JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 2

“MOONRAKER” | “DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER”
March 30th, 1959 - January 30th, 1960
Written by Henry Gammidge | Illustrated by John McLusky

Last week I touched on the Bond film producers occasionally removing scenes from certain big screen adaptations, only to insert them into subsequent movies later on. This week we'll note how the producers would occasionally discard an Ian Fleming story entirely, keeping the name and perhaps the names of certain characters, but otherwise coming up with an entirely new story.

"Moonraker" is a great example of this. The movie, released in 1979 as the twelfth film in the series, is a globetrotting adventure which sees Bond travel from England to California to South America to outer space, accompanied by beautiful CIA agent Holly Goodhead, in search of a missing space shuttle. The novel, published in 1955 as the third book in the series (and of which this strip is a faithful adaptation), is set entirely in and around London and sees Bond playing undercover detective as he works with beautiful Scotland Yard officer Gala Brand to determine who has murdered the head of security at a private rocket complex.

So... yeah. It's clear that by the Roger Moore era, the Bond film producers had found a formula that worked, and were unwilling to deviate from it at all, even if it meant coming up with a new story from whole cloth and slapping the title of an existing book on it. The only commonality between both the MOONRAKER film and book is the name of the villain, Hugo Drax -- and even then, it's literally only the name which holds. The Drax in the movie is a sinister American businessman. The Drax in the book (and comic strip) is a German posing as a Briton in order to launch his rocket at London and avenge the loss of World War II.

As in the previous strip, this storyline is narrated by Bond, and this time around he actually breaks the fourth wall more than once, looking directly out at the reader as he describes goings-on elsewhere in the story. It's an unusual conceit, especially for a James Bond story, and while the first-person narration seems reasonable, Bond directly addressing readers is an experiment that will hopefully be dropped as these serials continue.

Up to and including "Moonraker", John McLusky has gone out of his way to only depict Bond's commanding officer, "M", from behind or in shadow, presumably to lend him an air of mystery. The novels, however, don't treat M this way -- and as a result of McLusky's approach, the character is given considerably shorter shrift in the comic strip than in the MOONRAKER book. In the novel, M brings Bond to his private club, Blades, where Sir Hugo Drax is also a member, so that Bond can play cards against Drax and expose him as a cheat. The comic strip retains this entire scenario, but since comic M is shrouded at all times under the thick veil of mystery, he doesn't accompany Bond and remains a cipher rather than the character the book delivers.

Otherwise, "Moonraker" is a fine adaptation of Fleming's original work, and even helped me visualize some aspects of the story I had trouble "seeing" when I first read it.

And at this point we move into the stories I've never read in novel form, so I will no longer be able to speak to the strips' faithfulness to the original books -- but based on what I've seen thus far in "Casino Royale", "Live and Let Die", and "Moonraker", I expect pretty straightforward adaptations -- and based on that premise, I'll continue to note major discrepancies between books/strips and films.

MOONRAKER is directly followed in the Bond canon by DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, and thus that is the next strip adapted, as well. Here, Bond is sent to the United States on the trail of a diamond-smuggling ring out of Africa. It's interesting to note how few of these early literary Bond stories involve any sort of high stakes for the entire world. Bond saves London from annihilation in MOONRAKER, it's true -- but aside from that, his missions have been about bankrupting an enemy spy and tracking two separate treasures to the United States. And while the film version of DIAMONDS begins with the same smuggling ring premise, by the movie’s conclusion, Bond finds himself working to foil Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s attempt to destroy Washington D.C. with an orbital laser.

DIAMONDS marks another departure, though not quite so radical as MOONRAKER, from the source material. In this case, the strip (and, again, presumably the novel) retains a few character names – criminals Wint and Kidd and Bond Girl Tiffany Case — and starts with the same basic premise, but where the strip moves Bond from London to New York to Las Vegas to Algiers, the movie sees him travel to Amsterdam, then Vegas, then California — and, as noted above, the stakes in the movie are quite different from those in the book.

As far as the strip itself goes, it’s nice to read the real story of DIAMONDS for the first time. Unlike the movie, which set Bond against Blofeld for the third time in three consecutive films, the original story sees him working against an American crime organization called the Spangled Mob. (Indeed, Blofeld and his organization, SPECTRE, didn’t yet exist when Fleming wrote the book — DIAMONDS was the fourth novel but the seventh film.) In general, it’s nice to see Bond up against non-SPECTRE villains at this point in his career. The movies featured that organization, or at least Blofeld, as the villain in six of the first seven films. It wasn’t until the Roger Moore era of the seventies that Bond films moved away from SPECTRE into stand-alone villains. On the other hand, Fleming’s early works pit Bond against a number of one-off antagonists, with the occasional appearance by the Russian SMERSH agency as the only recurring foes. Much as I love serialized stories, and much as I love the Sean Connery Bond movies, those early big screen adventures all feel a bit too much like a weekday afternoon cartoon, something along the lines of G.I. Joe fighting Cobra in every... single... episode of their series.

Speaking of SMERSH, next week they’ll be back in the newspaper adaptation of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, followed by DR. NO!