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.

So the comic strip is clearly closer to the short story, as per usual, but even it differs. According to summaries I've found online since I've never read it, Fleming's story is told almost entirely in flashback from Smythe's point of view as he relates his tale to Bond -- while the strip version is very much set in the present day and follows Bond as he investigates the murder.

"The Hildebrand Rarity" is next, and this one is a massive departure from the source material! Again, I've never read the original short story upon which this arc is based, but I've found some detailed summaries online. Fleming's 1960 story follows Bond in some downtime in the Seychelle Islands as he awaits his next mission. He finds himself invited aboard the yacht of boorish American businessman Milton Krest, who is searching for a rare fish called the Hildebrand Rarity. Bond helps Krest find the fish, but is horrified when Krest poisons an entire reef in order to capture it. Later, Krest is found dead aboard his yacht, killed by the Rarity's poisoned spines. Bond suspects Krest's British wife, Elizabeth, of the murder, but has no proof.

The comic strip does adapt this short story, hitting all of its beats precisely, but it is all threaded through an epic reminiscent of THUNDERBALL. Bond is sent to the Seychelles to help search for a missing radio-controlled submarine, and meets a beautiful woman named Nyla, who invites him aboard Krest's yacht (in the original story, Bond is brought along by an old friend of his; a diver helping Krest search for the Hildebrand Rarity). Krest and Bond look for the fish as in the original story, but this is actually a cover for Krest's search for the sub, which he intends to pillage of its technology to sell. The strip features a five week lead-in, showing the sub's disappearance, before Bond even arrives -- and then after Krest is killed in the same fashion as in Fleming's story, there is an extended sequence where Bond, Nyla, and Elizabeth work against Krest's German crew to radio the U.S. Navy for help. Eventually the navy arrives and the day is saved.

Again, it's all somewhat derivative of THUNDERBALL, but I can't help feeling that may have been the intent! Remember, the strip's original adaptation of that novel was cut abruptly short over disagreements between Fleming and the newspaper, and then when the strip returned a year or two later, it jumped straight into the next storyline, leaving THUNDERBALL unfinished. So in "The Hildebrand Rarity", we have sort of a spiritual adaptation of what THUNDERBALL might have been -- albeit from a different creative team.

Finally, it's THE SPY WHO LOVED ME -- presumably adapted last out of the entire Fleming canon due to the author's own dislike of his work. It's said that Fleming was so disappointed in the novel that when he sold the film rights, he sold only the name, leaving the Bond producers to come up with an entirely original plot to fit the title! (Which, I mean, why not just call it something else in that case?) But THE SPY WHO LOVED ME is my personal favorite of the Roger Moore Bond films, so the producers must have done something right! However, we're not here to discuss the movie. As always, we'll compare the newspaper strip against Fleming's original story (details of which I have again gleaned from summaries on the web) -- and in this case, the newspaper adaptation of THE SPY WHO LOVED ME is actually quite faithful... eventually.

See, this storyline runs for over nine months, but it's made up of two completely unrelated tales -- the first created from whole cloth by writer Peter Lawrence, and the second an adaptation of Fleming's novel! In the first storyline, Bond is sent to Canada to assist the Mounties in stopping an extortion scheme that would've seen the plans for a new allied plane fall into the hands of a revived SPECTRE organization. But with Ernst Stavro Blofeld dead, this iteration of SPECTRE is led by a mystery woman who calls herself... Spectra. She presents herself as an old lady, but is seen at one point "unmasking" in private to reveal that beneath her disguise, she is younger and looks entirely different (though readers aren't shown her real face).

I assume this is all setup for Lawrence's future plans on the strip, as after the Canadian adventure ends, SPECTRE is not seen again for the remainder of the storyline. Instead, we follow Bond as he drives south to the United States to make a report in Washington, D.C. But he stops along the way at a motel where he finds two goons intimidating a beautiful girl who was left behind by the owners to run the place. It turns out the men are there to burn the motel down, kill the girl in the process as a frame job, and collect some insurance money for their boss. But Bond of course stops and kills them, then drives on.

Notwithstanding the fact that this is really two unrelated stories inexplicibly joined together under one title, this one is pretty good. The second half reads like classic Fleming Bond material, while the first half feels more like something out of the movies -- which makes sense; it's pretty clear at this point that Lawrence's writing is influenced as much by Sean Connery as by Ian Fleming (the film series had been running for six years by this point, with Connery having put in five appearances as Bond in that time*). I have a mind to read a few more of the ongoing storylines to find out how far into the realm of the silver screen Lawrence goes, as well as to see what becomes of Spectra!

But if I do, those will likely be private reads. I've accomplished my mission as regards Bond on the blog. I've looked at all the adaptations of the Fleming novels, and I'm ready to stop. So this time, James Bond... won't return.

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*Crazy to realize that for most of the sixties, Bond movies were more-or-less an annual affair! There was one a year from 1962 through 1966, before the series settled into its once familiar "every other year" cycle... which has itself been abandoned nowadays. Connery notched his first five Bonds in six years. Roger Moore's first five came over the course of nine years. Meanwhile, it took Daniel Craig fifteen years to manage that many! (Yes, I know there were studio bankruptcy issues in the middle of Craig's run, but still.)