James Bond 007: Permission to Die by Mike Grell et al.

There have been a lot of James Bond comic books from the 1990s onward; I don't have the inclination to pick up most of them. After his adaptation of Licence to Kill, though, Mike Grell wrote and illustrated a three-issue miniseries for Eclipse Comics and Acme Press, and that, I thought, had to be interesting. Grell is, of course, the writer and illustrator of Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, and he excels at stories about the brutality of masculine men. How could his take on Bond not be worth picking up?

I think that technically this is only based on the novels. Certainly Grell's Bond is a generic one, not based on any specific actor, and he does have the facial scar from the novels. When Felix Leiter shows up, he has a hook for a hand, so we know Live and Let Die happened. There are also a number of reference to From Russia with Love. There must, however, be some timeline sliding akin to the films, as it's definitely 1989 in this story (a newspaper about the fall of the Berlin Wall appears on the last page of issue #3), and those novels were both published in the 1950s, and nothing gives the impression that over thirty years have passed.

Indeed, stylistically, the whole thing is clearly patterned after the films. It begins with an action-focused teaser that's not relevant to the overall story; it ends with an enormous action set piece in a villain's underground lair that's about saving the world from destruction. Bond sleeps with four different women, I think, which is more of a film thing; in the novels, it's usually just one per book.

from Ian Fleming's James Bond 007: Permission to Die #2

Grell does a great job of it, on the whole. His artwork, combined with Julia Lacquement's coloring, is lush and detailed. The action is usually excellent, and I often don't care for big action sequences in comics, but Grell really makes them work. If in 1991, someone said this was going to be the basis for the next James Bond film, I would be pretty delighted, I think. The villain is a good one, a Phantom-of-the-Operaesque fellow who plays organ in a cave underneath a mountain from which he is launching a nuclear bomb. He comes across as deadly earnest in a pretty compelling way. Some elements feel a bit rushed, especially Bond's relationships with some of the women in issue #3; one does wonder if a fourth issue could have helped. (The issues are, though, double-length, so it's equivalent to a six-issue miniseries.)

I couldn't track down any firm release dates for these issues, but the first two have 1989 copyright dates and the third a 1991 one. There is a bit of a wonkiness to the plotting that makes me wonder about the original plans here. The first two issues almost work as a complete story; they're about Bond having to extract a woman from the other side of the Iron Curtain, smuggling her out through Hungary, while the communists desperately try to stop him. Despite their filmic touches (the teaser, how big some of the action gets), those two parts feel more Fleming on the whole with their emphasis on the details and logistics of spycraft. The main thing that stops them from working on their own is that the woman's backstory is somewhat too elaborate: if that was all the story was, we wouldn't need to know so much about her uncle.

from Ian Fleming's James Bond 007: Permission to Die #3

The third issue changes locale to America and focuses on her uncle and his plot to end nuclear war, which wasn't a thing at all in the first two issues. It's set up a little, but not very much, and so feels like the climax to a different story than the one we were reading. A solid revision could smooth it all out, I reckon, but given the apparent two-year gap between issues #2 and 3, was Grell hedging his bets in case there wasn't a third issue?

Like many post-1989 Bond writers, Grell has to reckon what you do with Bond if there's no Cold War anymore. I did really like the ending moment of the story where Bond thinks about the fact that his purpose in the world is coming to an end; it's the kind of masculine angst Grell did so well in The Longbow Hunters, and to be honest, I wish we had seen more of it here. Grell never did any more Bond comics, but I would have been all over them if he had.

Ian Fleming's James Bond 007: Permission to Die was originally published in three issues (1989-91). The story was written and illustrated by Mike Grell, with art assists by Dameon Willich (#1-3), Mark Jones (#2-3), and Rick Hoberg (#3); colored by Julia Lacquement; lettered by Wayne Truman; and edited by Catherine Yronwode and Richard Hansom.