James Bond

Publication history

In 2014, Dynamite Entertainment secured a ten-year deal with Ian Fleming Publications to produce monthly James Bond comics starting the following year. The Fleming Estate specifically asked writer Warren Ellis to take on the series, and he chose Jason Masters as the artist. Their debut storyline, VARGR, was announced in July 2015 and ran for six issues. To prepare, Ellis read all of Fleming’s novels, citing Risico as a key inspiration. Masters designed Bond based on Fleming’s written descriptions, an illustration Fleming himself had commissioned, and the work of John McLusky, the first comic artist to draw the character. Ellis explained that VARGR is an Old Norse term meaning wolf, evildoer, or destroyer. The first issue hit shelves on November 4, 2015, timed with the Spectre film release, and came with nine variant covers. It ranked as the 69th best-selling comic that month, with estimated orders of 35,600 copies. A hardcover collection of the first six issues came out on June 21, 2016. That same day, Dynamite released issue #7, the start of Ellis and Masters’ next story, Eidolon, which gave a modern update to SPECTRE, the villainous organization from Bond’s novels and films. Ellis developed the plot after reading Umberto Eco’s Numero Zero. In October 2016, Dynamite announced that writer Benjamin Percy would take over the monthly series from Ellis. Two months later, the new arc was titled Black Box, and it reset the issue numbering from the 2015 run. Artist Rapha Lobosco handled the art, and the first issue debuted on March 1, 2017 as James Bond (2017) #1. Percy said he was influenced by the film series for the story’s structure, specifically The Spy Who Loved Me and Spectre, while drawing Bond’s inner psychology from the novels. On July 16, 2018, Dynamite announced another ongoing series, this time with writer Greg Pak and artist Marc Laming, joined by colorist Rosh and letterer Ariana Maher. Their first story arc reimagined Oddjob as a Korean secret agent who becomes a rival to Bond in the field.

Plot

James Bond, an agent for British Intelligence, receives an assignment from his superior, M. He is to take over the unfinished work of a colleague who has died, a case involving a drug-smuggling network operating across Europe. Following a clue, Bond travels to Berlin. There, a woman named Dharma Reach meets him, pretending to be a contact from the CIA. She attempts to kill Bond but fails and flees. Bond then visits Slaven Kurjak, a wealthy Serbian scientist who became disabled during the Kosovo War and now creates advanced prosthetic technology. When Bond asks about the strange drugs appearing in London and Europe, Kurjak points him toward a suspicious laboratory. What Bond does not know is that Kurjak himself sent Dharma to assassinate him. At the laboratory, Bond gets into a gunfight with a Lebanese crime family. Afterward, he discovers Kurjak tricked him; the Lebanese group had nothing to do with the drugs.

Kurjak then dispatches a man named Bryan Masters to kill Bond at the MI-6 station in Berlin. Bond is not there, but Masters murders the station staff. When Bond arrives, Masters claims to be a CIA agent and offers to take Bond to a secure location because the station was attacked. Bond knows Masters is an enemy but agrees to travel with him to Kurjak’s security resort. There, they find Kurjak’s staff dead from his drug tests, a condition called "Condition Vargr." Masters attacks Bond, who kills him by injecting him with the same drug. Kurjak then appears and traps Bond in a sealed chamber. Kurjak explains the drug is his life’s work, dating back to the Kosovo concentration camps. It was meant to cure cancer but instead kills anyone who takes it. He plans to use it to control the world. He starts a decontamination cycle in the chamber and leaves Bond to die, but Bond escapes.

Critical reception

The debut issue scored 7.4 out of 10 on Comic Book Round Up. David Pepose of Newsarama called Ellis’s take on Bond the “purest crystallization of the character ... since the original novels,” praising the removal of Bond’s bigotry. SnapPow’s John McCubbin criticized the pacing and Bond’s lack of style, but called Masters’ artwork “the most impressive part about this opening issue.” Dom Reardon’s cover for that first issue later appeared on the cover of Bleeding Cool’s 21st issue, which focused on war comics.