63 Years Later, the Stellar Action Comic Strip Most America Never Heard of Deserves Another Shot

"The fabulous, feminine answer to James Bond"

Not many Americans got a chance to read this classic British newspaper comic

This goes double for newspaper comics, which are often viewed as disposable in ways that graphic novels aren't. Surprisingly few of them ever pick up an international audience. Exceptions include Andy Capp and Fred Basset, British strips that have substantially outlived their original creators. They do not include the British Dennis the Menace, which debuted in Beano in 1951, five days after Hank Ketcham started a strip by the same name in America.

The British adventure comic Modesty Blaise, created by the late Peter O'Donnell, was virtually unknown in the United States during its original newspaper run, from May 1963 to Feb. 2001. While it has a dedicated audience to this day in much of the rest of the world, over 25 years after it ceased publication, Modesty Blaise was only intermittently carried in American newspapers. This is usually blamed on its frequent nude scenes, which made it too spicy for American audiences. (Modesty is her name, not her practice.) The one exception for years was the Detroit Free Press, and even it censored a couple of strips.

The few fans that Modesty Blaise had in the U.S. more often came from a line of novels written by O'Donnell, or one of the two film adaptations. 1966's Modesty Blaise, a campy box-office bomb starring Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp, still has a cult following, which led to Quentin Tarantino executive-producing the in-name-only My Name is Modesty in 2004.

If you're too young or too American to have read the original Modesty Blaise strips, they're classics of the format. While not every storyline has aged well, Modesty Blaise is one of the great adventure comics of the 20th century.

I read Modesty Blaise for the first time thanks to the aforementioned online preservationists, but the entire original run of the strip is currently collected in 27 paperback volumes from Titan Books released between 2004 and 2017. While you may have to do some digging to find them all, every volume of Titan’s Modesty Blaise collections, which include commentary from O’Donnell and multiple looks behind the scenes of the strip, is still in print at time of writing. If you like spy movies, crime dramas, or crime shows like Leverage, you ought to check out Modesty Blaise.

Magnets for trouble

Modesty Blaise was "born walking" as an orphaned refugee in the Middle East after World War II, with no knowledge of her birth parents or nationality. She eventually wandered into Tangier, where she assumed control of a local gang and expanded it into an international organization of anti-heroic criminals called the Network. Under Modesty, the Network thought nothing of grand larceny or corporate espionage, but frequently crushed drug dealers or human traffickers that operated in its territories.

After she secured her own fortune, Modesty "acquired" UK citizenship and retired to London alongside her right-hand man Willie Garvin. Both of them are widely traveled and wealthy, with years of training as thieves, spies, and martial artists; Modesty is a crack shot, while Willie is an expert with throwing knives. That makes them irresistible to British intelligence, which often employs them as freelance troubleshooters.

In addition, Modesty's criminal past, unique skills, and knack for danger tend to land her and Willie in trouble, both voluntarily and otherwise. Both of them have that unique pulp-fiction ability, embodied in modern work by Jack Reacher, where either of them can find an old friend or imperiled stranger wherever on Earth that they happen to go. (My personal favorite is in “The Stone Age Caper,” when Willie is lost in the middle of the outback and randomly encounters the one Aboriginal Australian that he knows personally.)

Early on, Modesty Blaise is a Cold War-era pulp action strip to its bones. It’s neatly split into a series of 95 individual storylines, which often pit Modesty and Willie against Communist organizations ("La Machine," "Top Traitor," “The Wicked Gnomes”). Other arcs involve small-time con artists ("The Girl From the Future," "The Moon Man"), crime syndicates ("Death in Slow Motion," "The Maori Contract"), or old rivals ("The Girl in the Iron Mask"). The stakes are often kept low in Modesty Blaise, and that works to its overall benefit. Modesty's usually out for vengeance, justice, or survival, not the fate of the Western world.

Modesty Blaise’s original artist, Jim Holdaway, died suddenly in 1970. Much of the rest of the strip’s run was illustrated by the Spanish artist Enrique Badia Romero (Axa, Judge Dredd). Other contributing artists included John Burns (2000 AD, Heavy Metal), newspaper cartoonist Neville Colvin (who drew a couple of my favorite arcs, such as “The Balloonatic”), and for one and a half storylines in 1979, Private Eye’s Pat Wright.

Holdaway and Romero, the two best-known Modesty Blaise artists, had an incredible knack for economic storytelling. Both could do more with three panels than many later pencilers can pull off with an entire page. It makes Modesty Blaise a genuine thrill to read, as it can fit surprisingly elaborate action scenes within the constraints of an ordinary black-and-white comic strip. Combined with O'Donnell's deft plotting and dialogue, that makes Modesty Blaise one of the best adventure serials of the late 20th century, on or off the comics page. If you’re interested in learning how to draw sequential art, it’s worth studying Holdaway and Romero’s work.

Not all of Modesty Blaise has aged especially well. Sometimes, that's part of the fun of reading it in 2026, such as when some now-obsolete device gets pulled out as a high-tech trump card. For example, in "The Bluebeard Affair" (1972), Willie fools a couple of gunmen with a portable cassette player, which was new on the market at the time. Other stories make a big deal about ham radio, VCRs, Mace spray, or the thermic lance.

On other occasions, Modesty Blaise is simply a product of its time. It was often ahead of the curve on cultural issues like race, with both Modesty and Willie frequently standing against bigots on behalf of marginalized people, but the strip has occasionally proven controversial among modern readers for its use of outdated language. As recently as 2020, a villain's racism towards indigenous Australians in "The Stone Age Caper" (1971) got reprints of Modesty Blaise pulled from a newspaper in Australia.

With those caveats, Modesty Blaise deserves a place on the shelf of anyone who enjoys a good serial adventure. If you grew up in the United States, it's one of the best comics that you might not have never heard of, and Titan Books' most recent collections are a high-quality way to catch up with the series. Check it out.