Modesty Blaise

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Modesty Blaise is a comic book and fictional character created in 1963 by English author Peter O'Donnell . She is an attractive and dangerous young woman of many abilities who, due to her criminal past, has been drawn into confrontations with criminals in exotic locations around the world. She occasionally works for the British secret service or receives support from it.

background

In addition to novels and short stories, O'Donnell also created scenarios for various comic strips , which were successfully published in English daily newspapers. While looking for new characters, he remembered an encounter from the past: During the Second World War he was stationed as a radio operator in what was then Persia , where he met a little refugee girl. Years later, this girl inspired him to create Modesty Blaise.

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Modesty's past is in the dark. The reader only learns that she fled during and before the war and made her way through refugee camps to North Africa as an unnamed orphan . Your name comes from this time, based on Modesty ("decency") and Blaise , a teacher of King Arthur .

In Tangier , at the age of fifteen, she joined a small criminal gang and worked in a casino. After the death of the gang leader, she took over the leadership and the group quickly grew into the international criminal organization Das Netz . The always professional group quickly got rich with organized crime of all kinds, with the exception of drug and girl trafficking. Modesty was less than thirty, like Willie Garvin, a confidante from the days of the Net, was already a multimillionaire. She got out of business and retired in London.

This is where the novels' plot essentially begins. Modesty's life in her luxurious penthouse quickly becomes too monotonous. Out of sheer boredom and out of pure courtesy, she started working for the British secret service . At the side of her loyal friend Willie Garvin, she goes from one life-threatening adventure to another, whereby, according to her own morals, she now only fights for the good.

Modesty is a strong personality. She is young, good-looking, sexy, well-trained, powerful, rich, intelligent and human. The most modern weapons and technical aids help her with every job.

comics

The first comic strip starring Modesty Blaise was published in the Evening Standard on May 13, 1963 and became known as La Machine , although it originally had no title. The strips were printed without interruption until 2001, at times in up to 42 countries around the world. The last episode came out on April 11, 2001, coincidentally on Peter O'Donnell's birthday.

Although Modesty Blaise's comic strips appeared as daily strips, they tell individual stories of varying lengths. A total of 96 comic stories can be distinguished, all of which are written by Peter O'Donnell. The illustrators were Jim Holdaway , Enrique Badía Romero , John M. Burns , Pat Wright , and Neville Colvin . The last story, The Dark Angels , was never planned as a newspaper trip and appeared as a comic book after it was closed.

The complete German edition of the stories by draftsman Jim Holdaway is published in German by Carlsen Verlag . Other stories were published in the Austrian Strip and Agent X9 , where Modesty Blaise was strangely renamed Jessie Fox .

The complete English edition of all comic stories with a total of 30 books has been published by the London publisher Titan Books.

Movies

Novels

The first novel appeared in 1965 under the original title Modesty Blaise . Ten other novels and two volumes of short crime novels followed. The books reached a circulation in the millions and have been translated into 16 languages.

  • 1965: The Deadly Lady (Modesty Blaise)
  • 1966: The Lady asks for the Hereafter (Saber-Tooth)
  • 1967: The lady rides the devil (I, Lucifer)
  • 1969: A Gorilla for the Lady (A Taste for Death)
  • 1971: The Impossible Virgin
  • 1972: The Lady Makes Stories (Pieces of Modesty)
  • 1973: The Silver Mistress
  • 1976: Hot Nights for the Lady (Last Day in Limbo)
  • 1978: The Lady flies on kites (Dragon's Claw)
  • 1981: The Lady Wants It Different (The Xanadu Talisman)
  • 1982: The Lady draws the bow (The Night of Morning Star)
  • 1985: The Lady lets it flash (Dead Man's Handle)
  • 1996: Cobra Trap (not published in German)

The novels have been out of print for a long time. From 2005 to 2007 five new editions or audio books were published .

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