Download Modesty Blaise Collection by Peter O’Donnell (.CBR)

Modesty Blaise by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway
Requirements: CBR Reader, 3,5 GB
Overview: Modesty Blaise is the title of an action-adventure/spy fiction novel by Peter O’Donnell which was first published in 1965, featuring the character Modesty Blaise which O’Donnell had created for a comic strip in 1963.

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Modesty Blaise is a fictional character in a comic strip of the same name created by Peter O’Donnell (writer) and Jim Holdaway (art) in 1962. The strip follows the adventures of Modesty Blaise, an exceptional young woman with many talents and a criminal past, and her trusty sidekick Willie Garvin. It was adapted into films made in 1966, 1982, and 2003 and a series of novels and short stories beginning in 1965.

This was the first novel to feature the character of Modesty Blaise and her right-hand-man, Willie Garvin, and the series of books (all written by O’Donnell) ran concurrently with the comic strip until 1996 (the comic strip ran until 2001).

Technically, this is a novelisation of a screenplay O’Donnell wrote based upon the character, although it predated the film release by a year. The filmed version of the screenplay bore little resemblance to O’Donnell’s original (the author was often quoted as saying only a single, inconsequential, line of dialogue remained from his original script). Although the 1966 film version of Modesty Blaise was not a critical success, the book proved popular with fans of both the comic strip and readers of spy fiction (Blaise was promoted on the cover of the first American edition by Doubleday as the feminine answer to James Bond), and O’Donnell followed up with 10 more novels and two short story collections over the next 30 years

Having conceived the idea after a chance meeting with a girl during his wartime service in the Middle East, O’Donnell elected to work with Jim Holdaway, with whom he had worked on the strip Romeo Brown, after a trial period of collaboration with Frank Hampson, creator of Dan Dare, left O’Donnell dissatisfied. Modesty Blaise debuted in the London Evening Standard on May 13, 1963. The strip was syndicated among a large number of newspapers ranging from the Johannesburg Star to the Detroit Free Press, the Bombay Samachar, The Telegraph, (Calcutta, India), The Star (Malaysia), The West Australian (Perth, Australia) and The Evening Citizen (Glasgow, Scotland).

After Jim Holdaway’s death in 1970, the art of the strip was provided by the Spanish artist Romero. Eight years later, Romero quit to make time for his own comics projects, and after short attempts by John Burns and Patrick Wright, Neville Colvin drew the strip until 1986. Then Romero returned to the job and continued until the end of the strip.

The strip’s circulation in the United States was erratic, in part because of the occasional nude scenes, which were much less acceptable in the US than elsewhere, resulting in a censored version of the strip being circulated. (Modesty occasionally used a tactic that she called the “Nailer,” in which she would appear topless, distracting the bad guys long enough to give Willie or herself a chance to incapacitate them.) An example of this censorship appears in the introduction to the 2007 Titan Books reprint volume Death Trap, which illustrated two segments of the story arc, “The Junk Men” that were censored by the Detroit Free Press when it published the strip in 1977; in both cases a screen was drawn over scantily-clad images of Willie and Modesty. Reportedly, O’Donnell did not approve of the changes, although they were made by the artist, Romero.

The final Modesty Blaise strip ran in the Evening Standard on April 11, 2001. Some of the newspapers that carried the series, feeling that it had become a tradition for their readers, began running it again from the beginning. O’Donnell, in order to give Romero some additional work, gave the artist permission to adapt one of his short stories (“The Dark Angels”) as a graphic novel that was published in Scandinavia in 2002, later being reprinted in the US in a special issue of Comics Revue.

On the 1st December 2008, the Evening Standard, which had stopped including comic strips for some time, started republishing Modesty’s early adventures commencing with La Machine, using the original artwork.

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