Since her debut in the '60s, Modesty & Willie's adventures were reprinted by several publishers, sometimes parallelly under different series by the same publisher.
Among them, reproduction wise, Titan's first series in the '80s, known as 'Old Titan(OT)', was undoubtedly the best, where most strips were directly shot from the originals(but this series was cancelled after 8 volumes in 1990). And the irony is, one of the lowest quality reproductions are also from another Titan series : their 2nd series from 2004-17. At least the first 20 volumes of total 30-volume series have suffered from very bad source materials. Clearly, they didn't use their original source material and whatever they got, was always below par, except occasional good/decent strips. However, from #21 onwards, the majority of the strips were reproduced from the high-quality material, but by then all major/ground-breaking stories were already told.
After these, Comics Revue(CR) magazine & it's MB quarterly, Ken Pierce's 1st American series - all have mostly decent reproduction, albeit the occasional glitch. (First MB story published in CR was in #26 and after that almost all issues have serialized Modesty strips.)
Then, there was the Pioneer series of Modesty, which was mediocre at the best, in both reproduction & layout wise. Plus, DC's one-off Modesty's 144-page comic-book in full color.
Last but not the least, the single Modesty strip published in Diamond's 'Comic World' magazine (although I have only Bengali version, this series was also published in English & Hindi, plus few other Indian languages).
There were a few more series of MB - all short-lived : Star Books, Spectrum Comics & 3rd MB series by Manuscript Press(other than their CR magazine & MB quarterly), plus, one issue from the Comic Media. I don't have any copy of these series, so whoever has them, please share the related information. specifically the reproduction quality(Thanks In Advance!).
------------------------
An appearance-wise series/publication list & total number of issues/books published :
Comic Media (1973) - 1 issue
Star Books (1978) - 2 books
First American series(KP) (1981-1986) - 8 books
1st Titan series : Old Titan(OT) (1985-1990) - 8 books
Spectrum Comics(ToI) (1985–1986) - 4 issues
1st MP series : Comics Revue (1986-2008 & later) - numerous(200+ issues)
Pioneer (1988-89) - 12 issues
2nd MP series : CR Presents MB/MB Quarterly (1994-2001) - 25 issues
DC (1994) - 1 book
Comics World(Diamond) (1999) - 1 issue
3rd MP series : Modesty Blaise (2003) - 2 books
2nd Titan series : New Titan(NT) (2004-2017) - 30 books
------------------------
Cover-gallery..
No comments:
Post a Comment