Spanish Modesty Blaise Cover

I was sent this Spanish paperback cover by a friend and fellow Modesty Blaise collector. This is the only Spanish cover I have. Interesting that it is a painting, yet clearly based on Monica Vitti.

The Spanish edition appears to be available for free download. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if it is a legal download or not - perhaps someone with more fluent Spanish can work that out!)

Modesty Blaise Podcast

English lecturer Kate MacDonald has created a podcast about the Modesty Blaise novels. You can listen to the podcast via her website, reallylikethisbook.com.

New Modesty X9 Cover

Just in time for Halloween... this gorgeous X9 cover by Loopy Dave, of Modesty as a witch!

You can see a larger version on Deviant Art. Enjoy!

More Modesty Merchandise

And the Modesty Blaise merchandise just keeps appearing! More earrings, more bags, and now shoes:

The bag and shoes are available from Walk In Town, and the earrings from C2E-street (both Swedish).

I'm happy to see there's finally a piece of merchandise with a Holdaway drawing! All the merchandise I've seen to date is based on Romero's drawings (nothing wrong with that, just nice to have more of Holdaway's work acknowledged).
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Tales of the Shadowmen

Tales of the Shadowmen is a book series wherein the writers team various fictional heroes in new short stories; Volume 3 has a story featuring Modesty Blaise.

There is a nice lengthy review on Amazon, although the only specific mention of the Modesty story is, "'A Day in the Life of Madame Atomos' by Xavier Maumejean is a brilliant comic piece about the villainess which pays homage to the silly spy romps of the early 1970's. The story works well throughout and the last paragraph is priceless!"

If anyone else has read the Modesty story and would care to share a synopsis/review, I'll post it here. Thanks!
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Modesty cover used for Mickey Spillane novel

Back in the days when paperbacks were considered pulp, cover art was often re-used for other books. Here's the beautiful Robert McGinnis cover art for Sabre-Tooth used for a German edition of a Mickey Spillane novel:

And here's the Sabre-Tooth cover:

If you're a fan of Robert McGinnis, I highly recommend The Paperback Covers of Robert-McGinnis, a gorgeous book with hundreds of colour images of McGinnis' work.
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Agent X9

Agent X9 continues to turn out amazing covers. It looks like they've restarted the series, with 'Gabriel's Diamond'.

Name that cover artist, if you can!

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More AgentX9 Covers by Loopy Dave

Two more great covers by Loopy Dave... thanks to Ken for sending these.

You can view more of Loopy Dave's work here.
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Humphrey Bogart reads Modesty

Still playing catch-up on items sent to me over a year ago... this one is a real gem!
This Norwegian magazine features Humphrey Bogart on the cover, reading a Modesty Blaise book (you can click on the image to see the larger version)

About the magazine: "It is a magazine, sort of an intellectual journal, that has been around for a long while, is issued 6 times a year, and which prints articles dealing with politics, literature and social questions. This particular issue is #2 of 1993, so that would be sometime during the spring of that year."
Thanks to La Belle Sauvage for this!
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Agent X9 Cover by Loopy Dave

Another new cover for AgentX9 comic by artist LoopyDave, for The Warlords of Phoenix:

You can read his original post here.

Next Titan Reprint Announced

First up, a quick apology to everyone who's sent me material that has not yet made its way to the blog or website - I've been busy publishing some books of my own, which means my usually long lag-time for the Modesty site has gone from bad to even worse. But I'll attempt to make up for it over the coming months!

Good news: Titan continues to reprint the Modesty Blaise strips. Million Dollar Game is out this month, and Live Bait is scheduled for February 2012.

 

With Live Bait, we've come full circle, as the Manuscript Press omnibus of a number of years ago was also called Live Bait. According to the Wikipedia article, the stories included will be Samantha and the Cherub, Milord, and of course Live Bait.
The next story after LB is The Girl from the Future. I think we can safely assume what the title of Volume 22 will be!
Meanwhile, the Million Dollar Game sees the start of reprints from the second Romero era..

thanks to AFH for the info!

Kiss Kiss Kill Kill exhibition moves to London!

The Kiss Kiss Kill Kill exhibition of vintage spy film posters (mentioned in last August's post) has moved to a new venue! It is now in a central London location, showing alongside the most awesome Eurospy film festival you have ever (or never) heard of.

The Goethe-Institut in London and Berlin have chased down eleven bone fide sixties spy classics and subtitled them all. Along with a panel discussion, the whole package is playing at the Riverside studios in Hammersmith 2–9 May 2011.

From the Kiss Kiss Kill Kill website:  "This unique series of feature films, made at the height of the Cold War on both sides of the ‘Celluloid Curtain’, will be screened over a special ‘spy film weekend’ at Riverside Studios, London. There will be curators’ talks and a panel discussion, chaired by the BBC’s Security Correspondent, Gordon Corera. The distinguished panel includes writer and ‘spy specialist’, Phillip Knightley. Celluloid Curtain aims to shed new light on the history of the Cold War in Europe and itsdepiction in film. It will focus on the Cold War ‘spook’ as a cinematic creation of the Iron Curtain and look at the legacy of the films and politics of the period. This is a subject of great topical relevance: talk of a new Cold War, Wikileaks and ‘spy stories’ dominate ournews, bookshops and cinemas today."

You can read more about it here.

New U.S. source for Modesty Blaise books

Souvenir Press put an end to years of book-hunting agony when they started reprinting the entire Modesty Blaise series back in 1999... however, the earlier titles (especially those with the Holdaway covers) sold out quickly, and collectors had to trawl Ebay and Abebooks again - and pay extortionate prices for new paperbacks!

Independent Publishers Group is now carrying the Souvenir Press paperbacks, and appears to have most of them in stock. (The search box is a little hard to find - it's in the left pane under 'Quick Search'). Their contact information for orders is on their website.

Happy collecting!

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Agent X9 features Modesty Blaise fan art

Throughout 2011, Agent X9 magazine will feature 13 different artists doing Modesty Blaise fan art; one in each issue. First up is Jimmy Wallin:

There is a brief interview with the artist on the Agent X9 blog.
(You can use Google translator to translate the text from Swedish, although with mixed results: "Initially I had probably planned to do something more Hold Away-smelling") Hm, smells like Jim Holdaway? If you know a better online translator, please do recommend!)

Agent X9 will continue to feature more of these... we will keep you posted!
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