Marvel Comics published a lot of movie adaptations over the years – and while I haven’t read most of them (I’ll be working on that), one I made sure to add to my collection long ago was their two-issue adaptation of the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. For this one, Marvel hired the great writer Larry Hama (best known for his work on the G.I. Joe franchise) to turn the screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson into two comic scripts, with the team of penciler Howard Chaykin, inker Vince Colletta, colorist Christie Scheele, and letterer Jean Simek bring Hama’s scripts to life on the page.
After an opening sequence involving British Secret Service agent James Bond’s old enemy Blofeld (whose features are obscured because the filmmakers didn’t have the rights to actually feature Blofeld in a movie at the time), the story of For Your Eyes Only gets rolling when a Royal Navy ship called the St. Georges, which is disguised as an average fishing vessel, catches an old mine in its fishing nets. The mine detonates and the ship sinks off the coast of Albania before an operator in the hi-tech control room is able to pull the self-destruct lever on a machine called the A.T.A.C.
A.T.A.C. stands for Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator and its coded transmissions control the Royal Navy submarine fleet's ballistic missiles. If an enemy power got ahold of the lost A.T.A.C., they could countermand every missile order sent to a submarine or even fire Royal Navy missiles on English cities. Russia’s KGB is already working with an associate in Greece to retrieve the A.T.A.C. from the wreckage, and England had hired marine archaeologist Sir Timothy Havelock to locate the wreckage for them. When Havelock and his wife are murdered by a hitman, Bond is sent to find out who hired the hitman.
Bond’s investigation first leads him to the hitman’s villa in Madrid, Spain, where he crosses paths with the Havelocks’ vengeful daughter Melina just in time to participate in a car chase. He then follows a man he spotted at the villa, Emile Leopold Locque, to Cortina, Italy, where he gets mixed up with some winter sports athletes and engages in more action sequences. He learns that figures from the Greek underworld are involved in the race for the A.T.A.C., so trips to Greece and Albania are in order. More action ensues and Bond spends some extra time with Melina (after deflecting advances from young skater Bibi Dahl but pumping a Greek mobster’s mistress Lisl, the Countess Von Schlaf for information) on the way to a final confrontation with the main villain (is it Milos Columbo or his former smuggling partner Aristotle Kristatos?) at a mountaintop monastery.
James Bond was created by author Ian Fleming, and For Your Eyes Only was an attempt to bring the film franchise back down to earth after the outlandishness of the space adventure Moonraker with a story of spies and revenge, drawing inspiration from the Fleming short stories For Your Eyes Only and Risico while mixing in some unused action from the Live and Let Die novel. The result was one of the best films of the “Roger Moore as James Bond” era – and one of the most action-packed Bond movies ever made. It’s made up almost entirely of action sequences. There is hardly any downtime between the sequences, usually just a few lines of dialogue are spoken before more action breaks out. Sometimes they're not even over when you think they are; attackers will be taken care of and then more trouble will arise.
This mixture of plot with a whole lot of action was clearly a challenge for Hama and his collaborators to fit into just two issues of around twenty-four pages each. The comic script zooms through the film’s scenes at warp speed and there’s so much action to stuff into so few pages, the artists struggled to fit it in there. A lot of the action comes off as quite underwhelming because it occurs in such small panels. But they had no choice; they had to make the panels small because there was a lot more to come in the issues! It would have been better if Marvel had commissioned at least three issues for the adaptation.
But, even though it’s rushed and sometimes awkward, it is fun to see James Bond in action on the pages of a comic book that was published by Marvel, and the creative team did the best job possible of condensing all that is For Your Eyes Only into just two issues.
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