The Name’s Bond, Jane Bond: Previewing Camp Superspy Thrills In ‘The Best Of Jane Bond’

by Richard Bruton

Taken from the pages of Brit comics Tina and Princess Tina right in the middle of the Swinging Sixties, Jane Bond was a camp delight now collected in the The Best of Jane Bond.

It’s the Swinging Sixties, and there’s only one spy standing between crime and world domination – and her name is Jane Bond!

That’s the pull quote from the back page of the Best of Jane Bond and that’s really about all you need to know about this one. Well, that and that it’s got some gorgeous artwork by Mike Hubbard, the artist of the classic Daily Mirror strip Jane.

Obviously not authorised by Ian Fleming’s estate, Jane Bond is a glorious collection of campy espionage adventure, perfectly encapsulating a moment in history and frankly is exactly what you’d expect it to be.

Jane works for the World Police Force (Worldpol), thwarting all manner of high-level threats to the world and always looking great whilst doing so. Under the guidance of Colonel Merrill, her monocle-wearing boss, Jane goes out there and does the job, a 20-something agent with quick wits, quick fists, and a bunch of futuristic tech at her disposal to combat the worst of the worst.

Whether it’s fighting a school of super-villainesses, foiling plans to melt the Arctic ice caps, to escaping the clutches of a giant mechanical lobster (yes, really), Jane’s always there for Queen and Country.

The Best of Jane Bond collects a chunk of strips from the pages of the Tina and Princess Tina comics from 1968 – 1970, with all the superb reproduction we’ve come to expect from the Treasury of British Comics.

Sadly, we don’t know the writer of the Jane Bond strips but the artist is the great Mike Hubbard, made famous for his work on Jane, first assisting creator Norman Peet and then taking over the art of the strip in 1948.

When Jane ended, Hubbard moved to Fleetway and eventually to Jane Bond, where two pages a week saw the heroine face off against a perfectly wonderful and weird set of rogues, the tone falling somewhere between the typical girls’ comics of the time and the spy thrillers that were all over the TV and cinema screens.

The art you’ll see in this volume from Hubbard is drawn from all periods of the strip, its beginnings drawn in line but with grey washes of paint just in the first panel, then to include a first page of red tones, and finally, wonderfully, all grey tones. Hubbard really was one of the greats of British comics, that mixture of effortless glamour, striking figure work, and a dynamic style just coming together perfectly in Jane Bond.

Just like like the old Ginger Rogers quote about doing everything Fred Astaire did but ‘backwards and in high heels,’ Jane takes on everything the world of international espionage has to throw at her and comes out on top and does so looking great.

And yes, of course it’s campy and of course it’s very much of the time and of course there’s soem things in here that aren’t the sorts of things we’d see in comics now – to the point where Rebellion put a little warning in the front of this one about it how it ‘may deal with race, class, disability, or gender in ways uncomfortable to contemporary readers.’ And yep, it does do that, especially with gender.

But, taken as a product of the time of its writing, Jane Bond is a particularly fun thing, campy, fast-paced, a heroine in control and an artist just doing the sort of work that marked out this era of British comics and particularly those described as British girls comics as one full of incredible artists elevating the material.