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!
right...comics DO cause Juvenile Delinquency!
(among others)...
and 
– films that generated a combined $1.2 billion (emphasis mine) at the box office.
