By Peter O’Donnell & Dick Giordano (DC Comics)
ISBN 1-56389-178-6
Here’s an odd little item that’s worth a second look. Modesty Blaise is a reformed criminal genius who got rich and retired clean, but came back to the game out of boredom, only this time on the other side.
Originally a newspaper strip created by Peter O’Donnell and drawn by the brilliant Jim Holdaway, she and her charismatic partner in crime (and latterly crime-busting) Willie Garvin have starred in 13 books/short story collections, two films, one TV pilot, a radio play and nearly one hundred comic strip adventures between 1963 and the strip’s conclusion in 2002. The strip has been syndicated world-wide, and Holdaway’s version has been cited as an artistic influence by many comic artists.
In this volume O’Donnell adapts his first novel, which expanded upon the origins of the characters before reprising the first strip sequence, ‘The Gabriel Set-Up’, where she is seduced out of retirement by British Secret Service Chief Sir Gerald Tarrant. Willie Garvin has been arrested in a banana republic, and by informing Modesty so she can rescue him from a death sentence, the civil servant has accrued a debt of honour she can never repay. Also, she was so very, very bored with a life of ease.
To acquire oil rights for Britain, a payment must be made in diamonds to the ruler, but the government has caught wind of a plot to steal the gems en route. Old rival and criminal super-genius Gabriel wants the loot and nothing has ever stopped him before…
This classic adventure thriller is given a slick and glossy sheen in this original adaptation for the US market. The scripts crackles with energy and tension, the heroes are indomitable yet never implausible, and veteran Dick Giordano produces some of the best art of his career, free to work with a full page rather than within the tier of panels the daily strip was restricted to.
While not to every fan’s taste, the story is a solid entertainment, and a worthy addition to the fund of splendid pictorial action O’Donnell has crafted over his long career.
™ & © 1994 Modesty Blaise Ltd. All Rights Reserved.