Goldtiger.

I am a big fan of Modesty Blaise and following through some of the series that she inspired through several generations has lead me to several interesting series – The Baroness, The Seekers, The Girl Factory, Black Swan, Conversant USA, just off the top of my head. So I am searching ebay for Modesty Blaise when Goldtiger pops up. A supposedly forgotten series from the sixties crested to rival Modesty Blaise dropped from the paper because the leads were gay. The book reprints the first story and some behind the scenes interviews. So I order the book and the damned pandemic means I have wait months for the book to arrive. It finally arrived and it's a trip. Lily Gold and her partner John Tiger are former mercenaries turned fashion designers who trouble shoot on the side their first adventure has them tracking down disappearing ships on the Thames. There's a master villain with a plot that would make a Bond Villain blush. Hench men and women who are memorable. Interspersed with the strips are behind the scenes interviews, letters and articles with the writer Louis Schaeffer and artist Antonio Barretti. The relationship between the pair is strained as the artist is crazy and prone to ignoring the scripts and inserting himself into the strip. There are portions of the strip missing and we get sketches of strips, rough outlines from the artist and an extract from the novelisation. At one point Baretti inserts himself into the narrative as what Schaeffer has written is too boring and he wants to draw Rio. The ending is so audacious and meta that I can’t even. Of course, the truth is Goldtiger was never a real strip, Baretti and Schaeffer never existed and Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton made the whole thing up and was published by 2000AD through a Kickstarter. The strip is a nice companion to the lovely Modesty Blaise strips collections that Titan books had been putting out indeed it’s almost a satire of them. Throughout are plent of wnks and nods to Modesty Blaise - the aborted Goldtiger movie had Terrance Stamp as John Tiger, Stamp had played Willie Garvin in Modesty Blaise. A letter to the editor of the paper that runs Goldtiger is written by Jim O'Donnell a reference to Jim Holdaway and Peter O'Donnell the artist and writer for Modesty Blaise. You know for all the hubbub about the characters’ sexualities there is almost nothing of it in this book – John Tiger tells a female assassin, Farina Karesh, he’s picky about what he lets people stick in him as she tries to stab him with her talons. And Lily Gold asks Anouska, the Russian Doll of death – what appears to be a large cloaked woman is actually three thin women “Where have you been all my life?” Sadly the fight between them is lost but we are told that it is as sexual as it is violent. Part of the gag is that Baretti keeps trying to revive the strip I get the feeling that I may have to reread this a few times to really get the story