Modesty Blaise ran for 95 newspaper adventures, but most American readers never got to meet her. Created by the late Peter O’Donnell, the British strip appeared from May 1963 to Feb. 2001 and still has a dedicated readership across much of the world more than 25 years after its final installment. In the United States, its newspaper appearances were sporadic. A capable female action hero with an international criminal past was hiding in plain sight.
That gap makes a good case for a revival, whether through a new adaptation or a more accessible reissue. There’s already a substantial comic to discover, not just a character waiting for someone to give her a story. The source review ranks Modesty Blaise among the great adventure comics of the 20th century, while acknowledging that some of its stories and language deserve closer scrutiny than that endorsement might suggest.
The strip’s old billing, “The fabulous, feminine answer to James Bond,” gets you into the right neighborhood. It doesn’t quite explain what makes Modesty and her partner, Willie Garvin, worth following.
A retired criminal who can’t stay out of trouble
Modesty’s backstory begins after World War II, when she was “born walking”: an orphaned refugee in the Middle East who knew neither her birth parents nor her nationality. After reaching Tangier, she took over a local gang and built it into an international criminal organization called the Network. Its morality was selective. Grand larceny and corporate espionage were acceptable business; drug dealers and human traffickers operating in its territories could expect to be crushed.
With her fortune secured, Modesty “acquired” UK citizenship and retired to London alongside her right-hand man, Willie. Both are wealthy, widely traveled, and trained as thieves, spies, and martial artists. She’s a crack shot. He specializes in throwing knives. British intelligence understandably finds that combination useful and regularly recruits them as freelance troubleshooters.
Retirement also leaves plenty of room for trouble that doesn’t come through official channels. Modesty’s past, her skills, and her instinct for danger keep drawing the pair into conflicts, sometimes willingly and sometimes not. They share the pulp-fiction knack, familiar from modern Jack Reacher stories, of finding an old friend or a stranger in peril wherever they travel. The source critic’s favorite example comes from “The Stone Age Caper,” in which Willie gets lost in the Australian outback and happens upon the one Aboriginal Australian he personally knows.
The early strip is firmly rooted in Cold War pulp. Communist organizations provide the opposition in “La Machine,” “Top Traitor,” and “The Wicked Gnomes.” But the 95 storylines aren’t confined to geopolitical enemies. “The Girl From the Future” and “The Moon Man” involve small-time con artists; “Death in Slow Motion” and “The Maori Contract” take on crime syndicates; “The Girl in the Iron Mask” brings an old rival into play.
Those comparatively modest stakes are a strength, the source review persuasively argues. Modesty is often fighting for vengeance, justice, or survival rather than the fate of the Western world. A revival wouldn’t need to turn every threat into a global catastrophe. The personal motives already give the action a reason to matter.
Nor does a smaller scale mean a shortage of spectacle. In “The Galley Slaves” (1968), Modesty gets into a gunfight aboard a film set’s replica Roman trireme. “The Red Gryphon,” also from 1968, pits her against an Italian jewel thief. Both were drawn by original artist Jim Holdaway, whose ability to make action readable within a newspaper strip’s tight space is central to the comic’s appeal.
Holdaway died suddenly in 1970. Spanish artist Enrique Badia Romero, also known for Axa and Judge Dredd, illustrated much of the remaining run. Other contributors included John Burns, whose credits included 2000 AD and Heavy Metal; newspaper cartoonist Neville Colvin; and Private Eye’s Pat Wright, who drew one and a half storylines in 1979. The source critic singles out Colvin’s “The Balloonatic” as another personal favorite.
Burns also supplied the cover art for Titan Books’ 1985 collection Mister Sun. The range of artists matters, but the source review reserves its strongest praise for Holdaway and Romero’s economical storytelling: both could accomplish in three panels what many later pencilers need an entire page to convey. Elaborate action still fits inside an ordinary black-and-white strip. That economy, paired with O’Donnell’s plotting and dialogue, leads the critic to place Modesty Blaise among the best adventure serials of the late 20th century, in comics or elsewhere.
That’s also a practical reason to read the originals rather than wait for a screen version. For anyone learning sequential art, the review recommends studying how Holdaway and Romero direct a scene within those limits. The action isn’t just a list of events an adaptation could borrow; much of its force comes from how it’s drawn.
Why America missed it, and what a revival needs to keep in view
The usual explanation for Modesty Blaise’s limited American newspaper reach is its frequent nudity, which was considered too much for the market. For years, the Detroit Free Press was the exception, and even that newspaper censored a couple of strips. The heroine’s name evidently wasn’t a promise about the content.
American fans were more likely to encounter her through O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels or one of two films. The 1966 Modesty Blaise, starring Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp, was a campy box-office failure that nevertheless retained a cult following. That following eventually led to Quentin Tarantino executive-producing My Name is Modesty in 2004, an adaptation the source review describes as connected to the original in name only.
A new version would have an opportunity those films didn’t fulfill: introducing the character through the qualities of the newspaper adventures. That doesn’t mean treating everything in the strip as timeless. Some dated details are simply part of the pleasure of reading old thrillers in 2026. In “The Bluebeard Affair” (1972), illustrated by Romero, Willie outwits two gunmen with a portable cassette player, then a new arrival on the market. Elsewhere, ham radio, VCRs, Mace spray, and the thermic lance get the sort of attention reserved for impressive technological advantages.
Other dated elements aren’t so easy to enjoy. The source review argues that the strip was often ahead of its time on race, with Modesty and Willie repeatedly defending marginalized people against bigots. Yet its outdated language has also caused controversy among modern readers. In 2020, an Australian newspaper pulled its Modesty Blaise reprints after objections to a villain’s racism toward Indigenous Australians in “The Stone Age Caper” (1971).
Both points belong in the case for a revival. The protagonists’ opposition to prejudice is part of the work, but so is language readers may find offensive. An accessible reissue or adaptation should confront that tension rather than present the series as uncomplicatedly timeless.
Discoverability presents a separate obstacle. The internet has made it easier to find international comics, from bandes dessinées and science-fiction serials to stories buried in old magazine anthologies. Yet for translated exports such as Valerian or Yoko Tsuno, many more works never receive a release outside their original country. Small communities of fan translators and preservationists keep numerous out-of-print comics available online. The source critic first found Modesty Blaise through that preservation work.
Newspaper strips face an additional disadvantage: they’re often treated as disposable in a way graphic novels aren’t, and comparatively few develop an international audience. British exports Andy Capp and Fred Basset are exceptions, both having substantially outlived their original creators. The British Dennis the Menace is not another such American crossover. It debuted in Beano in 1951, five days after Hank Ketcham launched the identically named American strip.
For Modesty, at least, there’s already a route beyond scattered newspaper archives. Titan Books collected the complete original run in 27 paperback volumes, released between 2004 and 2017. They include O’Donnell’s commentary and multiple behind-the-scenes looks at the strip. The source reports that every volume remains in print at the time of writing, though finding them all may take some digging.
The review recommends those collections particularly to readers who enjoy spy movies, crime dramas, or crime shows such as Leverage. Its verdict is that, with the dated material acknowledged, Modesty belongs on the shelf of anyone who enjoys serial adventure, and that Titan’s editions are a high-quality way to catch up. Making those 27 volumes easier to find would give a revival a concrete starting point: put the actual adventures within reach of readers who never had them in their newspapers.
