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.

Anyway -- this is indeed the final meeting of Bond and Blofeld, as 007 realizes who Shatterhand truly is. With the help of a beautiful Japanese diver named Kissy Suzuki and disguised as a Japanese man (yeah, it's weird), Bond infiltrates Blofeld's castle and kills him. Then the story takes a turn not at all evident in the movie, as Bond loses his memory during an explosive escape from the castle. Kissy takes him back to her island and convinces him he is her lover, and they spend months living together while Tanaka informs M that Bond died during his mission. MI6 cleans out Bond's desk and reassigns his secretary, Mary Goodnight, to a new post. His obituary is published, and the world moves on without him.

But eventually, Bond finds a discarded crate with the word "Vladivostok" printed on it. This doesn't trigger a full return of his memory, but it's enough to get him thinking. Kissy, unable to continue deceiving him, encourages Bond to leave and find his destiny, and he departs -- unaware that Kissy is pregnant with his child!

I read things like this, and I can't help imagining a series of Bond films done "properly" -- not that I don't love the classic movies; I truly do. I grew up with them and I would never trade them away for more accurate replacements. But at the same time, I love the idea of total straight, direct adaptations of Fleming's books -- in the proper order, maintaining continuity between stories, and set in the 1950s and early sixties, when the books were originally published. But I imagine the movies' image of Bond is so ingrained in society at this point that such a thing would likely never happen. Still, though, it's nice to imagine.

Also, it's a crime that the name "Shatterhand" has somehow never made it into any of the Bond films. For Pete's sake, it's screaming to be used as the title of one!!

And now we move into a new era for the Bond strip. The original creative team, Henry Gammidge and John McLusky, departed following the conclusion of their adaptaion of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, with newcomers Jim Lawrence and Yaroslav Horak (credited as simply "Horak") coming aboard. My understanding is that Lawrence's scripts deviated a bit more from Fleming's source material than had Gammidge's relatively faithful adaptations. But as I've never read any of the remaining stories in novel format, I have no way to know! Still, however, I will continue to call out differences between the newspaper story arcs and movies when I see them -- I just won't know how much the strips themselves will be deviating from the books as well.

On the artistic front, meanthile, Horak's artwork is a major departure from that of McLusky. McLusky had a fairly realistic style, in line with classic American newspaper strip pioneers like Alex Raymond and Hal Foster. Horak could be considered sort of a blend of realism meets cartooniness. His figures and scenery are what you'd expect from a daily strip of this vintage, but his faces are extremely stylized. I confess that Horak took some getting used to, but as I made my way through his inaugural outing, I came to really like his work. (His dedication to frequenty cheesecakey shots of Bond's secretary, Mary Goodnight, certainly doesn't hurt my estimation of his work.)

What of the story? Again, it seems the film version of TMWTGG deviated wildly from the original work! First, we pick up with a vignette in which Bond, having made his way to Vladivostok, is captured and brainwashed by the Russians. He's sent back to London, where he acts under orders to assassinate M -- but the secret service head is onto Bond and evades death, then has Bond deprogrammed and returns him to active duty. Suffice it to say, none of this is in the film, which -- as with all the Roger Moore era Bond movies -- is a totally stand-alone affair.

Beyond that, the movie finds Bond on the trail of an assassin named Scaramanga, who operates in the Far East -- Hong Kong, Thailand, China -- and who has stolen a device called the Solex, which is capable of solving the world's energy crisis. The source material, meanwhile, simply finds Bond dispatched to kill Scaramanga over his assassinations of a few British agents. The only locale in this version is Ian Fleming's frequent stomping ground of Jamaica, where Scaramanga is an investor in a luxury hotel, and has invited several mobsters to meet him for a sales pitch. Bond goes undercover, bumps into Felix Leiter -- in Jamaica because of the mobsters -- and then is reunited with his old secretary, Goodnight.

The trio beats Scaramanga, Bond kills him, and with that, we are firmly into the Lawrence/Horak era of the strip. And it's an era which would last over a decade, from 1966 to 1977! But for us, interested only in the strip's adaptations of Fleming's original novels, it will be much shorter. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN was Fleming's final Bond novel, published posthumously. But the strip did have a bit more fleming material to adapt; subsequent to this storyline, Lawrence and Horak produced their own versions of a handful of short stories Fleming had published years earlier, but which the strip had originally skipped.

So next week, we'll tackle all those short stories at once to wrap things up!