“You only live twice, or so it seems” – at least, that is, if you are the work of the late illustrator John McLusky, creator of the popular James Bond newspaper cartoon strips. His dynamic, almost-forgotten drawings brought a reliable touch of glamorous machismo into the lives of readers of the Daily Express between 1958 and 1966, and are now to stir again.
The Los Angeles archives devoted to the glittering history of the Oscars will display McLusky’s influential images alongside other mementoes of the film franchise, which was based on the spy novels of Ian Fleming a former British intelligence officer.
“I’m very proud they will be seen again, as part of film history,” said Sean McLusky, son of the artist. “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.”
After contacting the archives through a London gallery, McLusky and his brother, Graham, have donated images that relate to some of the most famous early Bond films made from the thrillers and the comic strips – images that reveal a couple of undercover secrets of their own.
Not only does the graphic storytelling closely foreshadow the shape and look of the film Dr. No, made in 1962, but the depiction of Bond himself is also strikingly familiar. McLusky’s rugged, swarthy version of Fleming’s suave and violent hero bears a strong resemblance to the actor Sean Connery, one of the first actors to play the part, and for many older fans, the one who defined the role. This is not a coincidence.
“My dad had the same agent as Connery, a man called Leslie Linder, who was a film producer too,” McLusky said, “and we later heard from him that he had been given the nudge to the actor to audition for the role because he looked so like the newspaper cartoon character.”
The depiction of Bond himself is also strikingly familiar.
The film-makers also appear to have lent heavily on his father’s images. “The museum has taken one from every 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, except of course the 1967 David Niven film of Casino Royale, which was just a romp really.”
McLusky, born in Glasgow and raised in Yorkshire, had moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. He had also worked for Bomber Command during the second world war, drawing aircraft manuals and training materials and posters.
“He was a jobbing graphic artist in London by the time I was born and so in search of a regular job,” said McLusky, a music promoter who grew up in Hertfordshire with his father and mother, Sheila, a costume designer. “He happened to hit on the Express at the right time. The editors had a look at his work when they had just completed the deal with Fleming for the rights to run a strip based on his characters.”
Fleming had initial concerns about the idea, once writing of his fear that the comic strips would bring down the standards of his future writing. However, the eventual artwork was created with his permission by McLusky in collaboration with a succession of three writers who each condensed different stories.
Unusually, McLusky kept ownership of the artwork and so the family have been able to gift the strips to the Margaret Herrick library in Beverly Hills, the archives run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars.
“The academy has just accepted one of only eight full sets of drawings that McLusky made for Fleming between 1958 and 1966,” said Fraser Scott, of the online A Gallery , which helped make the gift. “I’m very pleased they will now be on show where they should be.”
McLusky himself, in a final plot twist, was quietly not so fond of his Bond drawings. “He started out sticking closer to what Fleming said he wanted,” said his son. “But then he updated them a little, I think. He called Bond ‘Jim’, and said he was just a misogynist hitman. Later on my dad did much softer work, like children’s drawings of the Pink Panther or Laurel and Hardy for the magazine TV comic. He preferred that stuff.”
The Bond films, first made by Cubby Broccoli and then by his daughter Barbara, and now produced jointly with EON Productions, are commercial juggernauts. But their Oscar record is less glittering. The teams behind the special effects, the sound and the theme songs, rather than their stars or directors, have more often been honored.
Vanessa Thorpe is The Observer’s arts-and-media correspondent
