My t-shirts, part 35: Modesty Blaise

"Modesty Blaise" is one of the best thriller/action comics ever. If you haven't read it, you should. It didn't stay great over its entire publishing span, but enough of it is still very much worthwhile thanks to taking the subject of the heroes' combat against various gangsters seriously and utilizing techniques and tech that are pretty realistic (unlike the James Bond fantasies that make the films generally lose all believability). The Jim Holdaway- and Neville Colvin-drawn episodes are generally the best.

And once you're hooked on the comic strip, you can read the novels and short story collections as well. They suffer a bit from writer Peter O'Donnell's conservative, even nigh-reactionary, world-view shining through a little too much, but are still very much worth reading if you like action-adventure stories.

I guess have two favorites among the books. One is A Taste for Death, in which Modesty's friend Willie Garvin is put into an excellent dilemma – he has to battle a man he has essentially no chance of beating, and though he's prepared to do so and die to protect Modesty, Modesty's not prepared to let him sacrifice himself so she puts him in a position where he really has to beat he's nemesis, or both he and Modesty will die. Another is The Xanadu Talisman, in which an enemy manages to kill a man under Modesty's protection in such a gruesome way as to unnerve even the normally stable-like-a-rock Willie Garvin.

Good stuff.