Blogging in Ignorance: The Girl from UNCLE

I don’t think that I ever saw The Girl from UNCLE on TV.

I never read any of the five comics published in the USA by (who else?) Gold Key.


I never read any of the three annuals published in the UK by World Distributors.


The only Girl from UNCLE story that I know is a comic strip in a Lady Penelope annual.

So why mention it?

First, because it provides such a stark demonstration of the difficulties that I mentioned earlier faced by artists trying to draw TV-tie-in comics with limited photo-reference. Here, the same photograph of Leo G Carroll, who played UNCLE boss Mr Waverly, is used at the beginning and end of the story, only six pages apart. Note, too, that Waverly looks nothing like Carroll in the penultimate panel, drawn without reference.


(Nor does April Dancer look much like actress Stephanie Powers either here or elsewhere.)

Second, this story was drawn by Enric Badia Romero, who would later become the regular artist on Modesty Blaise, the comic strip which kicked off this little thread about action heroines of the 1960s. And if Romero can finish where he started, so can I.


Pictures and panels
The Girl from UNCLE issue 2, Gold Key, April 1967

The Girl from UNCLE “Academy of THRUSH Agents”, art by Enric Badia Romero, Lady Penelope Annual, City Magazines, 1967

The Girl from UNCLE Annual 1968, World Distributors, 1967

Wooden Wonder: Lady Penelope

In the days before viral marketing and massive promotion budgets, one of the ways in which puppet science fiction producer Gerry Anderson tried to raise advance interest in his upcoming television series was through comics. When TV Century 21 was launched in 1965, alongside the familiar Anderson series Fireball XL5 and Stingray, and other TV stalwarts The Daleks and Burke’s Law (the detective series in which Anne Francis made her first appearance as Honey West) was what must have seemed a mystery – the futuristic adventures of aristocrat, journalist and spy, Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward.

A few months later, Thunderbirds appeared on television, and it all made sense. The puppet Lady Penelope went on to become one of Britain’s strangest ever sex symbols, which is saying something in a country that has produced such grotesques as Victoria Beckham and Jordan (though at least Lady Penelope was constructed mostly from natural materials).

If the producers of programmes like The Champions were restricted in the action sequences they could put on screen, how much more so was Gerry Anderson, his leading characters unable even to walk across a room convincingly, let alone run or jump or fight.

The Lady Penelope comic strip often reflected, rather than challenged, those restrictions, but this played well with Lady Penelope’s air of imperturbability.


Indeed, on those occasions when Penny behaved in a more physically aggressive manner, it seemed somehow undignified.


The Lady Penelope comic strip was successful enough for it to lead a spin-off comic of the same name in 1966, with the tag line “For Girls Who Love Television”. The Lady Penelope comic was to be the home of another strip intended to trail a new television series, in this case telling of the formation of the Angels fighter squadron that would appear in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.


At the same time, a series called The Mark of the Mysterons began in the boys’ comic Solo. The structure of the media of the day – only three UK television channels but as many comics as the market would bear – meant that girls and boys were expected to read different comics but to watch the same television programmes.

Sadly, the Gerry Anderson comic empire didn’t last. A third title, Joe 90 Top Secret was launched, but soon folded into TV21, which in turn, its Anderson-based strips already poached by another publisher, was swallowed up by Valiant. (In those days, a failing comic in Britain was not cancelled, but merged with another title, and the print runs and subscriptions added together to make the new combined comic more financially secure.) Lady Penelope was eventually transformed into Penelope, a more conventional girls’ comic with few links to its puppet past. So we never got solo adventures of Lieutenant Gay Ellis or Colonel Virginia Lake from UFO. A shame, that.

For more on the Lady Penelope comic strip, have a look at The Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History.


Panels
Lady Penelope “The Vanishing Ray”, art by Eric Eden, TV Century 21 issue 50, 1 January 1966, reprinted in Thunderbirds … Lift Off!, Ravette Books, 1992

Lady Penelope “Duel in the Jungle”, art by Enric Badia Romero, Lady Penelope Annual, Century 21 Publishing/City Magazines, 1968

The Angels, art by Jon Davis, The New Lady Penelope issue 55, 4 February 1967, reprinted in Action 21, issue 10, October 1989

Beyond Borehamwood: The Champions

Back to the ‘60s again.

The British television production company ITC, run by the flamboyant Lew Grade, had a big hit with its adaptation of Leslie Charteris’s stories of The Saint, starring Roger Moore. It spent the rest of the decade producing imitations about globetrotting adventurers (as well as financing Gerry Anderson’s puppet fantasies, but that’s another story). Danger Man, The Baron, Man in a Suitcase - all shared The Saint’s conviction that there was no country in the world that could not be replicated by stock footage, the parkland around Borehamwood studios, and a population of British character actors.

In 1968, The Champions stretched ITC’s resources further, by endowing its lead characters with super-powers. Craig Sterling, Richard Barrett and Sharron MacReady, agents of the international secret police organisation Nemesis, crashed their plane in the Himalayas, and were rebuilt by the inhabitants of a hidden city. Unfortunately, although their powers supposedly included super-strength, there was little more money in the budget for stunts and special effects than for foreign travel, so the stories tended to rely on such less visually interesting powers as super-hearing and telepathy instead. What feats and fights as we saw were largely hogged by Sterling and Barrett, either because of assumptions about gender roles, or because of the shortage of stunt women to double for lead actress Alexandra Bastedo.

The comics faced no such constraints.



Sadly, comics adaptations didn’t always take this sort of opportunity. The later ITC television series Department S involved a team assembled by Interpol to solve unsolveable crimes. It consisted of dogged investigator Stewart Sullivan, wild theorist (and novelist) Jason King, and rational researcher and computer expert Annabelle Hirst. Although Jason King was clearly the stand-out character, and eventually got his own spin-off series, the three principals treated each other as equals, and needled each other constantly.

Which is why the disappointment of the only comic strip adaptation of Department S that I have seen lies not just in Annabelle’s demotion to secretary, but in her deference to the menfolk.


Win one, lose one. But the win has that lovely sleek shiny artwork by Ron Turner, so I’ll read that one more often.

Panels
The Champions “Error of Judgement”, art by Ron Turner, Joe 90 Top Secret Comic Annual, Century 21 Publishing/City Magazines, 1969

Department S “The Silent Men”, writer and artist unidentified, Thunderbirds Annual 1971, City Magazines, 1971

“Anne Francis Stars In …”

Another female adventure character from the 1960s, another one-off Gold Key comic.

The TV series Honey West lived and died in the shadow of The Avengers. ABC television had evidently noticed the success of The Avengers in the UK, and wanted their own version. It ran for just one season (1965-66), before being cancelled to make way for the real thing. Honey West star Anne Francis reckoned that this was because The Avengers, having recouped its production costs in its home market, could be bought more cheaply. But it seems likely that ABC’s executives were also belatedly responding to the wave of anglophilia set off by the Beatles.

They may also have noticed that Honey West wasn’t all that good. Its half-hour episodes about the escapades of a Los Angeles private eye, her disapproving partner, and her pet ocelot are light and breezy, but they creak with the burden of middle-aged script writers trying desperately to be hip. Personally, I find that rather appealing, but The Avengers was constructing part of 1960s pop culture, while Honey West was just looking in.

Even so, Honey West offered a type of heroine that had probably never been seen before on US TV: confident, proficient, armed, and capable of throwing men around in a fight. And unlike Charlie’s Angels, producer Aaron Spelling’s next show about women detectives a decade later, Honey was clearly the boss.

Spelling’s source material was a series of novels by the semi-pseudonymous GG Fickling (“Fickling” was real, “GG” was fake), but all he kept were the name and the basic idea of a female PI. Fickling’s books were an attempt to write Mickey Spillane type thrillers with Marilyn Monroe in the role of Mike Hammer, but they are desperately crude in all senses of the word.

There’s a good site about the books here, and one about the TV series here. The entire series is available on Region 0 PAL DVD.

Gold Key’s comic book adaptation was produced in 1966. It contains two 16-page stories, “The Underwater Raiders”, about a jewel robbery on board a ship, and “The Fall Guy”, about an attempt to fix a wrestling match.

The Grand Comics Database attributes both stories to Paul S Newman (script) and Jack Sparling (art); but I suspect that there may, at least, have been different inkers at work. Here are a couple of extracts from “The Underwater Raiders”.



And here are some panels from “The Fall Guy”.




Some of those later panels remind me of Dan Spiegle. The likenesses are better, and the inking style is reminiscent of his work on Nemesis in The Brave and the Bold, but the compositions aren’t up to his standard.

The comic can best be described as “functional”. By Gold Key standards, that’s pretty good, but still hardly worth seeking out.

Update, 27 June 2007 Added two more scans.

Pictures and Panels
Honey West issue 1, Gold Key/KK Publications, 1966

The Other Cyd Child

One of the tidbits of information in the extras included in Titan’s series of Modesty Blaise reprints is that original artist Jim Holdaway had a set of reference photos taken to help him with the fight scenes, modelled by European women’s judo champion Cyd Child.

Child also worked as a stunt artist, and often doubled for Diana Rigg in The Avengers. So, stretching a point, you could say that she played both Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, which is quite an achievement.

The history of The Avengers in comics was covered in an article by Ian Wheeler, John Freeman and Dez Skinn in Comic International issue 201, and is the subject of a fine web-site, The Avengers Illustrated.

Among my pitifully small collection of issues of TV Comic is issue 720, from October 1965, which marked the start of a seven-year run of The Avengers, off and on.


(Is it just me, or should those dialogue balloons be read manga-style?)

Some of the TV Comic strips were reprinted for the American market by Gold Key. Although the indicia name the single issue they produced as The Avengers, the cover carries the title John Steed, Emma Peel, presumably to avoid confusion and trademark conflicts with Marvel’s super-hero team. The Avengers Illustrated shows the photographic covers, but here is how the newly-coloured interior art appears.


By far the best comic strip version of The Avengers ever put into print was the mini-series Steed and Mrs Peel (which also features Tara King), published by Eclipse Comics and Acme Press between 1990 and 1992, and written and drawn by Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson, perhaps the most perfect combination of creators and subject that I can think of. Confusingly, the back-up strip, about Mrs Peel’s reunion with her husband, was also drawn by Gibson, though it was written by Anne Caulfield. The back-up is quite amusing, but not a patch on the main feature, “The Golden Game”.

Again, The Avengers Illustrated only shows the covers, so here is a sample of the interior.


“The Golden Game” is a clever and witty story, and deserves a trade paperback if anyone can get the reprinting rights.


Panels
The Avengers, first instalment, art probably by Pat Williams, TV Comic issue 720, 2 October 1965

John Steed, Emma Peel “The Roman Invasion”, art probably by Pat Williams, from The Avengers issue 1, Gold Key, 1968, reprinted from TV Comic

Steed and Mrs Peel book 1, “The Golden Game” part 1 “Crown and Anchor” by Grant Morrison (writer), Ian Gibson (artist), Ellie de Ville (letterer) and Dick Hansom (editor), Eclipse Comics and Acme Press, 1990

Review: Modesty Blaise – The Inca Trail

Modesty Blaise: The Inca Trail by Peter O’Donnell (story) and Enric Badia Romero (art), Titan Books, May 2007, 118 Pages of strip, £11.99
Features “The Reluctant Chaperon” (first published in the Evening Standard, 26 March – 14 August 1975)
“The Greenwood Maid” (first published in the Evening Standard, 15 August 1975 – 2 January 1976)
“Those About to Die” (first published in the Evening Standard, 5 January – 28 May 1976)
“The Inca Trail” (first published in the Evening Standard, 1 June – 20 October 1976)

I am always slightly amazed at how well a good daily adventure strip can read in collected form. Surely, it is a hard enough task to tell a story in over a hundred tiny daily instalments over the course of several months, coping with readers who might start part way in, or miss a couple of weeks’ instalments while on holiday, or just not really remember how the story started by the time they reach the end. For it also to read fluidly in a collected format that was never intended by its authors is quite remarkable.

In this eleventh volume of Titan Books’ chronological reprints, Modesty Blaise reads so smoothly that it might have been written as a graphic album with an eccentrically restrictive panel grid. And Modesty Blaise was a very good daily adventure strip indeed. For once, I can say that about an old British comics series without fear that my judgement is being distorted by nostalgia. The Evening Standard is a London local newspaper, and it was not readily available where I grew up. I had read one or two of the novels, but I didn’t encounter the comic strip until Titan’s previous attempt to reprint the series in the 1980s.

For the uninitiated, Modesty Blaise, which ran from 1963 to 2001, was a contemporary crime and adventure strip.


No, honestly, it was.

Modesty herself had established a criminal empire in the southern Mediterranean while still in her teens. She had then retired, but, together with her sidekick Willie Garvin, was forever being drawn back into trouble.

The Modesty Blaise stories generally followed one of two templates. In the first, Modesty becomes aware of some nefarious activity by accident, or is informed of it by one of her old criminal associates, or by Sir Gerald Tarrant, head of British Intelligence. She and Willie plan to defeat the baddies. Something invariably goes wrong, and Modesty and Willie have to improvise their way to victory. In the second formula, someone with a grudge targets Modesty or Willie. They learn of this, work out a counter-plot (which usually goes wrong) and, again, improvise their way out.

The joy of the stories is in the variations that O’Donnell plays upon these themes, the convincing and ingenious details he adds from his research, and, above all, in the characters of Modesty and Willie, confident, competent, and displaying utmost faith in each other, but never superhuman. They make mistakes, are injured, are sometimes even out-thought or out-fought. Their victories always seem earned by effort, ingenuity and skill.


Right from the start, Modesty was also a rare female lead character of the period who was intelligent, tough and decisive, on a par with Cathy Gale and Emma Peel. But whereas Steed generally had the upper hand in The Avengers, nobody is ever in any doubt that Modesty is the dominant partner in her relationship with Willie (and, indeed, with anyone and everyone else). O’Donnell had rapidly dropped her tendency to become weepy at the end of a “caper”. The only remaining charge of sexual stereotyping that could be levelled at the character is the authors' willingness to use show her using sex to her advantage, as in the occasional tactic she calls “the nailer” – going into combat topless to distract the enemy. But even that is handled with a matter-of-fact humour that is typical of the series.


Of the four stories in this volume, three follow the first template. In “The Reluctant Chaperon”, Modesty is looking after the teenaged daughter of a friend when they witness an attempted Mafia hit, as part of an attempt to take over organised crime on Malta. In “The Greenwood Maid”, Modesty and Willie agree to help an old associate recover the proceeds of a bank robbery so that it can be put into a charitable trust for aiding drug addicts (it’s hidden in a castle where a Robin Hood pageant is being staged – hence the first of the two anachronistic panels earlier). In “The Inca Trail”, Modesty encounters the children of the deposed President of a South American state while trekking across country to meet Willie. “Those About to Die” follows the second template, as a dying billionaire kidnaps various combat specialists and forces them at gunpoint to take part in gladiatorial games.

Neither “The Greenwood Maid” nor “Those About to Die” is prime Modesty: stories with costume gimmicks often suggested that O’Donnell was bored. But “The Reluctant Chaperon” and “The Inca Trail” both benefit from commentary on the lead characters by various callow young things, and “The Inca Trail” has a particularly neat climax involving crossing a ravine with no bridge.


When I moved to London in the late 1980s, I was finally able to start reading the strip on a daily basis. I formed something of a dislike for Romero’s art at the time. Although it told the stories clearly enough, his characters all looked like they would be more at home in a Barcelona disco in the 1970s than wherever the story was set in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

That’s hardly a complaint I can level here. These stories are set in the 1970s, after all, and Romero’s types look quite at home in stories set in Malta, an unnamed Mediterranean island and a country in South America. Reproduction is patchy: clear in most places, but sometimes prone to losing fine lines and blotchy spreading of thicker ones. I’m not sure why this should be the case, as Titan presumably has access to Peter O’Donnell’s collection of tear sheets. But since the strips were originally drawn to be printed by letterpress on newsprint, they are quite robust, and comprehensible even when poorly reproduced.

Peter O’Donnell contributes short introductions to each story. There is also a reprinted interview with him from 1973, which covers his early work in comics (did you know that he wrote the venerable Weary Willie and Tired Tim for Comic Cuts at one point?), his move into newspaper strips, and his writing techniques for Belinda, Garth and Tug Transom.

Overall, if you have any interest at all in thriller or contemporary adventure stories told in comic strip form, Modesty Blaise is pretty much indispensable. Pick any album. This one will do.