. Action sequences need room to breathe, and these Bond stories just don't provide that.

Nonetheless, it's always fun to see a beloved character in a "new" format, and a James Bond newspaper strip is a fun idea. I look forward to watching Gammidge hopefully become more comfortable writing in this format as we continue next week into "Moonraker" and "Diamonds are Forever".