Solo

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Solo (Jonathan Cape, 2013).


I have to say that I don't quite understand the Ian Fleming estate's strategy with James Bond novels. Over the last six years, there have been three new ones, written by three authors, which are set in entirely different times and don't have anything to do with each other. It's almost like the way Toho keeps making Godzilla movies which pretend the only other Godzilla movie that ever happened was the very first one, or the way the Rolling Stones play three new songs and all the old, old hits, but studiously avoid playing any songs that were written after 1982.

This time out, William Boyd was selected to write a Bond book, and Solo is set in 1969. Bond, now 45, is sent to the west African nation of Zanzarim, where a rebel leader, Solomon Adeka, is carrying out a brutal civil war. Adeka is getting assistance from a billionaire who's running guns into the country and from a handful of mercenaries. Strangely, the arms and military supplies are coming in on airplanes bearing the logo of the charity that's supposed to helping the displaced children of the region.

Bond doesn't have to assassinate Adeka; he is in the final stages of terminal cancer when he finally makes it behind the lines under cover as a journalist and dies soon after he arrives, letting the civil war crumble. But he's betrayed all the same and, recuperating in Scotland, he concludes that he's going to have to follow the money back to America to find out who has hijacked the charity and track down that "philanthropist" without MI6 support...

It's a really fun book. I think that Boyd captured James Bond very well, and placed him in a believable world with a very unusual and interesting mission. He brought out Bond's brutality better than some writers wish to acknowledge, with one stunning example near the climax really surprising me. I was very satisfied with it, but I'm also left very curious about what would be happening next to the modern day Bond seen in 2011's Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver. Why are we skipping around? What next, Fleming Estate? A Bond-at-Studio-54 novel by another new author for the 2015 title? Recommended.

Carte Blanche

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Carte Blanche (Hodder & Stoughton, 2011).

You know that you've become old when James Bond is suddenly, and officially, eight years younger than you. Last year, Ian Fleming's estate let novelist Jeffery Deaver, who is highly regarded for his modern thrillers, take a crack at 007. In Carte Blanche, published last year, Bond has been formally rebooted to age 32. Born in 1979 and a veteran of the Afghanistan War, Bond works for a covert agency attached to MI6, and has carte blanche to act in Her Majesty's interests overseas. But when the trail of a strange cypher that states British casualties will number in the thousands leads him back to the UK, he finds that he has to follow the rules of the domestic service, MI5. Is James Bond really ready to be a team player?

Deaver's take on the character was quite fun. I enjoyed Bond's competence and realism, and his humanity. I don't know that it's accurate to say that he feels guilty at one point, but he at least considers the emotional ramifications of his actions. There's even a Bond girl who gets away from him, which is quite amusing. I like the way that Deaver's Bond has a masterful command of tactics, even if the overall strategy sometimes eludes him. What is shaping up to be a major plot point and the deaths of dozens turns out, much to Bond's surprise, to be a completely innocuous fetish on the part of one of the villains. I really enjoyed the way that Bond spends almost the entire book having no idea, once the villain has been established and followed, exactly what the heck his plan actually is. We're so used to the supercriminals in the movies showing off and bragging about their schemes that it was quite pleasing to be as in the dark as our hero.

Briefly, I was really pleased and entertained by this Bond story, though I am sorry to say that it looks like it's going to be a one-off, and all the neat threads begun in it probably won't ever be developed. Prior to this, the publishers - slash - licence holders tapped Sebastian Faulks for a one-off novel set in Ian Fleming's original, 1960s-continuity, and this will be continued in the next novel, to be written by William Boyd and published next year. Recommended, even if it proves to be a complete hiccup in the character's publishing history, and even though I kept visualizing a young Sean Connery in the part, and not Daniel Craig. Had to keep forcing Craig's face and build into my mind's eye; got a bit distracting, really.

James Bond: Nightbird

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of James Bond: Nightbird (Titan, 2010).



The James Bond newspaper strip is unique among the many classic reprints that Titan has released, in that it's the only one that's been collected in book form out of order. This is a little confusing, but, even though they lack volume numbers, the seventeen books do, in the end, reprint the entire run of the strip and in order, but they were not published in a beginning-to-end sequence. In perhaps the weirdest moment, the effective "book thirteen" of the run was published last. This is Nightbird, a book that contains three stories from 1976-77: "Nightbird," "Hot Shot" and "Ape of Diamonds."

It's possible that Titan skipped around sometimes in the hopes of finding the best quality material possible, and did not wish to publish before firmly knowing that they'd done their very best. After all, there are several strips in "Ape of Diamonds" which really do suffer from quite poor reproduction. This is the tradeoff for having these strips reprinted at all, in any format. Searching through newspaper archives looking for the original masters did, in many cases, turn up some incredibly neat gems, such as the Ron Embleton samples seen in another volume, and this one collects a never completed, and never printed, series of twelve strips of an abandoned strip from the early 1980s. If a few rough panels of a subpar story were the tradeoff to find that kind of rarity, then I'll take it.

On the other hand, maybe this book was published last because the stories are, and let's be charitable, pretty horrible? The 1970s Bond stories by Jim Lawrence and Yaroslav Horak - assisted in the final story by Modesty Blaise's Neville Colvin, who ghosts several strips in a quite remarkable pastiche of Horak - have a tendency towards grandiose plots that are just about this side of believable, but only if you're willing to believe the comic book supervillain trappings. "Nightbird" could have been a decent enough story about high-profile kidnappings, but with a criminal gang that uses "alien" costumes and a getaway ship shaped like a gigantic bird, it gets sillier by the panel. And by the time the trained super-gorilla shows up and Dr. No returns from the dead, you're waiting for Bond to don a cape and mask himself. Not recommended.

James Bond: The Girl Machine

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of James Bond: The Girl Machine (Titan, 2009).



By this point, everybody's familiar with what you get in these Titan editions, right? Three newspaper stories from the mid-70s, full of grandiose villainy, topless ladies, fisticuffs and great artwork by Yaroslav Horak, right? Yeah, but this time there's an extra treat. It turns out that a year or so after the strip was cancelled, the Daily Express considered relaunching it, and hired the great Ron Embleton, whom you may know from Oh, Wicked Wanda! and several Gerry Anderson strips, to illustrate twelve tryout strips.

That the project wasn't continued is a huge shame. With no disrespect to Horak, John McLusky or any of the great artists who did such a fine job with Bond over his quarter-century run in newspapers, Embleton was clearly the man who should have been drawing James Bond since the beginning. The actual content of the book is as interesting as ever - Bond's ally Suzy Kew has an awesome moment modelling undercover as a "big game hunter" - but this time out, the stunning supplementary material completely overshadows everything. Well done, Titan, uncovering this fascinating might-have-been! Recommended for older readers.

James Bond: Polestar

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of James Bond: Polestar (volume seventeen) (Titan, 2008).



At last, we've reached the end of Titan's reprints of the James Bond newspaper strip. Well, not quite... while this edition finishes up the run with the strip's final two stories from British papers, and three others which had only seen print in Europe, Titan was forced to skip over two books which should have reprinted 1970s adventures because of some unspecified problem or other, and those are due out later on. But arranged sequentially, this is book seventeen, even though it's the fifteenth published.

You can tell I don't have a lot to say about this one, can't you? There's just so little of interest here. Lawrence's work on the strip was frequently patchy, with clever ideas offset by downright dumb ones, but there's nothing in these five stories worth remembering. The artwork is uninspired and even the reliable Yaroslav Horak, returning for his first Bond stories in many years, was on autopilot. The villainous schemes are eye-rollingly silly and the plots are childishly simple.

Put another way, the baddie in the title story disposes of his enemies by stripping them naked and kicking them into the arctic snow to freeze to death. But they somehow die standing up, so that Bond can find gorgeous naked ladies in blocks of ice. Add to this trained attack bats and fake sea serpents and a "punk" rock star who wouldn't have been out of place on Quincy but commands the biggest worldwide audience you ever saw, and I can't even recommend this mess to Bond fans, only completists.

Bond and Tobey

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of James Bond: The History of the Illustrated 007 (Hermes, 2008) and B. Tobey of The New Yorker (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1983).



This is a very interesting overview of James Bond's lengthy career in comics, ranging from the newspaper strips to cameo appearances to adaptations of the films. Alan Porter has done an exemplary job tracking down stories from all over the world and interviewed many of the writers and artists who've worked on the character to flesh out the backgrounds behind the stories.

The book is gorgeously presented, with dozens of illustrations on very nice paper, but I found the layout occasionally aggravating. The bulk of the book is comprised of a list of stories, with creators, plot points and reprint details, arranged into two columns of text per page. This might be dismissed as a nitpick from a frustrated wannabe designer, but this leaves an awful lot of dead white space on many pages, and starting each entry with the title of each story in nondescript Impact font doesn't strike me as the best solution. I really enjoyed kicking back and following the presentation of stories throughout the 1970s, popping from British newspaper strips to Swedish comic books, but I wonder whether the book might work better as a secondary research source had each thread of Bond continuity been given its own section.

If you're not like me, and are able to avoid second-guessing the presentation of everything you read, you probably won't find these sorts of quibbles. Those aside, it's a genuinely fine book. If you really like James Bond, you're probably enjoying Titan's reprint series of the newspaper strips already, and this is a fabulous companion to those volumes. Porter's commentary is honest and informed. He doesn't hesitate to point out when some of the storylines get eyebrow-raisingly silly, and the background commentary to Bond's occasional truncated adventures-in-progress (such as the Thunderball strip or Topps' aborted adaptation of Goldeneye) is very interesting. In all, this is a perfectly good addition to any Bond-lover's bookshelf.




Barney Tobey, who passed away in 1989, specialized in dry panels where middle-management suburbanites were confronted with modern art, or visited Europe as baffled tourists. I might say that very little in this collection of 120-odd cartoons is on as consistently a knockout level as Tobey's New Yorker colleagues Charles Addams or Jack Ziegler, but I don't think potential readers should view that as a dismissal, either.

I read this yesterday during that agonizing weekly visit to the allergy clinic, and at one point turned a page and laughed so loudly and for so long that we had the full attention of every bored, suffering person there, much to the absolute, acute embarassment of my son, who was chuckling all the way through the latest Dr. Slump volume with much less noise.

Every decent library should have at least one New Yorker collection. I wouldn't pay an exorbitant price from an out-of-print specialist for this, but it certainly shouldn't be passed up if found in a good used bookstore, either.

(Originally posted February 04, 2009 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

The Sandman: Endless Nights and James Bond: Shark Bait

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I never got around to buying this, but Marie has a copy, which promptly made its way onto the top of my nightstand pile before I shelved it with her other books. Released in 2004, this sees Neil Gaiman and seven artists new to his universe telling seven short tales about his Endless family. They're not all successful - Frank Quitely brings brilliant, beautiful imagery to a story that tells us nothing new about Destiny, Bill Sienkiewicz's messy, challenging layout ends up obscuring a very nice story of Delerium, and I gave up on Barron Storey's "Fifteen Portraits of Despair" entirely - but the four where everything clicks are genuinely wonderful additions to the Sandman story. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I liked the Milo Manara story a lot - I should probably reread all those Manara books outside of young eyes; it's been a while - but best of all is a great tale of Destruction, hanging out at a very strange archaeological dig. I've said before that Gaiman's short stories are more entertaining and fulfilling than his longer tales; don't let Endless Nights' position as "apocrypha" to the ten-book Sandman story encourage you to overlook this!



Speaking of books that should be read away from young eyes, well, the Bond newspaper strips of the 1970s weren't shy about a little T&A, but the first two strips in this collection are just full of Horak-drawn nudity, especially the title piece, in which Bond's KGB nemesis spends pages in just a pair of panties. I wasn't pleased with the previous volume and its implausibly outrageous stories, but things are considerably more believable in these three tales, which are much more grounded in rough seventies espionage. "The Xanadu Connection" and "Shark Bait," from 1978-79, were the last from the original series of strips which dated back to 1964 and never actually appeared in UK newspapers. The series resumed in the pages of the Daily Star in 1981 with "Doomcrack," which was drawn by MAD's Harry North. Overall, a very good volume, and, I must point out, it's got another great essay about James Bond comics, this time highlighting Dark Horse's troubled run and a tale never completed, written by Alan Porter, who knows a whole heck of a lot about 007's long, strange career!

(Originally posted February 28, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

James Bond: Death Wing

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



For their latest collection of the James Bond newspaper strip, Titan bafflingly jumped ahead from the 1975 stories into 1977 for the last one to appear in the UK, and the first two which never appeared in British papers. Perhaps sales for the series are down and they wanted to promote the "never printed in England before!" angle? Whatever, I wonder whether the reason the Express cancelled James Bond in the first place was because the plots were getting increasingly ridiculous. I wouldn't want "Sea Dragon" in my newspaper because it's really stupid, although "Death Wing," if you can swallow the missile/glider thing, does have an exciting climax.

I know this next bit is going to read as forced given the above, but I would like to point out that Alan Porter contributes a nice essay about the history of James Bond in American comics, and it's the best thing in this volume. This is only recommended for completists, but Bond afficionados might enjoy the essay. I'd kind of like to read that 60s issue of DC Showcase with the Dr. No adaptation myself!

(Originally posted November 23, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)