If you look over the GCD indexes that i set up some years ago, I went into great detail with the sypnopses, and other notations regarding the stories.

For example, LIVE AND LET DIE was for whatever reason the shortest of the adaptations-- perhaps because someone felt there was a lot of material they considered unsuitable for newspaper audiences. By comparison, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE was the longest, running about 11 months in the papers.

Tragically, THUNDERBALL was cut short after about 12 weeks because Ian Fleming pissed off the newspaper publisher by allowing someone else to publish one of his newer short stories instead. They reconciled a years later, but when the strip resumed, it did so with OHMSS, and to this day, THUNDERBALL has never been full adapted as a comic. Considering the lawsuit that erupted over the novel (itself based on the unproduced film project), it almost seems liek there was a curse on that story.

Someone in one of the book intros noted the irony that most of the Fleming adaptations were toned down for the papers (cutting out some of the sex and violence... but when they got to the 70s, and were doing NEW stories, censorship in British papers had relaxed enough so that they were able to include MORE sex and violence than before, so that in style and tone the NEW stories were closer to Fleming's books than the adaptations had been.

When I was reading the 70s stories, I also noted the irony that they, like MUCH in the entertainment filed in the 70s, had gotten darker, more violent and more sexy... while the Eon 007 films actually went THE OTHER WAY, becoming almost cartoony in their level of humor. I often think if George Lazenby hadn't STUPIDLY taken his agent's advice and quit after one movie like he did, the whole history of Bond films in the 70s might have gone in a completely different direction-- and possibly, been closer in style to those comic-strips.

Several of Fleming's later books were actually expanded on and IMPROVED by the adaptations. Apparently, some plot holes in OHMSS were fixed... in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, they added the idea that "Dr. Shatterhand" had contacted the Japanese government, offering to shut down his garden of death, if they PAID him a huge sum of money. (In effect, blackmail!) As a result, unlike the novel, Shatterhand was on the lookout for government ASSASSINS tryiong to kill him and therefore avoid paying the money. This particular element, oddly enough, was invluded in the 1967 movie-- even though, since MI-6 had faked Bond's death, it made NO SENSE for them to be trying to kill Bond when he was believed already dead.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN had Bond meet another agent while he was in hospital who'd been maimed by Francisco Scaramanga, giving him a more personal reason for his mission, and it not being just a suicide mission to prove he could still do his job as an agent. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, THE HILDEBRAND RARITY and OCTOPUSSY were also greatly fleshed out and drastically improved.

What amazed me were some of the elements in the comic-strips that LATER turned up verbatim in the movies. For example, the giant tanker that could swallow submarined in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME had a smaller prototype in one of the comics stories, I believe it was a ship that was invisible on radar. The whole time I was reading Jim Lawrence's new stories from the 70s, I couldn't shake the feeling that the people making the movies were raiding the comic-strip for ideas!

In the last few years, I've seen the SAME thing turn up-- over and over-- with Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. New elements are added to comics versions, and years later, those same elements turn up in Poe movies.