by Mark Edlitz
But that [third and final] book sat in the publisher’s drawer for more than six months, possibly a year, before it was published [two years after the first two issues]. In the meantime, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Iron Curtain came down, and my story looked a little out of date and kind of a moot point at that stage. It was a different world. It had changed in a hurry. We included a blurb in a newspaper about the wall coming down and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. We gave Bond a closing line that had something to do with the change in the world. [Bond says, “Who knows, it might have worked…. And I’d be out of a job.”9] The story worked all right, but it would’ve been that much better if it had come out when it was supposed to.
Why were the second and third issues published two years apart?10
The publisher was having financial difficulties. They couldn’t find a printer that would print the book if they didn’t have the money to pay for it up front.
How did you arrive at the Bond that you selected, the composite Bond?
This is my Bond. But my Bond is actually Ian Fleming’s Bond. If you look at the frontispiece of the comic, James Bond has the Walther PPK in his hand, and he is leaning on something. I took that from a photograph of Hoagy Carmichael leaning on a piano. All I did was I took about half an inch off Carmichael’s nose because he was a bit too long in the face and too angular to suit me.
I changed his hairstyle ever so slightly to give him the traditional James Bond look and the black comma [Fleming likens the way that Bond’s hair rests on his forehead to a black comma in several novels, including Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, and Goldfinger.] I also added a scar, which I modified from Fleming’s description because frankly, a spy who’s walking around with a three-inch scar on his right cheek is going to be pretty darn easy to spot. But if you’re like me, growing up, we were rough-and-tumble kids, and every kid I knew had a scar on their eyebrow from taking a bad fall. I also knew a young lady who had an interesting scar in her eyebrow, and I said, “If you enhanced that and just brought it down to your cheek, it would be stunning,” She was a pretty girl to begin with but that scar through the eyebrow made it distinctive. That was what I had in mind when I did James Bond.
Mike Grell, like Ian Fleming, based Bond’s look on composer, singer, and pianist Hoagy Carmichael.
ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF MIKE GRELL; PHOTO (INSET) COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST
I drew the scar coming down through his eyebrow, missing the eye, and then just catching a portion of his cheekbone so that overall the length is three inches. But it’s actually two small scars that are less noticeable. This way somebody can’t say, “Keep your eye out for a guy with a three-inch scar on his right cheek.” The reality is, even back then, plastic surgery would’ve covered that up.
Was there a lot of trial and error in drawing Bond?
Oh, hell no. I just did one preliminary sketch and sent it to them, and they liked it. That was it.
The character was waiting inside you.
Oh, absolutely.
Have you seen the Ian Fleming–commissioned drawing of Bond?
Yes, yes.
It’s almost too elegant.
It’s not that it doesn’t work. That commission is also very much Hoagy Carmichael plus a scar on the cheek. I changed it but it’s all subjective.
You said that it was important to show Bond’s weaknesses in your story.
Bond is a guy who is carrying ghosts with him. I mentioned that I picked up pretty much where On Her Majesty’s Secret Service left off. I wanted to let the reader know that this was the guy who was still healing from the death of his wife. He had not fully recovered from that yet. Everything that he does is geared in that direction.
He’s a bit reckless. At that stage in his life, Bond would’ve had a bit of a death wish. That’s why Boothroyd tells Bond, “You’re licensed to kill. No one gave you permission to die.” That brings Bond back to who and what he is. He’s a military guy. He’s got orders. He’s going to obey his orders, and no one has given him permission to die.
Was Permission to Die your title all along?
Yes. I knew that they were going to be doing Licence to Kill, and I was looking for something that sounded very James Bond. I still think it does.
It’s the flip side to Licence to Kill.
Right. Raymond Benson paid me one of the biggest compliments I ever had. He told me that he thought my book, Permission to Die, was the best James Bond movie that he had ever read.
How long did it take to draw all these books and pages?
It was probably about a year-long process.
Bond comics aren’t always good. Is Bond difficult to write as a comic?
No. [Comic book writer] Cary Bates, whom I worked with on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, was a huge James Bond fan. I remember saying to Cary that I thought it was silly that James Bond hadn’t been turned into a [monthly] comic book. He said, “It’s all a question of the visuals and the action.” I said, “What do you mean?” Cary said, “Take the scene in The Man with the Golden Gun where James Bond jumps the car, ramp to ramp, over that broken-down bridge. It rotates, spirals 360 degrees in midair, lands on its wheels, and drives off. In the movie, that’s spectacular. In a comic book, it’s three panels. Who gives a shit?” And he’s right. Cary’s right. At that point, the thrust of Bond films seemed to be more emphasis on the action and the gadgets and less emphasis on the character, which is a huge mistake.
For me, this story is more about the character, and that’s why the critical reaction that I got to Permission to Die was as good as it was. It was because I tried to give all the characters in the book something important—an arc, a personal backstory. The villain, who is about to blow up a major city and kill a whole bunch of people, is in a great deal of personal turmoil over the act that he’s about to commit. Widziadlo sees this as a sacrifice that he is about to make; he is about to be branded the worst terrorist criminal ever to exist. In his mind, Widziadlo is willing to do that because he thinks that in doing so, he’ll be saving the world. Right? It’s the logic of his own twisted psyche; he’s a damaged character.
Widziadlo may be insane, but his insanity doesn’t take the form of being a sociopath or a psychopath. It’s something that happened to him that scarred him. My revelation is at the end of the story. When Widziadlo and his girlfriend Edáine Gayla are embracing, she reaches up and removes the mask that he’s wearing. Everybody’s expecting him to have horrific scars. Widziadlo’s not scarred at all. All the scars are on the inside. Just like James Bond, all the scars are on the inside, except for the one.
When writing a Bond comic, do you have to make sure to somehow include fans who only watch the movies and aren’t familiar with the books?
You have to. I come from an era when you were more likely to read the book before you saw the movie. Today people are not interested in reading books at all, or for the most part, few of them are. They’re more likely to have their first experience regarding Bond from a movie. Fortunately, the old films hold up extremely well. The newer ones, not always so much.
The biggest disparity between the literary Bond and the film Bond came during Roger Moore’s tenure as James Bond. I’m not saying anything against Moore, because he’s a terrific actor. I really like the guy. He’s got a terrific sense of humor. But there was a point where there was little difference between James Bond and Maxwell Smart. Bond was played goofy, played more for laughs than it was for serious. In the middle of that, he made a couple that were pretty darn good. For Your Eyes Only was the best of the bunch that he made. The Spy Who Loved Me was pretty good, too. But the other ones were sort of goofball, broad comedies. That didn’t suit my image of Bond at all.
What are the best comic strip or comic book Bonds?
You have to put the newspaper comic strip, the original one in the Daily Express, right at the top. And, for my money, all the rest of us are wannabes.
What made the Daily Express comics so good? The
y were faithful to Fleming, took their time….
It was the combination of all of that. The characters were true to the Fleming stories. The comic strips took a good deal of time to tell the story that they wanted to tell. The artwork was just terrific. In the strips, all they had was black and white. But they were stunning—rich texture, bold blacks, and you had no trouble at all reading it, even though it reproduced at a microscopic size by the fastest publishing method known to man on the crappiest paper available.
The two major illustrators on the original Bond comic strip were John McLusky and Yaroslav Horak. What were their stylistic differences? Horak already had a well-known, rather distinctive style, whereas McLusky seemed to be more of the old-school illustrator, at least in my view. McLusky’s Bond resembled Sean Connery a bit closer than Horak’s did. Horak’s characters have a particular stamp to them, a particular way he has of drawing eyes, for instance. Horak’s women had a particular look about them. It’s like the difference between Neil Adams and Jack Kirby. One is more illustrative, the other is more stylized and perhaps a bit more dynamic.
Horak is Neil Adams in that example?
Right.
Kirby’s work is bold and dynamic, while Adams is more realistic.
Right.
Out of Horak and McLusky, which is more realistic?
Yeah, that’s gonna get my head handed to me. You get stylized images more frequently from McLusky, and a more illustrative kind from Horak. Take for instance their portrayal of James Bond. I prefer Horak’s James Bond to McLusky’s. But McLusky’s rendering and his old-school style appeals to me. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Let’s face it, when we’re talking about cartoonists and comic books or comic strips, you’re always going to have a soft spot in your heart for the one that attracted your attention first.
You said McLusky was an old-school illustrator. Can you elaborate?
Cartoonists tend to use shorthand. We draw things that we know and that look a certain way. A good guy looks a certain way. A pretty girl looks a certain way. We draw types, stereotypes, because a lot of times we don’t have a lot of time or space to establish whether somebody’s a good guy. If you want somebody who’ll be recognized as a good guy, you’ll draw him with softer features and nicer eyes. And bad guys look a little more stern around the edges. It seems to me that the guys who have that ability to draw different characters, different styles of characters realistically, without resorting to stereotypes are kind of few and far between, even today.
What does a good Bond comic capture that a novel or film can’t?
That’s interesting. As an artist, when I look at a page, I’m not just looking at the people on the page and what they’re doing. I’m looking at the world that they live in. And at a glance, you can absorb the world of James Bond in a comic book, whereas in a novel, it has to be described. Sometimes at length, and sometimes ad nauseam. Fleming was guilty of spending page after page describing a game of golf or page after page describing a dinner. Now it’s all stuff that was interesting to Fleming, which adheres to what Agatha Christie said: when you read a book, you get 10 percent plot, 20 percent characterization, and 70 percent of whatever the writer knows best. That holds true with Bond. It’s the texture that can be missing unless you’re willing to wade through all those pages.
Reality and good storytelling don’t necessarily always mix. You can do something that can be a ripsnorter, a great action yarn, a terrific action scene, and have little to do with reality. But if it’s entertaining and the audience buys it, that’s all that counts. Denny O’Neal, who was my editor on the Warlord and Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics, used to say, “Yes, it’s bullshit science, but it’s our bullshit science.” And that holds true with James Bond. You have to just accept that, even though the world of modern-day spies is a little closer to John le Carré’s George Smiley than it is to Bond. They’ve established the world that Bond lives in, and you go to Bond for that reason.
Is there a panel that best encapsulates what you were trying to do with Bond?
Oh, lord. That would presume that I remember the frames because I sure don’t have a copy of the book. My favorite page of the book is probably in the first issue, when we introduce Bond and he’s basically gotten out of bed with a young lady, and he’s staring out the window. There’s a flashback to a number of iconic Bond moments. I included moments from Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball. As many as I could, on up to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and that crucial moment when the camera pans to Tracy in the car with the bullet hole. That spread basically encompasses everything that I thought was important about Bond.
Grell depicts memorable moments from Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in Permission to Die.
COURTESY OF MIKE GRELL
You don’t have a copy of your book? Or it’s not in front of you?
Yes, it’s in storage someplace. Someplace. If you said, “I will give you $1,000 if you could mail me copies tomorrow,” I would have to go to eBay and buy copies to send to you. I’ve had to do that more often than not. One day I will come across those books, and that’ll be great. But the likelihood of finding them anytime soon is slim to none.
Where’s the artwork?
In the ’90s, there was a collapse of the comic industry, starting about 1993, when Marvel Comics went bankrupt. When I started in the business in the early ’70s, the cancellation point for a book at DC Comics was 33,333. If you did 33,334, you were just over the line into the black. If you dropped into the red, the book was canceled. In the ’90s, sales of books typically were three hundred thousand. And could go as high as three million. That’s because of what collectors were doing: People were buying comics not one and two copies; they were buying ten, twenty, or fifty copies and putting them away, hoping to resell them a year later for more than they paid for them.
But all that ended the first time some kid walked in, tried to sell his dozen copies of whatever back to the comic book dealer. The dealer probably reached under the counter and pulled out a giant long box packed to the brim and said, “Kid, I got all you want for a quarter apiece.” That big booming sound that you heard all around the world was the collectibles market collapsing. And the comic business went down with it.
It collapsed as exponentially as it expanded. You went from having a book that was selling half a million copies one month to one selling a quarter of a million the next month. The next month you’d be selling maybe eighty to one hundred thousand copies. The next month after that, you’d have about fifty thousand. Before you know it, even well-known titles like Batman were down to selling eight thousand copies a month. Eight thousand. Right now, even though the industry has rebounded considerably, there are few titles that have recovered to the levels that we were selling in the ’70s. Few comics are selling thirty-thousand copies a month.
Given that context, where’s your artwork?
I sold it. I had rent to pay, a mortgage to pay, food to buy. I sold everything. I sold everything to stay alive, and I’m still on the green side of the sod. Where the artwork is, I have no idea.
Did you keep any art?
I didn’t keep anything to commemorate my time. I have a couple of pieces that were stashed away in storage and avoided the mass sell-off. But I don’t have anything of my own hanging on my walls right now. I’m at the stage where I’m not interested in leaving something behind for somebody else to sell. At the moment I’m in the market for a new car, so everything’s for sale.
ROGER MOORE IS JAMES BOND
Talking to Roger Moore when he’s wearing a tuxedo is like trying to hold a conversation with Leonard Nimoy when he’s wearing Spock ears. Your rational mind knows you’re talking with an actor but your fan instinct can almost trick you into thinking that you’re talking to the real James Bond.
Moore and I met at a gala dinner where he was invited to talk about his work for UNICEF, a charity that provides aid to needy children. Moore became a goodwill a
mbassador for UNICEF, and from 1991 until his death in 2017, he traveled the world meeting ill and impoverished children and raising money and awareness for the organization.
At the gala, diners listened politely as Moore spoke about his ties to the charity. However, I suspect that many of them, like me, were there less to see and admire Roger Moore the philanthropist than to rub shoulders with James Bond. After Moore’s speech, the moderator opened the floor to questions. Moore responded to all of them knowledgeably and passionately, but it wasn’t until I asked Moore about his work as the superspy that the gathering turn festive. Moore knew his audience wanted him to acknowledge his onscreen counterpart, and he did not disappoint.
Prompted by my question, Moore self-eff acingly explained his version of how he was cast in the role that earned him international stardom. “Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, the producers, and I used to gamble. They owed me a lot of money. They thought it would be cheaper to put me in a movie.”
Moore talked about taking over the role of Bond from Connery. He said, “People would ask, ‘Aren’t you nervous about taking over for Sean Connery?’ And I’d respond, ‘No, not really. There have been four thousand actors who have played Hamlet, and this certainly ain’t Hamlet.’ There’s not much to say in the role apart from, ‘My name is Bond.’” It could be argued that Connery was so successful and beloved as Bond that only an actor of great confidence could assume the mantle. Moore’s bravado and fearlessness were not unlike Bond’s. Furthermore, Roger Moore was suave, erudite, and witty—words that have been used to describe James Bond himself.
