July 31, 2014

The Seekers.... They sought to copy!

Hi everyone, I'm sharing this email from one of the Modesty Blaise fan group members as this is a fascinating bit of trivia: a comic strip called "The Seekers" that was clearly a Modesty Blaise rip-off. Read on...

"Another interesting hit on Google. This may be old news, but as I¹ve never seen this magazine mentioned here before, I thought I¹d bring it to the gang¹s attention. From 1971 to sometime around 1978 it seems there was something called the Menomonee Falls Gazette which was a weekly tabloid that reprinted comic strips from various sources. If you check out the cover scan gallery at Comic Vine you¹ll see some issues featured Modesty Blaise. Unfortunately there appears to be no index of the issues at Comic Vine. Now, while scanning the gallery I spotted this:
It's a reprint of a UK comic strip called The Seekers. Does the art look familiar? It definitely jumped out at me! That led me to WikipediaApparently, The Seekers was a UK strip that John M Burns, one of the MB artists, drew. And according to that article, it bears a few similarities to MB. Anyone ever see this one?
There's a partial online archive of the strip on thrillmer.com.
 I just looked at a few at random and if Peter O¹Donnell didn't share words with somebody about this I¹d be very surprised! I know artists have their own style and so characters often look similar, but still...!