The James Bond Omnibus 002 Paperback – April 12, 2011

These James Bond comic strips were all created before the films were made, and at first hew closely to the original stories, but as they start to embroider it's interestingly different from the movie adaptations. The artwork varies dramatically from the solid but occasionally awkward illustrations of John McLusky to the high style of Yaroslav Horak, who has a seriously Sixties swing. The stories were all written around the structure of the daily three-panel strip, but still flow pretty well imho."On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (originally appearing 29 June 1964 – 15 May 1965), written by Henry Gammidge and illustrated by McLusky, isn't terribly different from the book (first published in 1963) or the 1969 film; their following collaboration, "You Only Live Twice" (17 May 1965 – 8 January 1966) is faithful to the 1964 book, not the film of 1967: Bond, tasked with convincing the head of Japan's secret service to share decrypted Soviet communications, is asked to perform a favor in return - assassinating the mysterious master of a murder garden.The next Bond adventure, "The Man with the Golden Gun" (January 10 - September 9, 1966) is adapted by Jim Lawrence and illustrated by Horak. It too is faithful to the book: recovering from the outcome of the previous adventure, Bond is sent Jamaica to eliminate Cuban assassin Francisco Scaramanga. “The Living Daylights” (September 12 - November 12, 1966) is also pretty much the original story, with Bond providing counter-sniper fire to cover a British agent crossing the Berlin Wall.With “Octopussy” (November 14, 1966 - May 27, 1967) things start getting inventive: on a personal quest to track down a postwar murderer, Bond uncovers a deadly smuggling operation liquidating a cache of nazi gold. "The Hildebrand Rarity" May 29 - December 16, 1967) is dramatically different from the short story, with Bond searching for a lost submarine with the help of a millionaire ichyologist who is fishing for a very special catch. The last story of this collection, "The Spy Who Loved Me" (December 18, 1967 - October 3, 1968), is really two shorts about Canadians in distress - one leading Bond into a new confrontation with SPECTRE, and the other into an arson plot in the backwoods.The printing is decent, with crisp black and white. The strips are pretty good-sized by today's standards - i.e. probably about the size they were printed back in the day!

Very high quality and lots of interesting stories.

I had some of the Dynamite comic reprints of James Bond and wanted to get the complete set of the UK based newspaper comic series before they might be unavailable due to current events. This book is one is a series of sequential reprints (some different and some duplicative of my Dynamite books) that collectively is a more holistic set. They were affordably priced in totality compared with other potential options for achieving the same BUT with one caveat. In order to jam all these comics in this oversized thicker flexible softcover book, the images and word font of the comics is reduced rather than enlarged like the Dynamite books. Unless you are strongly near-sighted, you may find the contents of these books too small to comfortably read even with reading glasses under a strong light. As opposed to going "all in" and buying everything at once, I'd suggest buying one volume and see what I mean so you can determine if it is reasonably readable by you before buying the rest of the set. I ended up keeping them anyway (even though they are very tough to read for me) because my other options were almost triple the price to obtain something equivalent to this "everything in one set of books."

The product description reflected the quality of the item when it arrived. This is very helpful when buying used books.

The illustrations where like stepping back in time. Full of twists and turns, it's another form of medium to tell the James Bond story and it was very good.

Excellent

Yes, I enjoyed reading every chapter in this volume thoroughly! I intend to re-read them whenever I feel like reliving the thrill!

Other than again, the small size of the print. I like the volume and stories more than volume 1. It really begins to expand on the universe. Despite being comics strips, they are not as short as one might think. Average 30 to 40 pages. Those, some are only like 20.

Loved it.

Bien recu

C'est très bien. Je recherchais cela depuis très long temps.

This second volume in the James Bond Omnibus sees both the end of the Ian Fleming stories and the transition from the dark and sinister drawings of John McLusky to the crisp and sensuous style of Horak. Both visual artists are masters of their craft and I particularly like McLusky's rendition of 'You Only Live Twice' - which really does justice to the surreal climax with Blofeld on his island fortress. By contrast, Horak's rendition of 'The Man with the Golden Gun' gives James Bond the true cinematic treatment, making the most of double-panel spreads for key scenes and heralding in a bevy of long-legged beauties from both sides of the law. The short stories 'Octopussy' and 'The Hildebrand Rarety' are fleshed out (in every sense of the word) to full feature-length stories and conclude the comic-strip treatment of all the original Ian Fleming books.

Super quality comic book. Really appreciate it.