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.