We haven’t checked lately, but we’re guessing Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez didn’t register at Bed Bath & Beyond. Luckily, though, we’ve stumbled on the perfect wedding gift — at least for the groom, who not only now owns the 007 franchise but also appears to be taking styling cues from Ernst Stavro Blofeld. For a mere $77,000, you can surprise the happy couple with a rare set of original, ink-drawn panels from the long-forgotten but quietly influential James Bond newspaper comic strip, which debuted in the British press in 1958 — four years before the tuxedoed superspy ever stepped onto a soundstage.
“My father had to come up with what James Bond looked like,” says Sean McLusky, son of the late illustrator John McLusky, who’s now selling his father’s artwork through the London-based A Gallery. “There were descriptions of Bond in Ian Fleming’s books, but no cover drawings or anything like that. He had no face. James Bond was not visible to the public. My father had to invent his face.”
Strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true. CBS viewers got an early peek at one version of Bond in 1954, when the network aired a live, hourlong adaptation of Casino Royale. But Barry Nelson — the clean-cut actor cast as “Jimmy” Bond in that heavily Americanized production — bore about as much resemblance to 007 as Howdy Doody. The secret agent John McLusky began drawing for The Daily Express a few years later, on the other hand, looked exactly how the world would soon come to picture James Bond: ruggedly handsome and athletic, with the cool, steely gaze of a killer. In fact, McLusky’s version looked a lot like Sean Connery.
McLusky’s son suspects that’s no coincidence. “My father was friends with Sean Connery’s agent,” he explains. “And the agent told Connery to try out for the part in Dr. No, since he looked like the Bond in the comic strip.”
Sean Connery became the face of 007 for millions through films like Dr. No and Goldfinger.
Courtesy Everett Collection
In fact, McLusky suspects much of that first Bond film owes a debt to his dad. “I met with the archivist from EON Productions” — the longtime Bond producers, before Amazon acquired the franchise — “and I asked to see a storyboard for Dr. No,” he recalls. “She told me there were no storyboards for that film. That’s when I realized they must’ve used my dad’s drawings. You can match scenes from his panels to the camera angles in the movie.”
Again, technically speaking, not quite. While McLusky’s art and the early Bond films do share a certain joie de Bond — a crisp, stylish bravado and, yes, even a DB5 zooming across the page — the comic strips were faithful, serialized adaptations of the novels, sticking more closely to Fleming’s original plotlines than the films ever did. Which, come to think of it, might make them especially intriguing to a certain bald billionaire with a penchant for rockets and reboots. These unofficial storyboards could offer a stripped-down, cinematic blueprint for a new Bond, a sketchbook for whatever 007 looks like next.
But act fast. Since A Gallery began selling the McLusky archive — prices start at $1,800 for a single panel, $77,000 for a curated dozen or $1.9 million for the entire remaining collection — they’ve been flying off the shelves. A few were scooped up by an unnamed film director, others by a Hollywood mogul, and McLusky recently donated a set of 12 to the Academy Library. Only 836 panels remain.
This story appeared in the June 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.