Modesty Blaise: The Black Pearl
Modesty Blaise: The Black Pearl by Peter O’Donnell (writer) and Jim Holdaway (artist). Titan Books, 2004. unpaginated, b+w, 8.5″ x 11.5″, $16.95.
This volume (the fourth in Titan’s series) collects the daily Modesty Blaise strip from December 12, 1966 to January 13, 1968. The title character is some kind of spy (in the adventures here it is never made clear what her actually job is or who she works for) from England who gets into adventures with a fellow named Willie who likes to throw knives. The stories (three are included here) are uninteresting, adventures in foreign locales. There’s lots of fighting and each has its slightly mystical or science fictional element. I didn’t really get much of a feeling at all for the two main characters. I got bored pretty early in and mostly starting just looking at the pictures.
One would have to call the art by Jim Holdaway photorealistic. The backgrounds, rooms, and cars all provide testament to the use of photo references. Backgrounds are often almost unbelievable detailed and realistic. The characters also show a sense of reality, of photography. This sense suffuses the strip so much that it is often a bit lifeless. The characters’ faces all seem so expressionless. Holdaways has a great line, variable in thickness, often so precise and straight it was probably drawn with a straight edge. Within the confines of his mostly square panels he makes great use of depth of field, placing a face or figure cropped off one side and then another face or figure further in the distance.
The art is the what makes this strip stand out, in my opinion, and is the reason I picked up a volume. I’m less enthused by the content.
For some samples of the strip and more extensive discussion of it, I highly recommend A.E. Mendez’s site on Photorealist Newspaper Strips and particular his Modesty Blaise pages.
Tags: Comics, comic_strips
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