Each week, we post a
limited-edition design, to be sold for exactly 7 days, then replaced with another!
This week...the Swinging 60s come to life with the astounding-campy adventures of
Modesty Blaise
!
Initially a very successful comic strip by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway about a "bad girl" gone good,
Modesty Blaise
was produced as a feature film in 1966 starring Monica Vitti, during the spy film craze spawned by the
James Bond films
.
Unfortunately, the film's producers went the "camp" route, producing one of the first "spy-spoof" films!
O'Donnell, who had done the first draft of the flick's script was so displeased, he took his version of the script and turned it into a
prose novel, which sold very well (and received praise by critics and fans alike, unlike the movie)! This launched a second career for O'Donnell, who continued to script the comic strip and penned more novels both adapting the strip storylines and doing
new tales, which were then rewritten into the comic series!
After the first movie, there was a tv pilot which turned the character into a generic private eye, and in the 1990s, an origin tale,
My Name is Modesty
, which went straight to video.
Time has been kind to the
first Modesty film, and the campy style which turned off 1960s audiences who expected a more accurate portrayal of the character, has become an attraction to 21st Century viewers who now look upon it as ironic deconstruction of the heroic concept!
Go figure!
We'll go with the flow, and offer one of the
best poster images from the film (and one of the few with her looking like the comic strip version!) on a
kool kitschy kollection!
Plus, all the text is in Japanese, for an
added layer of koolness!
With all due modesty (ouch), we think you'll just snap these goodies up!
, as personified by Jane Fonda!
by Jean Claude Forest, the character was visually-based on Brigitte Bardot, who was offered the movie role but turned it down (picture "Bardot IS Barbarella!" on the posters).
, as Durand-Durand!
, btw) I did find The Comics: the Complete Collection by Brian Walker (which combines the two previous volumes into one MASSIVE hardcover) for only...wait for it...$9.97! It's normally $19.99!
, Penguin Book of Comics
, all Ron Goulart's books, etc.
is a comic strip writer-artist himself (Beetle Bailey
and Hi & Lois
) as well as the son of legendary creator Mort Walker
.
' legendary Torchy Brown was, unfortunately, limited to black-owned newspapers which had relatively-limited circulation.)
and Joe Palooka
.
based on the 1980 tv series
!)
, about a Black woman private eye!
had done a number of comic strips in Europe, but was unknown in America. Friday was his Stateside strip debut.
and a then up-and-comer named Howard Chaykin (American Flagg
, The Shadow
)!
Besides the strip, there was a one-shot comic book in 1972, and a feature film
in 1975 (a year after the strip was canceled) starring action-movie goddess Pam Grier
as Friday, Thalmus Rasulala as Blake Tarr, Yaphet Kotto as Detective Colt Hawkins, plus Eartha Kitt, Jim Backus, Godfrey Cambridge, and in one of his earliest roles, Carl Weathers, as an un-named assassin!
, curiously, I've never seen a novelization (and, in the '70s, they did novelizations of movies that weren't even released in the US, just shown overseas)!
aficionado or grrrl hero fan in your life, you can't go wrong with a Friday Foster mug, bag, shirt or other goodie from Atomic Kommie Comics™!
isn't.
