Cool as an early morning rose and as deadly as nightshade, Jane Bond was the female super spy of British girls’ comic strips in the 1960s.
As we’ve discussed before, the world of British girls’ comics remains a somewhat undiscovered country, despite the recent revival of interest in titles like Misty. Misty, with its supernatural bent, was something of an outlier, and the new appreciation of it seems to emphasise the fact that it wasn’t like everything else rather than revalidate the whole world of girls’ comics, which often tended to underestimate the imagination of their readers and fed them romance and schoolgirl hijinks to the exclusion of everything else.
Nevertheless, there were plenty of impressive and innovative strips that emerged in the medium – the cynically glamorous Sugar Jones, as we’ve already explored, was a great example of how to feed the (assumed) interests of girls while offering them something a bit meatier and smarter than much of what they were given. What’s more, the girls’ comics were not immune to the trends of the time that also dominated the boys’ comics. In the 1960s, spies were all the rage thanks to the huge success of the Bond movies. Women in Bond films were always the second fiddle – sex objects or double-dealing Mata Hari types – but the 1960s also saw the rise of the female super spy with characters like Modesty Blaise. It was no surprise, then, that one of the most popular stories on the era featured a character that lifted from all the spy stories of the time and filtered them for a juvenile, female audience.
Jane Bond – Secret Agent appeared in the first issue of Tina and ran for 158 issues, surviving a merger of the comic with Princess to become Princess Tina after 31 issues. Tina was a strange, ambitious attempt to create an international comic, with localised editions appearing across Europe. Perhaps it was part of the attempt to appeal to readers in different countries with different tastes that saw the comic attempt to move beyond the traditional sort of strips that it was assumed that girls wanted.
The strip was drawn by Mike Hubbard – the artist who had drawn the legendary saucy Daily Mirror comic strip Jane from 1948 to 1959 – with scripts by a writer (or writers) whose name was never recorded and so is lost in time. Each story was a multi-chapter adventure that ran for two pages per issue. Jane Bond, as we are told in her first adventure, is “cool as an early morning rose and as deadly as nightshade, born in the United States, educated in Italy, dressed by Zior of Paris – and hated by every crook in the world.” This exotic, sophisticated spy for Worldpol (a typically global police force of the time) is first seen winning the Pasadena Grand Prix and is pitted against a variety of supervillains who are determined to steal secret formulas or hold the world to ransom in the manner that would be familiar to anyone familiar with 007, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers or other spy romps that only had one foot in reality. There is no overt suggestion that Jane Bond is related to James Bond, who goes unmentioned throughout, though the implication is there. The strip’s title was probably pushing the limits already, though things in the 1960s were a lot looser and it’s hard to imagine that the Bond producers – or Ian Fleming – would go to the effort of suing a children’s comic publisher for what was a satirical cultural nod. British comics of the 1960s and 1970s in particular had a long track record in spoofing and referencing pop culture and no one was ever going to really think that this was in any way officially connected to the James Bond stories.
With just two pages in which to further the story – which included bringing readers up to speed on what had happened last week and finding a suitable cliffhanger moment to end on – the stories don’t hang around. Reading an entire adventure in one go is quite exhausting but certainly keeps things exciting. Jane Bond has no end of gimmicky devices to help her escape from scrapes – smoke bombs in her compact, miniature disguise kits, explosive necklaces and so on – and is able to fight burly men and rescue helpless scientists by bursting in through a glass window. She’s the classic sort of action heroine that people like to believe didn’t exist until recently, clearly inspired by female contemporaries like Modesty, Emma Peel, April Dancer and Honey West – the equal of any man and better than most.
Jane Bond – Secret Agent lasted until 1970, when her adventures were brought to an untimely end with Jane sent on a world cruise to unwind. She was replaced with the rather blander and more traditional adventures of a student nurse. She was never seen again outside of reprints in annuals (which were always the repository of old reprints that probably made no sense to the current readership) and a colourised Dutch paperback collection, Jane Bond: Geheim Agente. In more recent years, Rebellion has published a collection of surviving strips – a frustratingly incomplete book but the best that we can hope for I imagine, sadly, as Rebellion’s non-Misty girls’ comics collections don’t seem to have been especially successful. The character seems ripe for rediscovery and reinvention, though the James Bond producers may be a little more litigious today than they were back in the day. Still, with the continual suggestions that the next James Bond be a woman, perhaps EON Productions should snap up the rights to the character and make Jane Bond an official spin-off character. There is a great TV series to be made from the character as long as it respects the mix of glamour, kitsch, action and humour.
DAVID FLINT
BUY THE BEST OF JANE BOND (UK)
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