Gad, Sir! Comics!

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

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

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