To those of us in the United States, our first mainstream exposure to Ian Fleming’s James Bond was in 1962’s Dr. No (though it could be said that JFK saying he loved the novel From Russia With Love in LIFE Magazine, helped, too). In his homeland of Great Britain though? Readers could thrill to the daily exploits of 007 as early as 1958, just five years after the first novel was published! Thanks to an agreement with British newspaper Daily Express, Fleming allowed his novels to adapted to the daily comic strip format.
For me, the amazing thing about these strips are that they are generally really faithful to the original Fleming novels, though there is some censoring of some of the more grisly deaths and the like. This is something that the movies got further and further away from, sometimes really only sharing a title. Another interesting fact is that the visual appearance of Bond, by artist John McLusky, is said to have influenced the casting of Sean Connery as Bond based on his resemblance to said rendition! See for yourself and compare:
From: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Sadly, aside from a few sporadic collections, the Bond strips have been really hard to come by in the USA. Thanks to Titan Books, however that’s no longer the case. The James Bond Omnibus series has been collecting the strips in the original published order since 2009. The four volumes currently available cover all of the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, but seeing as the strip ran from 1958-1983, there is a ton more to be collected.
The volume I picked up recently is The James Bond Omnibus 002. I picked up for a couple of reasons, it contains some of my favorite Bond tales, and I was able to get it on the cheap at my local comic shop. This volume in particular covers On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Living Daylights, Octopussy, The Hildebrand Rarity, and The Spy Who Loved Me. Clocking in at nearly 350 pages, this is a pretty great value, and if you’re not a fan of prose, but want to read the original Fleming novels, this is a great compromise.
One aside that I thought was interesting,if not a little annoying is this: the adaptation of Thunderball in Volume 001 is incomplete. At the time Thunderball was being serialized, Ian Fleming contracted a rival newspaper to publish the short story The Living Daylights. Unfortunately, because of this, Thunderball was never completed in comic strip form. In my mind, this makes Thunderball the black sheep of the Bond family, because not only did it cause this brouhaha, but the original novel had its share of legal trouble too, due to being a collaborative project. Then of course Kevin McClory, one of the previously mentioned collaborators, commissioned Never Say Never Again, a remake of Thunderball that isn’t considered a part of the main Bond series.
Now that I’ve bored you with history, allow for me to make up for it with a few of my favorite strips in the collection. If you like, they can be had inexpensively on Amazon.
