Jim Holdaway

The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970

Holdaway settles into a grove. The first stories are marked by distinctive alternating dark and light periods. Modesty's extreme look and the densely inked set piece climaxes comprise the dark; the obsession for the fine, almost architectural line work in settings and figures and Willie's blonde playmates, for example, make up the light.

Frank Hampson, the dean of British comic artists via Dan Dare and Eagle, attempted to become Modesty's first visualizer, penciling a few weeks as tryouts, but, according to O'Donnell and MB Quarterly #24, badly misread the character. (Hampson's version looks like Modesty as Tuesday Weld. See this Hampson link to view the two versions side by side. Hampson's biography says the publisher thought the samples were not sexy enough.) Holdaway got the job instead through his former partner's insistence that he was the right man of the job.

Since the extant Hampson strips, done in the exact-to-reference style he was famous for, follow the initial O'Donnell's script, it becomes possible to speculate on what Holdaway contributed to the early evolution of Modesty and Willie in his own right.

The early stories are the days of Modesty's uncompromising angular look, all black clothing, and climatic battle scenes set at night. They showcase Holdaway finessing photo-strip technique, to out-Drake Drake and rest of the Americans, but even then he wasn't a slave to his reference. The backgrounds of the first stories are rendered as close to real as possible and appeared with weekly frequency and crisp accuracy. The apartment layouts, for example, looked like renditions from an architectural journal. Dense, full blacks were the order of the day, with hands and faces fully modeled. Willie even had tiny crow's feet and Modesty thin penline eye shadow.

Then several weeks would be "light" work, contours and shapes, outlines and a variety of line weights. Willie's occasional blonde girlfriend episodes (--always blonde. No rival dark-haired young sexy woman ever appeared in Holdaway's stories) were done in the light style, always a stark contrast with the dark surrounding Modesty.

Thus, Holdaway helped a great deal to give the heroine her somber mystery, her no-nonsense seriousness, her aura of complete confidence and competence. He gave in visual terms the same kind of "born in the blood" power O'Donnell thought Modesty required.

Modesty Blaise has been so good for so long because one writer at the helm has meant that there has been a consistency to the stories, of characterization, of incident. The stories played out as the situation dictated. The second story is two weeks shorter than the first continuity; the third 3 weeks longer. In addition, in 1965 O'Donnell began to write the series of novels where he could explore character development denied to him in the strip which he then carried over to the collaboration. (Holdaway did the covers for 3 of the novels: Sabre-Tooth, I, Lucifer, and A Taste for Death.)

Holdaway, working without an assistant and the necessity of a different approach for a Sunday page, was able over time ('63-66) to refine his adventure storytelling, searching for that same kind of consistency that O'Donnell sought as well.

Modesty attempts to disguise her look three times in the Holdaway stories, each time with less conviction. The top strip, she affects the garb and carriage of a Hong Kong bar girl ('64). Another was a Hedi-styled barmaid in "The Vikings," ('66) and lastly, as a hip 60s scenester in "Bad Suki"('68, below). The middle strip is a good example of how Holdaway used Modesty as a design element--her dark image and dark clothes set against white space. The "L" of the middle panel probably began as the background painting from the first panel, but then blacked out and taken out of perspective to serve as a frame and lead the eye to Modesty in the third. Bottom, the young girl O'Donnell saw that fateful day in camp makes her appearance in "The Beginning," a two week intro done in 1966 meant for papers picking up the strip mid-stream. That sequence serves as a convenient halfway point in discussing Holdaway's seven years on the title. Thereafter, Modesty would eventually be rendered "lighter" and the settings would become less important, as the focus on the leads meant less emphasis on exotic locales and landscapes.

This was a gradual change, but eventually Modesty lost her sharp features. In the second half, roughly '67-70, Holdaway made Modesty more conventionally pretty--a simpler, rounder, fuller face shape, smaller nose, the eyes large, but lined by less extravagant lashes, a smaller mouth with a defined, notched upper lip. He also made less use of complicated shading patterns, leaving her face, as most comic artists do with young women, clear and unmarked, leaving high cheekbones to be suggested by contour alone. Her hair was fuller across the forehead, so that the head made a full oval, rather than the tiered top knot of the past.

This was in step with the stories. O'Donnell and Holdaway had established the mindset they wanted to have the reader to have about Modesty, to take her seriously as an action hero, so now they could relax a bit in making Modesty more of a idealized attractive female. Despite a British strip tradition that allowed topless nudity, the early stories are mostly respectful in depicting her fully clothed. (Maggie Thompson, in an introduction of "girlie-girlie" strips for Romero's Axa says that American sensibilities demanded that Modesty's original "scanty" clothing be covered up. She is shown nude once or twice in the early stories, yes, but actually less suggestive than what Drake was doing in Juliet Jones, for example. Maybe it was attitude. Modesty made no bones about being sexually active. Juliet and Eve, of course, were untouchable.) In the second half of Holdaway's stories, Modesty might go through the entire episode wearing a bra or ripped clothing. But just as telling, there are stories where it is just close-up after close-up of her face, and her figure isn't shown at all.

Holdaway made less use of establishing landscape panels taken from photographs too.

Some mention should be made about Holdaway's handling of men. His male characters, especially the villains, were never convincing. Some girl artists fail at this because they lavish so much attention and care on the females, but this wasn't the case here. Holdaway tried everything. Even in the end, while Modesty is drawn simply and directly, the male characters are still a topographical map of creases and wrinkles, shadings and chunks of lines. This could also be a function of chasing the Bond genre, as live action typically took the shortcut of making the villain some sort of outlandish caricature, in look, accent or dress, something Mike Myers has built a career on with Austin Powers.

Modesty is relatively free of period detail, in story and language. O'Donnell has said he refrained from such uses, but clothes and fashion were the domain of the artist. Little has been written before about Holdaway, his technique, influences, and his feelings toward storytelling (at least within this American's grasp). My guess is that Holdaway used photo reference only for backgrounds, and that his figures and faces, for the most part, were invention because of the relative lack of individualization of secondary characters--they all pretty much look alike or are caricatures--and the occasional stretched stiffness of the full figure poses. Occasionally there are panels which have the texture of photographs, like the dancing girl above, or the profile of Modesty on the right. (See this on the question of O'Donnell as Gabriel and Holdaway as Gus.)

Holdaway's style was still evolving when he suddenly died from a heart attack in his home, Kenley South London district of Croydon, February, 1970 .

It would be nice to say his last complete story "Take-Over" or "The Warlords of Phoenix," the sequence he was working on when he passed away, represent him at his best, but the truth to me was he was still heading there.

I think of the last cycle of stories, "The Hell-Makers," running from March to August 1969, was the most representative of what he and O'Donnell wanted in the strip. The plot is classic Modesty. Willie is captured and drugged to the brink of madness and Modesty comes to the rescue with a vengeance and a sense of ultimate justice that would make an American hero quail, but it involves more than just mere recovery, as in order to save Willie, Modesty puts at risk the thing Willie values more than his own safety or sanity--her well-being. Modesty, of course, will prove this loyalty cuts both ways.

The story contains the late phase, prettier, more conventionally drawn Modesty, but that is beside the point now. She doesn't have to rendered unusually to be unusual.

The story is filled with sly doubles--Miriam the robot-like blonde agent who admits to no human emotion, the female-hating prospector Gus who's amazed at the interest Modesty takes in "man-things," Gus' twin Golden Eagles, serene Solomon and vicious Sheba, and so on, all meant to comment on what really is important to the reader. The bond between Willie and Modesty.

The distribution in the US has been a wildly haphazard one, perhaps the reason why the strip has never really achieved the popularity it deserves here. In 1967 Cartoonist Showcase began reprinting the series, followed by other fanzine-type collections in the 70s, likeThe Comic Reader and MFGazette, all adhering to small print runs and stories in small doses, as the Beaverbrook Group refused whole episode collections. Finally, in 1982, Ken Pierce issued the "First American Edition" series, meant for sequences left behind when the fanzine era collapsed. Two years later, Titan Books began their go, the quality of their TPB collections, reprising Holdaway and early Romero, effectively forcing Pierce to jump to the Neville Colvin period. Titan's run lasted 8 books and six years (comprising almost 10 years of continuity out of the 17 then in the can). In the 90s Rick Norwood thankfully set up two titles to cover the waterfront: Comics Revue picked up where Pierce had ended, eventually catching up with current continuity last year, while the Modesty Blaise Quarterly filled in whole story gaps not covered elsewhere. All the scarce items, especially the Titans, inspire lively bidding on the auction block.

Al Williamson submitted some samples when an American-style Sunday Modesty Blaise was being considered in the late 60s. (The work is consistent with the style Williamson was using on the early period of Secret Agent X-9.)

Cartoonist Showcase used one figure study as a cover for issue No. 4 in 1968 and a rejected Sunday page of Williamson's "Uncle Happy" story on the back. More than 30 years later, Rick Norwood reprinted the Sunday sample in Modesty Blaise Quarterly #18. (The sample is also available on his Comics Revue webpage.)

To see Williamson's adventure treatment is interesting, especially in light of the competition to become Modesty's artist that ensued following Holdaway's death. The publishing group decided on "Spanish School" romance artist Enrique Badia Romero, turning down such well known English action illustrators like Frank Bellamy.