The James Bond Omnibus, Volume 002
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Collection published: 2011 Contents published: 1964-68 Acquired: January 2022 Read: April 2022 |
Beginning in 1958, the Daily Express ran a daily comic strip adapting the James Bond novels, which has been collected into a series of omnibuses by Titan. I reviewed the first volume a few years ago, and now that I've read all the novels adapted in the second, I've read that one, too. This collects adaptations of the last few James Bond books—On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, and Octopussy & The Living Daylights—and then it circles back to adapt some stuff skipped over before—"The Hildebrand Rarity" from For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved Me.
The first two stories here are written by Henry Gammidge and illustrated by John McLusky; McLusky illustrated every story in volume 001 and Gammidge wrote most of them, and as there, they are perfectly serviceable adaptations. Gammidge doesn't make a lot of tweaks to the stories, usually just streamlining them a bit, e.g., long passages about Bond learning about Japanese culture in You Only Live Twice just don't make the cut. He does make the biggest change I can recollect from him in YOLT; in the novel, Bond infiltrates Blofeld's Japanese base alone, but here, Kissy Suzuki sneaks in with him. The story also has a weird discontinuity; at its beginning, Mary Goodnight is introduced as Bond's new secretary, but at its end, when Bond is thought dead, we're told she's so sad because she had been Bond's secretary for years. He does also massage the way one story leads into the next; we see Mary get reassigned to Station J after Bond dies, setting up her role in The Man with the Golden Gun.
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| from The Man with the Golden Gun (ser. 3, no. 194) script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak |
With The Man with the Golden Gun, Jim Lawrence takes over the writing and Yaroslav Horak the art. Horak's art is more exaggerated and even sometimes grotesque than McLusky's more realist style; the women are more apt to pose suggestively. I did sometimes find it harder to follow, but I also found it more immersive.
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| from The Living Daylights (ser. 3, no. 255) script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak |
Lawrence is much more likely to take liberties in his adaptations. He adds a whole subplot in The Man with the Golden Gun before Bond goes to Jamaica; Bond is recuperating from his brainwashing at the same clinic where one of Scaramanga's victims is recovering, and is turns out the victim's nurse is a Russian spy who tries to seduce Bond, and then whom he foils. The Living Daylights is a pretty straight adaptation, but Octopussy adds a lot. The short story is told from the perspective of the villain; Bond comes to see him, tells him he's been caught, and the villain ends his own life. But here, we see Bond's investigation play out in Austria, aided by (of course) a young woman, and then in Jamaica, aided by both her and Mary Goodnight, picking up from TMWTGG. Chinese gangsters try to kill Bond; the whole thing is much more elaborate.
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| from Octopussy (ser. 3, no. 271) script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak |
This, then, becomes the go-to method for the last two adaptations. There's no spy plot in the original of "The Hildebrand Rarity"; Bond just bumps into some rich American jerk collecting wildlife specimens while on vacation. Here, the rich American jerk is also working with the Soviets to steal an experimental NATO unmanned submarine. Many people seem to praise these strips for capturing the feel of the novels, but in this one, I felt the influence of the movies a bit; the strips began before the films did, but by the time of this strip, the first four or five films were out, and it feels a bit Thunderball to me in particular. The Spy Who Loved Me is also quite different; the first two thirds of that novel don't feature Bond at all, but tell the life story of Vivienne Michel, whose life Bond saves in the final third. The novel replaces all this with a completely unrelated story about Bond trying to stop a recently revived SPECTRE from stealing technical data on a new stealth airplane. This expands massively on a very brief story Bond tells Vivienne in the novel. Again, it feels more film Bond than novel Bond.
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| from Octopussy (ser. 3, no. 428) script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak |
But it also works. I like adaptations best when they bring something new to the table; Gammidge and McLusky did solid work, but it often didn't add much. Lawrence and Horak's work is at its best when they are adding their own stuff, and I look forward to seeing where they go in future volumes, when the strip's adventures became (with one exception) wholly original, because based on this, they know how to spin an entertaining Bond tale even without Fleming as a basis.
I became curious: On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the longest Bond comic story so far, clocking in at 274 strips. On the other hand, The Living Daylights is the shortest, at just 54. But volume 001's Thunderball was 64, and adapted an entire novel, while this volume's The Hildebrand Rarity is 174 strips but is adapting a short story. So which strips were the most expanded/condensed? To work this out, I counted out how many strip installments each comic story took up, and counted how many pages each corresponding story ran in my 2006 Penguin editions of the Bond books.
The average compression is that one page of prose becomes 0.65 strips; if you remove the short stories from that, it drops to 0.53, because the average page of a short story becomes 2.24 strips! It's quite a difference, but even the two Horak/Lawrence novel adaptations are the only novel adaptations to have more than one strip per page of prose. The later McLusky/Gammidge ones were trending longer, though, with You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service the only two of their novel adaptations to be above the average compression. Were they expanding the stories as the grew closer to running out of Fleming stories to adapt?
Astoundingly, the 48 pages of "Octopussy" can become 167 strips (3.48 strips per page), while the 336 pages of Thunderball become just 64 strips (0.19 strips per page).
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