The comic strip syndications of Lee Falk’s Phantom – Aranyadeb, or Lord of the Forests in the Bengali version – and Mandrake the Magician are regurgitated in the same Bengali paper to this day. But the glorious creation of writer Peter O’Donnell and artist Jim Holdaway was what gave the lingering 80s of feisty ‘consumer vigilante’ housewife Rajani, the twirling Nirma girl, and Sita of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan the urge to fast-forward, ideally stiletto in hand, never on stilettos. And not just for women who may or may not have known her, but also for men like me whose idea of men-women relations was strongly shaped by Modesty-di.
As a way of introduction, Blaise is the high-cheek-boned, black-haired brawn’n’beauty whose help is sought by the 1960-70s-era British Secret Service. (Neither the people nor the world age in the comic strip over time.) But more than the secret service action stuff, it’s really about seeing the incredibly ironically named Modesty in various forms of violent or amorous action that gives us a frisson even today.
The Modesty I am most familiar with was drawn by Enrique Badia Romero, who took over from Holdaway after the latter suddenly died in 1970. Romero’s art work moved Blaise-di from the earlier more ‘British’ light-and-shade zone to a cleaner, bolder, sexier ‘Latin’ alpha female one. Suddenly, her curves were bonier; her bones, curvier. Thanks to her, I looked up the meanings of the word ‘scapula’ and ‘clavicle’ – and her weapon of choice, the Japanese palm-held yawara, which O’Donnell in the comics called ‘kongo’. Modesty Blaise was Gina Lollobrigida channeling the yet-to-arrive Lara Croft.
But also of immense interest for me was the character of Willie Garvin, Modesty’s ‘trusty sidekick’. For one, Garvin, unlike usual sidekicks, was a bona fide alpha male. The comic strip didn’t just simplistically overturn the standard ‘Bond-Bond girl’ sexual politics by making Blaise the voluptuous, hyper-kinetic, aggro-seductive protagonist and Garvin the Watson to her Sherlock, Robin to her Batman. He is an ex-Thai boxer in ‘Saigon’ – who had, incidentally, spent a year in jail in Calcutta where he picked up a penchant for quoting from the psalms.
Like Modesty, Willie, too, leaves an erotic (as well as fatal) bodycount. The two are partners in the true sense of the word, with Blaise taking the lead. They are/were never lovers despite their closeness, despite Modesty calling him ‘Love’ and Willie calling her ‘Princess’. And despite their very conspicuous physical appeal – they strip and change in front of each other without either batting an eyelid, in Modesty’s case a very firm, fluttering pair of eyelids. In other words, Modesty and Willie treat each other with respect.
Swag – from swagger – is not usually a term used to describe attractive women. And yet, Modesty Blaise is all swag and more. She is all woman and more, without having to ‘masculate’ herself by ‘wearing the pants in the house’. In fact, barring her black catsuit, she’s very rarely caught in trousers.
I have never read any of O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels, or watched the three Modesty movies (1966, 1982, 2004). It was the comic strip – especially those drawn by Romero – encountered in a Bengali newspaper, next to classified ads of astrologers and godmen and women, that drew me in. Blaise-di not only remains the embodiment of woman to me, but also of person. And she does it without ever having to utter, as an academic recently did, anything about the ‘porn of patriarchy’.