Mister 8

…a.k.a. The Coalition Of Bloggers wRiting About Spies. Pretty awful huh? It’s a work in progress.

So…my apologies for the lack of posting yesterday, and through the week last week, and potentially for the week ahead. I’m still working on the project, which involves lots of tedious work, and a hard deadline. In the meantime, I wanted to point you all toward some of my favorite blogs, which you may have seen in the sidebar, but may not have visited.

Agent ASPIDELAPS:

Double O Section is run by a chap named Matthew Bradford, aka “Tanner,” and covers the gamut of spy fiction from The Amazing Screw-On Head to Spooks to Kim Possible and everything else in between.  Double O Section is the go-to site for news on the latest releases, and interesting insights on, for instance, why the Transporter series should be considered within the realm of the Eurospy genre, or a look at gender roles in the Bulldog Drummond flick Deadlier Than The Male. The latter came as an add-on to his new series of “My Favorite Spy…” which will include movies and books, and hopefully comics and cartoons and television shoes as well. If the previous hasn’t enticed you, Tanner also runs regular contests with awesome book and DVD prizes!

Agent MICRURUS FULVIUS:

Wes Britton is not so much a blogger as he is an expert on spies of film and television. He’s published a trio of books (Spy Television, Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film, and Onscreen and Undercover: The Ultimate Book of Movie Espionage), with an encyclopedia on the way, runs Spy Wise, a website devoted to spy-fiction, and The Spy Report, a blog dedicated to spreading news of espionage-related developments, both fictional and real. His website is a source of information as valuable as his books, containing articles like the Michael Caine spy-ography (even if Wes is horribly, horribly wrong about the dreadful worst-ever Michael Caine movie–and this is a man whose career includes Austin Powers 3 and the terrible fourth Jaws movie–The Holcroft Covenant), and a wealth of information about O.F. Snelling, including a PDF of the entire Snelling study of Bond, Double-O-Seven: James Bond Under the Microscope.

Agent PARANJA MULTIFASCIATA

Quick: think of a spy movie. David Foster at Permission to Kill has seen it, and if he hasn’t, he will. An invaluable resource for finding details of obscure and foreign secret agent movies, Permission to Kill will also one day hopefully be an invaluable book of film reviews on your shelf. David has shined the spotlight on forgotten films like (at random): OSS-117: Murder For Sale, The High Commissioner, or Masquerade, and includes thoughtful insights and important cultural contexts. The reviews are so good and so frequent that David can be forgiven for not seeing the genius of Casino Royale (not not that one, the other one). For those taking a first look at the site, you are blessed with just over two years of reviews to read through

Agent HEMACHATUS HAEMACHATUS

Paul Bishop is an author of crime fiction, and runs Bish’s Beat, a multi-faceted blog that covers spies, pulps, gumshoes, cops, swinging jazz, and just to throw you for a loop, LOLzCats. He’s got his finger on a number of cultural pulses, and I regularly find news there that I not only haven’t seen, but I didn’t know to look out for in the first place. Recently, he pointed to an article about gender issues in the James Bond series, and initated a discussion about Chris Mills’ Noir Magazine. Most interestingly, Paul has a viewpoint on crime fiction that most of the rest of us spy bloggers don’t: he’s lead detective of the West Los Angeles Area Sex Crimes and Major Assault Crimes unit.

Agent BOULENGERINA

Jason Whiton, like myself, is another newcomer to the spy blog scene, and so might not have the extensive archive that the previous writers wield. Still, his Spy Vibe blog is off to a great start, with a thoughtful tribute to Patrick McGoohan, and a recent appreciation of the IPCRESS File. Spy Vibe is also a website, with a wide collection of spy-related video clips that highlight, as Jason says, 1960s spy style. We’re looking forward to seeing much more of Spy Vibe in years to come!

I hope you’ll check out these great sites, and I’m also interested in getting feedback from my own readers on posts here. Please feel free to comment below, or email me with suggestions / criticism!

In addition to the Friday filmclip, which will come later in the day, I wanted to share an embarrassing bit of the past inspired by yesterday’s romp through some surf spy classics. See, about six and a half years ago, I attempted to start my own surf spy band…nothing came of it except for one recorded practice.

But I thought I’d share a few songs from that session for the hell of it. The band suffered from not having a bass player, and having a converted guitar player as a drummer. Still, it was a bunch o’ fun:

Detective Frank McSwaggart

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From Russia With Love

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Mondolfo’s Revenge

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Your humble host.

One year ago today, I made the first post at Mister 8, knowing that I didn’t have an audience, in which I established what I believed to be the goals of the site. Those goals have changed a bit over the past 12 months, but I thought, if you’ll allow, I might look back on those goals, revisit some of my favorite posts over the past year, and lay out some ideas for the next year at Mister 8.

My goal with Mister 8 is the following:

Publish a weekly comic detailing the adventures of agent Martin Queen, aka the titular Mister 8. Still in the planning stages, Mister 8 will combine the feel (though, sorry to say, not the artistic majesty) of traditional adventure comics by Caniff, Raymond and Sickles with a touch of contemporary humor. That’s the plan, leastwise.

Well, this one went by the wayside fairly quickly. I realized two things shortly after posting the first few strips. The first was that the story I wanted to tell with the Mister 8 comic was vastly more intricate than my art skills or the webcomic medium would allow. The second was that putting out a comic strip, even one only seen once a week, was hard work.

Still, I’m working on a series of scripts and pitch for a comic series from my original ideas, that I’ll hopefully start submitting to editors next summer.

Discuss spy-fi music — the themes of John Barry, Lalo Schiffrin, Jerry Goldstein, Henry Mancini, Ron Grainer, Laurie Johnson, etc. — and provide tablature for the songs that I’m capable of picking out.

I’ve certainly posted a good bit of tablature. And one of my favorite posts from the last year discussed Spy-Fi music with a capital S (and F)…an interview with Tom Pervanje of the spy-surf band Spy-Fi. One of the things that I didn’t get to do this year, but wanted to, was to record versions of the songs for which I was figuring out the tablature. Though I had a few posts, during surf-spy month, and in the post for the IPCRESS File theme, where I shared some music, in the next year, I hope to provide much better quality songs — maybe even an album?

Talk about the genre on film and television — from the camp of Derek Flint to the cutting edge of the Prisoner and the Avengers to the serious takes of John Le Carre. Also, yes, inevitably, James Bond.

In the past year, we’ve scarcely talked about Flint, The Avengers or John Le Carre! But we’ve talked plenty about Bond.

We’ve also discussed my all-time favorite television show, The Prisoner, sadly quite a bit after the passing of Patrick McGoohan. We also cast a spotlight on I-Spy after running into Robert Culp in New York. And of course, the Harry Palmer Files took up much of the summer!

Spotlight the genre as represented in comics — Nick Fury, Sarge Steel, Tara Chase, King Faraday, Super Spy…the list of secret agents working in a world normally reserved for superheroes is extensive.

Thanks to our readers, we’ve been able to share bunches of out-of-print comics, and we also spotlighted a number of costumed adventurers who cross the boundary between spy and superhero.

Analyze random aspects of spy-fiction — Gadgets, tropes, cars, and whatever else comes to mind. In fact, I think I’ll start things off soon with a posting about fonts used in spy fiction.

And I did! I also covered typography in The IPCRESS File, discussed machines and technology in spy films and television, and talked about setting the scene in spy novels.

One of the best things to come from my publishing a blog about spy fiction this year was meeting so many other fantastic bloggers, with whom I formed a loose sort of union with a lousy name — The Coalition Of Bloggers wRiting About Spies — or COBRAS, for short. I hope to do more collaborative work with these guys in the future, and look forward to seeing what they come up with in the next year.

So…goals for the next year — I guess we’ll check back in on these next November:

1. Complete scripts for and sell a publisher on the idea of Mister 8 the comic!
2. Expand the web presence of Mister 8.com  and the COBRAS!
3. Share more spy-related music!
4. More interviews!
5. Finish the Harry Palmer Files!
6. Talk about the Avengers, Man From UNCLE, Mission Impossible, and other classic 60s espionage shows!
7. Become more acquainted with the Eurospy genre!
8. Answer the question: Who is Eidolon?
9. Offer more contests and fun giveaways!
10. Bring in more regular readers and commenters! Please comment!

Thanks to everyone who has visited the site in the past year! I hope you’ll keep coming back!

Yours truly,

Armstrong Sabian

I am amazed that I’ve had the attention span to make it this far! And as I discussed in our one-year anniversary round-up the other day, there’s plenty of stuff that I have yet to cover.

I couldn’t figure out what to post for my 200th post. I’ve got a few other posts that should be forthcoming — a look at Hitchcock’s three not-really-spies-on-the-run films, a tablature for the wedding theme in You Only Live Twice, and a look at the Kommissar X films, starring the late Tony Kendall, which I’d already planned to watch tonight.

In the end, though, I found it fitting to return to the reason I made this site in the first place — that dagblasted failure-so-far of a comic. Here’re some sketches that I’ve worked on lately, trying to figure out who exactly this character is. I think one of my biggest mistakes was jumping right in, thinking that things would click into place as I drew each chapter. But as early as week two, I already had major regrets about what I should have done differently for the sake of the story, characters, etc.

Jack Carnehan:

Simon Crewe: