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.

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 6

"THUNDERBALL" | "ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE"
December 11th, 1961 - February 10th, 1962 | June 29th, 1964 - May 15th, 1965
Written by Henry Gammidge | Illustrated by John McLusky

THUNDERBALL has the peculiar distinction of being the only James Bond story developed by Ian Fleming himself with the intention that it would become a movie. In the 1950s, Fleming worked with producer Kevin McClory on a project to bring Bond to the silver screen. When the project fell by the wayside, Fleming went ahead and adapted the story they had come up with into a novel. Years later, when Bond finally did make it to the movies, producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman adapted the novel THUNDERBALL into the fourth film in the series. So essentially, THUNDERBALL was a movie treatment adapted into a novel, which was then adapted into a screenplay!

As such, one might expect the original THUNDERBALL, adapted into this comic strip, to sync up fairly closely with the film -- and at least initially, that's true. Both versions open with Bond declared unfit for field duty by M, and sent to recuperate at a spa called Shrublands. There, he encounters a mystery man named Count Lippe, who tries to kill Bond when the agent shows too much interest in the Count's Tong tattoo. Bond reciprocates, giving Lippe a near-death experience, and then returns to work at MI6. Meanwhile, the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion -- SPECTRE -- holds a meeting to discuss their latest plot: stealing a NATO plane transporting two nuclear missiles. SPECTRE's agent on the inside, co-pilot Giuseppe Petacchi, kills the plane's crew and hijacks it, ditching it in the Atlantic ocean near the Bahamas after SPECTRE takes the bombs.

LOOK UP! LOOK DOWN! LOOK OUT!

JAMES BOND IS BACK!

(With all due apologies to the THUNDERBALL movie poster.)

Back in 2018, I started looking at the James Bond newspaper strips originally syndicated in Britain's Daily Express in the 1950s and '60s. I got about halfway through the series, and then was forced to stop due to a number of factors in my life at the time. It was the first retrospective series I ever failed to complete, and it has bothered me ever since. I vowed at the time that I would finish my originally intended run (all of the strips that adapted Ian Fleming's original novels) someday. And now, five-and-a-half years later (seriously?!), it's time.

There are eight storylines left, but a few are based on short stories -- so I've broken it out to three posts in total, which will take us right up to the end of the year. And I know we're going to sail right through to the end of this thing, because unlike last time, I've already written up all the posts! As previously, the main crux of these posts will be to compare and contrast the quite faithful newspaper adaptations with the typically more loosely adapted (or in some cases totally made up) films.

For those who need a refresher, or perhaps weren't even born yet those many years ago when I started this project, here are the first five posts in the series:

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 1
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 2
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 3
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 4
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 5

And with that, we'll reconvene next week to get to it. See you then!

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 5

"FROM A VIEW TO A KILL" | "FOR YOUR EYES ONLY"
June 26th, 1961 - December 9th, 1961
Written by Henry Gammidge | Illustrated by John McLusky

So. There was a movie made in 1985 -- Roger Moore's final outing as James Bond -- called A VIEW TO A KILL. The title is one word shy of a short story written by Ian Fleming and released in 1960 -- and that's literally the only similarity between the two. A VIEW TO A KILL is a horrible movie about Christopher Walken trying to blow up Silicon Valley while a near-fossilized James Bond (57-year-old [!] Roger Moore) tries to stop him. "From a View to a Kill" is a tale which pushes Bond, as was the case in MOONRAKER, into the role of detective, and he's sent to France to investigate the murder of a dispatch rider ferrying important documents from the headquarters of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to the country's British Secret Service outpost.

Bond spends makes time with a secret service agent named Mary Ann Russell while investigating the grounds around the base and the path traveled by the rider, eventually learning that he was killed by a Russian agent masquerading as a fellow dispatcher. Bond thwarts the Russians as expected, and the tale comes to an end.

There's a lot of jousting in this story between MI6 and SHAPE, which is kind of fun to see -- basically the entire reason M sends Bond on this mission is to show up SHAPE by having his agent solve the mystery after they've given up. I confess that I've never quite understood the title of this story -- the movie version actually makes a bit more sense to me despite its corny shoehorning into the script -- but now that I've actually read it, I think the idea is that Bond is sitting on a Paris street, enjoying a meal and admiring the view, when he's summoned into action and winds up eventually killing some guys.

That's the best I can come up with, anyway.

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 4

"GOLDFINGER" | "RISCIO"
October 3rd, 1960 - June 2th, 1961
Written by Henry Gammidge | Illustrated by John McLusky

GOLDFINGER, probably the most beloved and best-known James Bond film, is an interesting exercise in adaptation from the source material. Assuming, as usual, that the newspaper strip is a fairly faithful recreation of the novel, then the bigscreen version of GOLDFINGER follows the story almost precisely up to around the halfway point, at which it veers in a different (but superficially similar) direction.

But before we get there, first the commonalities: both the original and the movie begin with Bond in Miami following a mission, where he gets involved in determining how millionaire Auric Goldfinger has been cheating at cards. This seems to be something Bond likes to do in his spare time, as MOONRAKER began under similar circumstances. And there's another nice continuity touch here, as Bond is recognized in Miami by another player from the card table in CASINO ROYALE, which is how he's pulled into the Goldfinger situation. It's something the movie version could never have pulled off, since the prior adventure never happened in that continuity.

Bond returns to the U.K. after showing up Goldfinger, and, in a moment of total coincidence, is assigned by M to shadow the magnate and determine how he's been smuggling gold across Europe. MI6 believes Goldfinger to be the treasurer of SMERSH (a connection absent from the film, wherein the villain is affiliated with no organization other than his own), and busting his operation should cripple the Soviet agency. Bond plays a round of golf against Goldfinger in England, then shadows him to his factory in Switzerland, where he's captured, along with a young woman named Tilly Masterson who is after Goldfinger for revenge over her sister -- a girl Bond had dallied with in Miami and who Goldfinger had murdered for her indiscretion.

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 3

“FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE” | “DR. NO”
February 1st, 1960 - October 1st, 1960
Written by Peter O'Donnell & Henry Gammidge | Illustrated by John McLusky

James Bond's fifth and sixth adventures were adapted into the film series' second and first movies, respectively -- and as a result, the big screen versions of DR. NO and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE may be the most faithful of all the entries in the series.

There are differences, certainly -- both movies feature the organization SPECTRE in some form or another, while SPECTRE does not yet exist in the novel/comic strip source material. The movie version of DR. NO also introduces Felix Leiter, who is nowhere to be seen in the book, and who Bond had actually already met three times previously in the original continuity(CASINO ROYALE, LIVE AND LET DIE, and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER). There are also additional "conquests" for Bond and an extra action set-piece or two in the movies -- but aside from all these relatively minor discrepancies, and aside from the flipped order, the film versions of both stories match up very cleanly with the originals.

In FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, the Russian intelligence agency SMERSH decides to demonstrate its power by killing a British secret agent, and settles on Bond, using a secretary named Tania Romanova as bait. Romanova states that she will defect in Turkey and will bring the Soviet cipher device, the SPEKTOR, with her -- but she will surrender herself only to Bond, with whom she's fallen in love via his dossier. Admittedly, the setup to the film version is different -- where here, it's SMERSH alone after Bond, partly due to his foiling some of their prior operations, in the movie it's SPECTRE manipulating SMERSH so they themselves can steal the cipher device (known in the movie as the LEKTOR rather than the SPEKTOR for obvious reasons).

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.

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.

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.