Even More Modesty

Sometimes my nightly ritual involves taking a few more chunks out of the 10,183 Modesty Blaise strips, thoughtfully being reprinted by Titan Books. I've followed the stories from 1963 to 1969, and if anything they're getting better.

How do you evaluate a comic strip? Here you have two innovative, creative, and driven elements -- Jim Holdaway's stark line-work and Peter O'Donnell's endless parade of tangled plots and bizarre villains -- who meshed together perfectly. They knew each other well and, just as importantly, they knew the characters.

I'm not a fan of mystery-thrillers by any means, but O'Donnell has me permanently hooked. Far from being repetitive, each story has a new angle that puts Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin to the test. The fact that he could cram so much into a daily three-panel strip -- and make it engrossing even when collected into books -- is baffling to me.

Simultaneously ahead of its time and the last of its kind, it's cinematic and epic, funny and terrifying, and ultimately touching. I'm sad it's all over, but I still have 31 more years of strips to read.

PS: Peter O'Donnell says that "The Hell Makers" is one of his favourites, and I agree. Willie is kidnapped and tortured with a brain-damaging psychedelic drug, so Modesty teams up with a dusty old cowpoke and his trained eagles. And that's just the beginning...

More Modesty!

I stumbled upon Modesty Blaise through the back door: the 1966 film starring Monica Vitti. Not being familiar with Peter O'Donnell's "Modesty Blaise" newspaper strips or novels, I took the movie at its purely silly face value. And I loved it.

It turns out that Monica Vitti's character bears next to no resemblance to the REAL Blaise. Titan is reprinting the entire 39 year run of the daily strip in brand new, super high quality books, and I bought the first volume just to make a comparison. Now, three volumes in, I'm hopelessly hooked on the original non-campy-but-still-so-mod Modesty Blaise.

I'm not a fan of spy/action/thriller storylines, but O'Donnell gets me every time. Besides the solid characterization of Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin -- a truly believable male/female duo who compensate for each other's weaknesses -- the villains are also fully-fleshed and beautifully quirky; Gabriel's nerd-sociopathy, Uncle Happy's baby-talk, Mister Sun's sadistic drive to force Blaise into compromising her rigid morals. On top of all that, artist Jim Holdaway's style is stark and real...but many of his characters have a comically grotesque appearance.

In short, the Modesty Blaise strips are expert storytelling, endless creativity, and every panel is a surprisingly beautiful and complex piece of art.

It's also interesting to see how O'Donnell structured the stories to meet the unique demands of a daily newspaper strip: three panels each, always ending with a significant piece of dialog; every strip self-contained but still fitting into a plot arc; subtle moments for rehashing the story for readers who missed a week or two. It does feel a bit weird to read them one after the other, but it still works...and they're the BEST "just before bed" material.

So cheers to Modesty: a realistic kick-butt professional heroine. And cheers to the Monica Vitti version as well, incidentally.