Random Intelligence Dispatches For March 23

I've been travelling for the Easter holiday (including an unplanned, snowbound, thirty-hour stopover in Cleveland, sans computer), and gotten a bit behind on the blog, I'm afraid, so I'll try to do a bit of catching up here...

Honey West DVD Art

TVShowsOnDVD.com has the cover art for VCI's Region 1 release of Honey West on DVD. VCI's website offers no release date, extras, or other information so far, but judging from the cover art provided, this will be a substantially thicker package than the Region 2 version. (Not that that necessarily indicates any more actual content, mind you.)

Royale With Cheese

CommanderBond.Net reports (originating from JamesBond.fr.com) that Sony is planning a three disc special edition of Casino Royale for release in Europe this June. Based on past release patterns, I'd be surprised if we see it stateside before the fall, since they'll probably want to tie it in with the theatrical debut of Quantum of Solace, but the French can reportedly look forward to bonus features (including deleted material) on June 18.

Book On Bond In Comics

CBN also reveals a very exciting new James Bond reference title on the way this fall: James Bond: The History of the Illustrated 007 by Alan J. Porter. Out of all the Bond reference works we can expect this year (and between the Fleming Centenary and the release of QoS, there are quite a lot!), this is the most exciting to me because it explores the sole untapped aspect of 007 stories: the comics. As Porter notes on his blog, even Ian Fleming Publications' own "definitive" history of Bond in print, James Bond: The Man and His World, dismisses this sector of the Bond phenomenon with a single sentence! It's a realm of Bond storytelling that I've always been compelled by, and one very much deserving of its own tome. The only book to really delve into Bond comics at all before is Andy Lane and Paul Simpson's The Bond Files, and that was primarily by way of story descriptions of the newspaper strips. This was a welcome feature at the time of the book's publication, as these stories were still uncollected. Now that Titan has released most of these strips, fans no longer require story synopses, but instead thirst for an in-depth, behind-the-scenes history of everyone's favorite British superspy in the comic medium. That's exactly what Porter promises, covering everything from the newspaper strips to foreign Bond comics and Japanese manga, from DC's Doctor No adaptation to Dark Horse's original Bond series of the 1990s. In the past, magazine articles have been devoted to this subject (including a good story by Porter in a recent issue of Back Issue Magazine), but never a book. So I'm very much looking forward to this one! More info on Porter's blog...