Bond is Back! An exciting new exhibition of the work of the late illustrator and 007 strip-cartoon artist John McLusky, who did so much to present Ian Fleming’s James Bond to the general public in an early and striking visual form, is being mounted in Los Angeles in the USA.
Examples of the work of McLusky will be placed on display at the Academy Film Archives, the extensive Los Angeles archives devoted to the history of the Oscars, which also holds other unique film material collections. Glasgow-born John McLusky (1923-2006), who traimed at the famous Slade School of Fine Art in London, was the artist commissioned to draw the first James Bond cartoon-strip, which appeared in the UK’s Daily Express newspaper between 1958 and 1966.
His work was also arguably an influence on the search for an actor to play James Bond, and his visual respresentation of Fleming’s novel Dr. No bears some interesting and intriguing resemblances to the first EON 007 movie Dr. No. Indeed, some Bond experts have suggested that McLusky’s illustrations were used by the Bond film-makers and doubled-up as a storyboard for the movie’s director Terence Young. This sounds very plausible, as Dr. No was made on a relatively low budget.
According to an article in the UK’s Observer newspaper (4th August, 2024), ‘The comic strip artist who gave James Bond his look’, the Academy film archives, based at the Margaret Herrick library, will display McLusky’s influential 007 images alongside other iconic mementoes of the long-running EON film franchise. The Academy archives are run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation behind the Oscars. Sean McLusky, son of the late artist, told the newspaper: ‘I’m very proud they will be seen again, as part of film history. He did such an excellent job, my dad. He nailed the look and the more you look at the drawings the more you can see how much work it was to get everything across’.
The new display is the result of Sean McLusky and his brother, Graham, contacting the Los Angeles archive through a London gallery, and they have donated images which they believe show how McLusky’s visualisation of James Bond bears a strong resemblance to the actor Sean Connery who, of course, was selected to play 007 in Dr. No (1962). They feel that this is not a coincidence. Sean McLusky explained to the Observer: ‘My dad had the same agent as Connery, a man called Leslie Linder, who was a film producer too, and we later heard from him that he had given the nudge to the actor to audition for the role because he looked so like the newspaper cartoon character’.
As the film-makers appear to have lent heavily on his father’s cartoon images, Sean revealed that: ‘The museum has taken one from very Fleming film and this makes sense because, from what I know, when they were making Dr. No, which was quite a low-budget spy movie at the time, they pretty much used my dad’s comic story as the storyboard. The framing of the images and the pacing are very similar. They really took on and adapted his vision in the early films…’.
As the Observer noted, Bond creator Ian Fleming, who did a deal with the Daily Express for the rights to run a strip based on his Bond characters, initially had concerns about the idea, and thought it might impact on the standards of his future writing, but the eventual artwork created by McLusky appears to have met with his approval. Unusually, McLusky – a canny Scot – managed to get back ownership of his Bond artwork, and so the McLusky family have been able to gift the strips to the Margaret Herrick library.
When McLusky stepped aside from penning the Bond cartoon in 1966, he was succeeded by artist Yaroslav Horak, and the strip ran in the Daily Express until the end of 1976, using up the Fleming stories and creating original new material. From January, 1977, the strip switched to the Sunday Express, still drawn by Horak, but only ran for 18 more weeks. When the Bond strip-cartoon was revived in the Daily Star (at that pointed owned by Express newspapers) in February, 1981, it was drawn by Harry North. However, from August, 1981, John McLusky was back, and remained on board until the Daily Star suddenly ended the cartoon in July, 1983.
Did You Know?
John McLusky was one of the special guests at the James Bond British Fan Club (as the JBIFC was then named) convention held at Wembley Conference Centre in 1982, where he was interviewed live on stage by founder and president Ross Hendry. McLusky proved to be highly entertaining and shared some great anecdotes, including the fact that he often got his best friend to pose as Bond when he was creating some of the strip images.
