Category: {comics}

Comics

James Bond postage stamps

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Proving once again the centrality of James Bond to contemporary British identity, the Royal Mail releases these stamps on January 8th, 2008, the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth. If a sexist state assassin seems an awkward choice of cultural ambassador, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill present a more iconoclastic view of the super spy in the Black Dossier, the latest volume in their unfolding history of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Good to see that the stamp designs above include the Pan paperback covers from 1963. (The other examples are the first editions from Jonathan Cape, the 2006 Penguin reprints and what appear to be a set of Seventies reissues.) A friend of mine at school had a collection of the Pan books and they remain my favourite Bond book designs, not least because they were some of the first book covers to strike me as being well-designed rather than well-illustrated. What the Flickr link doesn’t show is the die-cut holes in the Thunderball jacket which made the cover seem as though it was pierced by bullets, the kind of expensive production detail you rarely see on anything other than a bestseller.

And while we’re on the subject of Bond design, Daniel Kleinman’s superb Casino Royale title sequence is on YouTube.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Please Mr. Postman

CQ

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A belated shout of appreciation for this film whose distribution appears to have been so limited that everyone missed it, me included. That’s a shame as Roman Coppola’s debut (he’s the son of Francis) has a lot to commend it although it helps if you’re familiar with pulpy European spy/science fiction/horror movies of the late Sixties and the po-faced works of auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni. CQ pays loving homage to both styles of filmmaking which probably explains why the studio didn’t know what to do with it.

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Cain’s son: the incarnations of Grendel

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Beowulf wrestles with Grendel, Lynd Ward (1939).

There’s nothing new in pointing out Hollywood’s crimes against literature, the film business has been screwing up book adaptation since the earliest days of silent cinema. But sometimes the wound is so grievous you can’t help but speak out, in this case against Roger Avary’s Beowulf which is released next month. This is another CGI-heavy confection along the lines Polar Express, with the actors being given digital bodies via motion-capture, and it’s something I’d probably have ignored until I saw this picture of Grendel, the story’s principal monster. Beowulf is one of the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems and Grendel, the bloodthirsty creature which Beowulf battles, is one of the ur-fiends of English literature, along with his equally monstrous, lake-dwelling mother and the dragon which fatally wounds the hero. The trio give us a peek back into the dark imagination from a time before recorded history and Grendel especially has always had something raw and primal about its character. So when you see a beast with such a history portrayed as little more than a diseased muppet you wonder what’s going on. Are the creators inept? Ignorant? Were studio restrictions at work? How does an industry with the talent to give splendid life to the trolls and Balrog of Lord of the Rings, or Davy Jones and crew in Pirates of the Caribbean, screw up so badly?

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