For Your Eyes Only - Marvel

I thought I'd take a break from the Warrens today and post about a magazine that just arrived in the mail--Marvel's adaptation of the 1981 James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only (aka Marvel Super Special #19).

My Dad took my sister and I see to a lot of the Bond films, but this one sticks out in my memory the most, for some reason. Not that the film is bad in any way--in fact, it's one of my favorites--but even die-hard Bond fans say this is one of the most stripped-down adventures Bond ever had--light on the crazy gadgets, weird locations, and outlandish super-villains (maybe it's because I bought the Marvel two-issue adaptation when I was on vacation in the Poconos at the tender age of ten, and almost every comic I ever bought during those great visits stand out in my memory).

The adaptation was written by Lary Hama, with the odd art combination of Howard Chaykin (who also did the nice cover) and Vince Colletta. I can barely makeout any of Chaykin's dynamic storytelling; I wonder if he did little more than rough layouts for Colletta to finish. The whole thing is in color, too, but like the art it's done in an extremely-minimalist red-blue-green-yellow-white-back-to-10 style.

This does a fairly decent job at adapting of the least-visually exciting Bond films, but sometimes you get taken out of the story by odd balloon placement such as this:

James Bond's floating head, promising "ice cream on the way to the Biathalon"? Good old-fashioned nightmare fuel!

The magazine ends with a fourteen-page text piece about the making of the film. Not only does it have a photo of background-Bond-girl Tula in a bikini (anybody remember what he...uh, she was famous for?), but it ends with the sentence "James Bond will return, most likely in Octopussy!", which has to be the first time any Marvel comic ended with the word pussy. It may have been the last, too, but I don't know for sure since I don't read a lot of Bendis.