By the way, did you know what yesterday was? The fiftieth anniversary of this comic’s main inspiration! I’m talking, of course, about Modesty Blaise, Peter O’Donnell’s highly influential comic strip that debuted on May 13th, 1963, although the heroine wasn’t seen until a day later, which makes it… fifty years ago today!
Almost from the first page I read (well, make it the third or so), I loved the comic: Jim Holdaway’s stylish yet precise art, combined with O’Donnell’s talent for making each strip read as a unit but also as part of a whole when you read them all in one batch, sparked my decade-long enthusiasm for adventure strips, the result of which you can see all over this site. (Here’s a recent one.) Which eventually resulted in this comic, too.
If you haven’t done it in the last 50 years, go read some Modesty Blaise! There’s a newish edition out from Titan Books, with lots of informative extras and commentary by O’Donnell. I recommend the first book, The Gabriel Setup – apart from being all introductory, it contains an all-time favorite of mine, The Long Lever.
