Today’s concluding post on Dr. No in comics was assisted by my two all-time favorite sites on art and illustration in James Bond media. The images were kindly provided (after I searched high and low, but could not find my copy of the collected strip) by newest COBRAS member Peter @ The Illustrated 007, which is a treasure trove of all sorts of Bond-related art, from book covers to comics to posters to international representations.
The text uses as its source an archive of the sadly now-defunct site called The Art of James Bond, whose author, “Red Grant,” provided a history of the Bond book covers, posters, comic strips and production art.
The first strip of the Dr. No series appeared in the Daily Express on Monday, May 23, 1960, having followed, as the novel, five 007 stories before it. This was the first and only Bond comic story to be written by Peter O’Donnell, who of course later went on to create his own secret agent comic strip in Modesty Blaise. Unlike previous stories, O’Donnell, with artist John McLusky, kicks right into the story, with Bond giving up his trusty Beretta to his boss, M, and shortly thereafter launches into the Jamaican / Crab Key adventure.
John McLusky Dr. No
The story is fairly faithful to the Fleming novel, with all of the familiar faces — Quarrel (who first appeared in Live and Let Die), Honey Rider, and the villainous Dr. Julius No himself. Bond would not debut on film for another two years, and No is presented here with a more rudimentary set of pinchers than those seen in the movie version. There are other differences too — McLusky presents his Honey with the broken nose that Fleming writes her with in the novel, for instance — but it is surprising how much of the visual imagery of the comic strip eventually made its way into the film, including the scene where Honey rises from the ocean. And as always, it’s interesting to note the visual similarity of McLusky’s Bond to the eventual casting of Sean Connery.
Probably not the strip you'd hoped to see, eh?
Dr. No was originally conceived as a television project by Fleming, and therefore ventures more into the realm of fantasy than the previous stories, including a climactic battle with a giant squid and the eventual death of the villain as he’s crushed under tons of guano. The series concluded on October 1, 1960, having run 114 strips total, and has been collected three times so far — in The Illustrated James Bond, put out in 1981 by the James Bond 007 Fan Club, in Titan’s 2005 reprinting of the series
