Modesty Blaise: The Hell Makers [Paperback]

The Modesty Blaise Strip first began running in London Evening Standard in 1963 with stories by Peter O' Donnell and art by the late Jim Holdaway. While popular in England and elsewhere around the world, The Modesy Blaise comic strip never had wide circulation in the United States, due in part to its occasional strong violence and nude scenes. Reprints here in the states have been sporadic but recently Titan Books began reprinting the entire series from the beginning. The Hell Makers is the 6th volume in the series. The book features an introduction by writer Max Allan Collins and also includes an interview with Peter O' Donnell. Three complete stories are included.

The Hell Makers leads off the book and finds Modesty's sidekick Willie Garvin falling prey to a set-up when he tries to play good Samaritan and help out a women in distress. She turns out to be an operative for a group looking to derail a government scientific project. Willie is captured and given doses of a powerful hallucinogenic drug derived from LSD that gives him horrible delusions. The group films Willie's psychotic rants and shows them to Modesty. They plan to blackmail her into discrediting two American scientists that will cause their project to grind to a halt. The female agent's arrogant attitude incenses Modesty as she swiftly dispatches the cocky agent. Now Modesty, along with help from the CIA has to find Willie and rescue him before his captors realize their agent is dead. Easier said than done, however, as Willie is being held high in a mountain retreat cabin that will take a treacherous climb to traverse. The Hell Makers was a great story. The strips are reproduced with impeccable quality and Holdaway's art is simply amazing. He had a remarkable cinematic ability to capture the action in panel strip format. The strip originally ran from March to August, 1969.

In "The Warlords of Phoenix" Modesty and Willie are in Japan training with their old martial arts mentor Kazumi. Their plans to meet Kazumi and his daughter Kimi for dinner later are shattered when Kimi is attacked by her own fiancée and critically stabbed. In a rage, Kazumi kills her once future son-in-law Asada. Kimi reveals she discovered that Asada was part of a shadowy organization known as Phoenix. As Willie and Modesty begin to investigate Phoenix, little do they know that Phoenix has their eye on the pair and soon Modesty and Willie are gassed unconscious and wake up aboard a ship off the coast of Japan. They are taken to a secret island where the Warlords of Phoenix explain that their group will rise from the ashes of a future nuclear war and gain control of the world. They want to recruit Willie and Modesty into their ranks. Bet you can guess what their response will be! The "Warlord of Phoenix" is notable due to the fact that Jim Holdaway passed away suddenly in the middle of the story and would be replaced by Enrique Badia Romero, who would handle the art on the strip until it ended.

I really have to give credit to Titan Books for reprinting this classic material that many of us here in the states never had the opportunity to see in its original run. The strips look great and the bonus articles and interviews make these collections that much better.

Reviewed by Tim Janson

The Hell Makers contains three episodes. Jim Holdaway died suddenly before the last of the three was completed and Enric Badia Romero took over very competently.

Captivity and escape is a standard theme in the Modesty Blaise series: one of them gets caught and incarcerated and the other breaks him/her out, or both are in a fix and cooperate to escape. The imaginativeness of their escapes is very entertaining and the adventures are page-turners. A fairly rare thing in comics is plot and counter plot, where each side outthinks the other, but we get that in one of the adventures (in which the reader also gets an advance introduction to the word mafia before it gained wide currency). There's a very sixties flavour to the series, but as it segues into the seventies, it acquires a new artist, with Holdaway dying prematurely and Romero replacing him.

The reproductions are excellent for the most part, but some are spotty, including the first few days by the new artist. Blaise's face has a more delicate beauty and more character in Holdaway's hands and the first artist has a better command (so far) of landscapes, but Romero surpasses him in two areas: giving Modesty sexy poses (especially in the pivoting of her hips) and in the fighting sequences. Also, the second artist, a Spaniard, Latinizes Modesty's face.

There's an introduction over several pages at the beginning of the book, plus short intros by O'Donnell to each episode. Like the Gabriel Setup, I plowed through this issue... maybe a little too fast. It's that entertaining. Unbeatable bedtime reading. Go for it - my money's where my mouth is: I have more on order!

When I was a kid I couldn't wait for fridays to go buy my favourite magazine so I can read the comics strips. My favourite character was way cool Modesty Blaise. I a happy that I found her again. Happy reading

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