Comic Book Review: Steed and Mrs. Peel #0

Like a lot of spy fans, I’ve been waiting a loooong time for this. For the first time since 1998, we’ve got a new, officially authorized Avengers story! Not those title-stealing pretenders who did some work for S.H.I.E.L.D. this past summer; the real Avengers—the TV Avengers. That’s right, John Steed and Emma Peel. My favorite TV spies ever. But just because we’ve got a new Avengers story on our hands, in convenient comic book form, doesn’t guarantee it will be any good, of course. Not by a long shot. (See: 1998.) So it was with trembling hands that I opened this Boom! comic by Mark Waid and Steve Bryant. Would the creators do justice to the wonderful, inimitable characters immortalized by Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg? I’m elated to report that the answer is an unequivocal yes!

Steed and Mrs. Peel #0 is good. It’s very good, in fact. It’s better than the 90s comic of the same name written by Grant Morrison (recently reprinted by Boom!)—and that was a lot of fun itself. But Mark Waid gets the tone of the show and the specific crackle of the best Brian Clemens or Philip Levene banter between Steed and Emma. The cadence of the dialogue feels right in a way that few tie-in writers have ever really nailed before.

As far as I’m concerned, the banter is the number one thing to get right in telling a good Avengers tale, but the story matters, too, of course. This special zero issue is a self-contained one, and Waid manages to cram a proper Avengers episode (or mini-episode, at least) into these 22 pages. “The Dead Future” is a direct sequel to the famous (or infamous) TV episode “A Touch of Brimstone” (though, while it rewards a familiarity with the episode, none is required). The Hellfire Club is back in action, but has changed its focus from the past to the future—or at least a 1960s vision of what the future might look like. In the teaser that strikes the correct balance of stylish spy and impossible sci-fi, a doomed agent is aged beyond his years and “woken up” in the far-flung year 2000. Through trickery, a window displays flying cars and a Metropolis-like cityscape. The club members use this scenario to pick the agent’s mind and then eliminate him. It’s a premise right out of Sixties television, reminiscent to some extent not only of the Avengers episode “Escape in Time” (one of my favorites), but also numerous Mission: Impossible set-ups.

From the teaser, following the pattern of the color Emma Peel episodes, we cut to a brief “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed” sequence, and it was here that I knew I was completely on board with this take. The gimmick by which Steed contacts Emma (which I won’t divulge) is not one the show ever used—but very easily could have been. In a comic, though, this particular gag functions on a meta level that wouldn’t have come across on TV. (And it also manages to sneak in a subtle reference to “The Winged Avenger.”) From there, Steed leads Mrs. Peel to the site of an aged corpse in the clothes of one of their agents—and it’s not the first time they’ve seen this scenario.

The story that follows feels not only like a loving tribute to the TV episodes, but also to the Avengers TVcomics of the time. At one point, Steed battles a bearded “Father Time” wielding a scythe, which is exactly the sort of imagery that popped up in those two-tone comic strips in the Avengers annuals! But the writing here, as I already mentioned, is infinitely superior to most of those stories. 

The artwork is fantastic on a level of channeling Sixties pop art pop culture (in its best moments recalling the work of Mike Allred), but less successful in depicting the series’ stars. I’m guessing that Boom! were unable to clear likeness rights for the actors, because these Avengers look very little like Diana Rigg and (especially) Patrick Macnee. That’s a shame, because a sequence in which Steed is “aged” into his 80s would have been a great opportunity to depict Macnee as he looks today! (One panel comes close.) It also seems unfair that Marvel was able to get away with using Peter Wyngarde’s likeness in their X-Men comics that "borrowed" TheAvengers’ Hellfire Club (as a character named “Jason Wyngarde,” no less), but here in an official Avengers tie-in, a brief flashback of has “Brimstone” character, Cartney, bears little resemblance. Cartney is also at the center of my only real nerdy nitpick about this book, too, and that’s that no character played by Peter Wyngarde would ever “favor rather a D-class fragrance,” as described here! But Mark Waid was prepared for my gripe, and has Emma quickly explain, “Oh, no pinchpenny he. But, it must be stressed, the honourable John Cleverly Cartney did incline sharply toward the vulgar…” And perhaps that can be said of Wyngarde. Okay, Waid, you’re off the hook on that one.

I enjoyed the Hellfire out of Steed and Mrs. Peel #0 (sorry; I couldn't resist!), and heartily recommend it to all Avengers fans. It quenches a thirst long overdue of satisfying like a good champagne. (Another minor nitpick would be that there wasn’t quite enough of that signature beverage consumed in this issue, but again my churlish gripery was quickly abated… this time by the fact that bubbly appears to be Emma’s concession of choice in a movie theater! Nice touch.) I hope it sells well and spawns a long series that lives up to the high benchmark set here.

Follow the link here to read my reviews of some past Avengers comics.

NOTE: If the variant covers depicted here seem odd to Avengers fans, they won't to comic book fans. They're homages to classic X-Men covers from the era when that comic was homaging The Avengers, thus completing the circle of homage.

Diana Rigg to Guest Star on Doctor Who

BBC reports (via AICN) that Emma Peel herself, uber-spy star Dame Diana Rigg (also the greatest Bond Girl of all time), will appear alongside her daughter, Rachel Sterling (Tipping the Velvet) on an upcoming episode of Doctor Who penned by none other than Mark Gatiss! Gatiss is not only the author of the fantastic Lucifer Box spy send-ups The Vesuvius Club and The Devil in Amber (as well as the less successful third novel in the trilogy, Black Butterfly), but also an avowed fan of of both James Bond and Sixties spy television. (He's all over the extras on the DVD release of BBC's answer to The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives!, for instance.) I have little doubt that he'll be able to resist working in a sly reference or two to Rigg's famed spy roles. (He even references Charles Helfenstein's excellent book The Making of On Her Majesty's Secret Service on an audio commentary for the latest season of Sherlock, the brilliant modern-day take on Sherlock Holmes that he co-created with current Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat.) Apparently the pair will play a mother and daughter on the show, too. (I was kind of hoping they'd play older and younger versions of the same character on a time travel show. Oh well.) Rigg's Avengers predecessor Honor Blackman memorably appeared in the epic 1986 Doctor Who serial "The Trial of a Time Lord."

Review: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 Featuring Some of the 20th Century's Greatest Fictional Secret Agents

Famous fictional spies have made appearances in several recent volumes of Alan Moore's epic literary mash-up comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. James Bond got rather unfairly skewered in 2007's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which also featured appearances from Hugo Drummond, George Smiley, Q, Callan's Lonely and a young Emma Peel—as well as references to Felix Leiter, John Drake and Callan's Toby Meres. Last year, Simon Templar, Jason King and the Sean Connery incarnation of 007 made cameos in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969. And even more spies turn up (in more substantial roles, too) in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009, out this week!

For regular readers of this series, which began as a sort of Victorian-era Justice League teaming the likes of Mina Harker, Allan Quatermain, Dr. Jeckyll and Captain Nemo before spanning centuries to incorporate scores of other characters from fiction, film and television, part of the fun is spotting all the cameos and figuring out who certain characters (sometimes remaining nameless due to copyright regulations) are supposed to be. If you count yourself in that category, then you may wish to read no further until you've perused the book yourself, because I'm going to reveal some of the spy characters populating the latest volume. But I'm not planning to spoil any plot details.

Century: 2009, the final part of the "Century Trilogy," takes place (obviously) in 2009. In keeping with the modern Bond films, M (the nomenclature is a fixture of the series) is now a woman. In a rather delightful twist, however, we soon piece together that this elegant older woman is Emma Peel! (She even keeps a framed photo of Steed on her desk.) Em (get it?) has grown disillusioned over the years with the original James Bond (Moore's supposed take on the literary 007, whose character actually bears no resemblance to Ian Fleming's creation, even if artist Kevin O'Neill nails the physical appearance), but because of his notoriety it's suited her to continue to employ "increasingly younger stand-ins" who carry on his name and number. These stand-ins, codenamed J1 through J6, of course bear the respective likenesses of Sean Connery (the version of 007 seen in the last volume), Roger Moore (perhaps supposed to be Simon Templar himself recruited to fill the shoes of James Bond?), Timothy Dalton (in the weakest likeness), Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig (in the best likeness). Later in the story, Emma comes to the rescue in a Rolls Royce along with appropriately aged companions Tara King and Purdey! (This version of Purdey is a clever amalgamation of Purdey and Joanna Lumley's Absolutely Fabulous character Patsy.) In what reads as a very nice sort of epilogue to The Avengers, Emma explains that they're all very loyal to each other, adding, "I suppose it's that we all used to be in love with the same man." Soon enough Cathy Gale is also in the picture, but this version of Cathy also owes something to another famous Honor Blackman spy character: she "has some experience as a flight instructress" as well as some lesbian tendencies! Lesser spy cameos in the book (I mean lesser in that they don't have speaking roles) include Spooks' Harry and Ruth, 24's President David Palmer and Burn Notice's Michael Westen (by reference, anyway) and, in a particularly amusing single-panel appearance, The Prisoner himself, Number 6.

Moore is clearly fond of The Avengers, so he treats them pretty well. As I said above, the portrayal of the ladies of The Avengers is really quite moving, making this comic a must-buy for fans of that series on the eve of Steed and Emma's official return to comics in Boom!'s upcoming Steed and Mrs. Peel series. As he made abundantly clear in Black Dossier, however, Moore has no love whatsoever for James Bond, and therefore treats him rather ruthlessly. (I have to say, I was disappointed that someone who's clearly so well read and such a lover of classic adventure fiction as Moore would rely on preconceived notions about Fleming's Bond based more on trendy, ill-informed lit-crit and some of the early movie appearances than the actual novels themselves. Among the myriad slanders he levied against 007, he made the character a habitual woman-beater. Had he read Fleming's short story "The Hildebrand Rarity," Moore would know that Fleming's Bond disdains such men.) The original Bond, now in his 90s, is subjected to one final insult... but nothing so bad as in Black Dossier. In fact, I was quite amused to see a nonagenarian "Sir James" wheelchair-bound and breathing through an oxygen tank (thanks to "cirrhosis, emphysema and syphilis..." all in all a much fairer portrayal of the original Book Bond!), but still looked after by a comely nurse nonetheless.

In this volume, Moore's misdirected outrage is mainly reserved for Harry Potter. Poor Harry is portrayed as something much worse than 007, and jabs at J.K. Rowling about "sloppily-defined magical principles" like "a child's idea of how [things] work" take on a definite pot-kettle quality coming from the creator of this very universe we're reading about, equally brilliant and equally flawed—especially when it comes to sloppily-defined principles. (See: the "Blazing World" in Black Dossier, a haven for fictional characters within an entire universe populated exclusively by fictional characters!) Despite these jabs, however, the jeers at Harry Potter's expense seem a bit more good-natured than those directed at James Bond. Alan Moore's primary problem with both of them, it seems, is that they're too modern for his liking, and therefore part of a declining culture that's "fallen apart... by becoming irrelevant."

I love Alan Moore's writing. He's produced some of the greatest literary works of our modern declining culture, among them Watchmen, V For Vendetta and even the aforementioned Black Dossier, every bit as brilliant as it is flawed and the true masterpiece of the League series. But he's become a grumpy old man. (Okay; perhaps he was always a grumpy old man.) His recent outrage at the idea of DC producing new comics without Moore's involvement about the characters he created in Watchmen seemed more than a little hypocritical coming from a man who's made a career out of appropriating other authors' characters (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls) and putting them in predicaments that almost certainly would have appalled those authors! And if he truly believes that Harry Potter represents the nadir of Western Civilization, then I suspect he's either suffering from a bout of jealousy or else he really does believe that culture of the past will always remain infinitely superior to culture of the present day. And if that's the case, then I'm not sure it's culture that's fallen apart by becoming irrelevant... or the author himself. I think there's a tendency among cultural historians and particularly pop culture historians (especially those who write blogs about it, speaking of pots and kettles) to elevate the past at the expense of the present. I'm as guilty of it as anyone; I admit that I, too, would generally prefer a spy film or TV show from the Sixties to one from this decade. However... that doesn't mean that I completely close my mind to the idea that a great one could come along again at any moment. (See: Homeland. Or Casino Royale.) I don't think anyone should ever do that. Because when you close your mind that much, that's when culture truly falls apart. Not when a woman with a ridiculously fertile imagination creates a magical world that resonates so much with an entire generation of children that her books succeed in luring them away from their consoles and back into bookstores for the first time in ages.

But I digress. Am I reading too much into this comic book? Perhaps; perhaps not. Moore's writing encourages such obsessive analysis. But at the end of the day, whatever the author's agenda, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 still rates among the most entertaining comics I've read this year. And despite his thinly coded complaints about the state of popular culture, I believe that entertainment is still Moore's primary goal with this series. Here, he succeeds admirably, and I would recommend this book (indeed, the whole Century trilogy) to any spy fans (especially Avengers fans) or fans of classic literature and popular culture in general.

Boom! Reveals Avengers Comic Covers

Boom! Studios has revealed some of the covers available for the first (#0) issue of their new, ongoing Avengers comic book, Steed and Mrs. Peel. (The actual title The Avengers is conspicuously already taken on comic shop shelves.) As previously reported, the series will be written by Mark Waid. Waid is most famous probably for the DC epic Kingdom Come (which featured a one-panel cameo from Steed and Emma), but perhaps more germain to Steed and Mrs. Peel is his outstanding work on the Crossgen series Ruse, which was essentially Sherlock Holmes crossed with The Avengers--and a whole lot of fun.

Previews has posted the main cover for Waid's upcoming series, which will be drawn by Athena Voltaire artist Steve Bryant. As previously discussed, issue 0 will be a direct sequel to the infamous Avengers TV episode "A Touch of Brimstone," in which Steed took on the villainous Hellfire Club and Emma donned a dominatrix costume to become the Queen of Sin. Years later, Chris Claremont and John Byrne paid homage to that episode in Marvel's X-Men comics, appropriating the Hellfire Club as their own villains, and even borrowing actor Peter Wyngarde's likeness (albeit closer to his Jason King character than his "Touch of Brimstone" character) and name as Hellfire Club member "Jason Wyngarde." Emma Peel herself, in her Queen of Sin incarnation, spawned the popular X-Men character Emma Frost, whose White Queen outfit was the inverted twin of Mrs. Peel's own costume.

Bleeding Cool has some of the variant covers by Josh Corvey, which take the homage full-curcle and specifically reference X-Men covers that originally referenced The Avengers' Hellfire Club.

The Real Avengers Return in All-New Comics!

Those other Avengers (and they're good ones, too... just not the real ones!) might be getting all the media attention right now, but Boom! Studios is taking advantage of that attention to reintroduce comics readers to the original Avengers, John Steed and Emma Peel, heroes of the fantastic, classic Sixties spy series during its most popular incarnation. When Boom! began reprinting Grant Morrison's Steed and Mrs. Peel comic from the early 90s, I hoped aloud that those reprints might lead into a series of new Avengers comic books. (Well, not New Avengers comics... not yet, anyway; for now all I'm hoping for is new comics about the old Avengers! Then maybe Purdy and Gambit down the road.) Well, it looks like that's happening! And with some major talent on board. Boom! released this teaser image this morning, and a product listing at Midtown Comics (via Bleeding Cool) fills in the details.

As in the 90s, the title is again Steed and Mrs. Peel so as to avoid confusion with Marvel's product. (Even though the TV Avengers came first.) That information alone tells us something: Steed's partner will apparently be Emma Peel rather than Cathy Gale, Tara King, Venus Smith or someone else. (Of course it doesn't rule out the possibility of other partners appearing as well, as they did in the Morrison run.) And (here's the big news!) the listing confirms that this Steed and Mrs. Peel is an ongoing series, not just a mini! As the teaser graphic reveals, the writer is comics superstar Mark Waid, who previously gave Steed and Emma a one-panel guest appearance in his Kingdom Come epic for DC. (Or perhaps artist Alex Ross was responsible for that unauthorized cameo.) The Avengers TV show inspired more than one title in the Marvel universe. As I've blogged about before, the X-Men's nemesis the Hellfire Club and its White Queen, Emma Frost (as well as founder Jason Wyngarde) all come from a particularly memorable Avengers episode called "The Queen of Sin." (See visual comparisons here.) Teased in the graphic and confirmed in the listing, the original version of the Hellfire Club will feature prominently in Waid's first issue, a #0 special. It's unclear from the copy if this is a direct adaptation of the TV episode or a sequel, but I would bet the latter. What the copy does make clear is that the new series takes place "in the continuity of the original TV series," so presumably that means a Sixties setting. Steve Bryant (Athena Voltaire) will handle art chorse, while Joseph Michael Linser provides a variant cover. Additionally, Boom! will collect the 90s Grant Morrison series in a trade paperback this December.

Wow! An ongoing Avengers comic! I can't wait. What a great day today is for spy fans.

Follow this link to read my opinions of some previous Avengers comics.

The Spies of Avengers Assemble Get Their Own Posters

Yeah, it's once again time to talk about the big Marvel superhero movie that's also chock-full of spies coming out next month. But so I don't have to keep doing my whole elaborate explanation of how it's not the Avengers that we all know and love, I'm going to use the UK title from now on when discussing Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble. Disney realized at the last minute (after already spending a fortune on a campaign based around the U.S. title) that most viewers in the UK still associate the title "The Avengers" with some old TV show from the Sixties. Who woulda thought? Stupid Disney. It still irks me that Marvel stole the title from the greatest spy series ever to begin with, but now that I can call it Avengers Assemble (which is honestly a better title anyway), I'm less irked and can focus more on being excited that there's actually a huge budget movie about Marvel's superspies, including agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury, Black Widow, Maria Hill and Hawkeye. Sure, there are also some better known superheroes in the mix (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk), but the thing I'm most excited about is the spies. And as seen in the Japanese trailer and the latest TV spot (below), director Joss Whedon has even included the improbable but awesome S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, right out of those classic Sixties Steranko comics! All those S.H.I.E.L.D. agents get their own posters, too--even fan favorite Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), a character created especially for the movies (though very similar to the comics' Jasper Sitwell) who's developed his own cult following. Here, courtesy of the IMP Awards (via Dark Horizons) are some movie posters featuring Coulson, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Black Widow (Scarlett Johanssen) and Maria Hill (Coby Smulders). Hey, I didn't say they were good posters... but they do show the spies.

The Avengers' Black Widow Gets Her Own Comic--Inspired by the REAL Avengers' Emma Peel!

Regular readers will know that I'm a big fan of the spies in the Marvel Comics Universe, including Nick Fury and the Black Widow. I'm slightly less of a fan of the spies in the Marvel movie universe, but I'm still excited to see Samuel L. Jackson's Fury and Scarlett Johannson's Widow (both veterans of Iron Man 2, as well as other Marvel movies in Jackson's case), along with their fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Coulson (an original movie character played by Clark Gregg; I still wish they'd just named him Jasper Sitwell, after the comics character) and Hawkeye (played by utility spy franchise fill-in Jeremy Renner, who made his debut as the character in a cameo in last year's Thor) in this summer's Joss Whedon-directed superhero tentpole The Avengers. (I'm not a fan, however, of Marvel's use of the title The Avengers, which to me belongs to John Steed and his various cohorts, who pre-date the Stan Lee comic by two years.) Now, according to Newsarama, the worlds of film and comic book will temporarily merge in a new comics miniseries with a title almost as awkward as my parenthetical-laden mega-sentence above: Marvel's The Avengers: Black Widow Strikes. The three-issue series by Fred Van Lente and various artists will reveal the movie Black Widow's espionage exploits that happened between Iron Man 2 and The Avengers. Coulson and the movie version of Nick Fury (who's based on the Ultimate Universe version of the character, who was actually modelled on Jackson long before he ever signed on to play the role) will also make appearances. But the reason I'm really excited about this series is because Van Lente name-checks the actress who played my very favorite catsuited female superspy, Emma Peel from the real Avengers of Sixties TV! "I am a huge espionage nut," the writer tells Newsarama. "My obsession with kick-ass spy females dates back to my sixth grade crush on Diana Rigg." An Emma Peel obsession is definitely the right background to writing a good Black Widow adventure.

Oddly, this comic will first be serialized in the Russian edition of Maxim, and will consequently be a bit more risque than film tie-in comics tend to be. The Marvel miniseries version then hits stores this May, the same month that The Avengers opens on screens across the country.

For fans interested in getting to know the real Black Widow of Marvel Comics, there are three great hardcover collections that make an excellent introduction: Sting of the Widow, Black Widow: Web of Intrigue (featuring a terrific Paul Gulacy-illustrated story that "guest stars" Michael Caine) and Black Widow: The Itsy-Bitsy Spider (which contains stories written by Queen & Country's Greg Rucka).

The TV Avengers in Comics

The news earlier this week that The Avengers (Steed and Mrs. Peel, not Thor and Iron Man) would be returning to comics in the form of new reprints from Boom! got me thinking about other Avengers comics past, and I decided it was time to look back at some reviews I wrote before starting this blog. In fact, it was partly writing reviews of Avengers comics for the excellent (if no longer updated) website devoted to that subject, The Avengers Illustrated, that inspired me to start this blog. (That, along with TV reviews I wrote on the old Avengers fan forum. Sadly when that forum died, I lost my reviews of The Persuaders!, which I'd very much like to have as part of this blog archive. Oh well. One day I'll tackle that great series anew.)

Here, beneath webmaster One-Ten's informative recap, you'll find my review (penned under my own name, Matthew Bradford), of the first Avengers comic in the magazine Diana (which wasn't named after Diana Rigg). These Diana strips were notable for fantastic artwork (mostly by Emilio Frejo), even if their kid-oriented plots tended to be lackluster.

Here, at the bottom again, is my review of the second Diana story.

And here you'll find my reviews of the comic stories drawn by the great John Bolton in the 1977 New Avengers Annual. I was a big fan of one of them, "Fangs For the Memories." Better still, you can actually read the whole story itself on the site! Be sure to poke around there for lots of great information on every comic book and comic strip incarnation of The Avengers.

I wonder if Boom!'s reprint rights extend to older material? It would be great to see these old Avengers comics collected someday...

Steed and Mrs. Peel Return to Comics!

Steed and Mrs. Peel Return to Comics!

According to the All Pulp blog (via the Avengers International Fan Forum), and confirmed today via a visual press release from Boom! Studios, John Steed and Emma Peel will return to comics in January... sort of. Boom! will release a Steed and Mrs. Peel title (the title The Avengers is already taken on comic shelves, unfortunately), but it won't contain new material. Instead, this is a reprint of the 1990s comic book by Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson originally published by Eclipse Comics. That series ran three 48-page prestige format issues; Boom! will redistribute it into six 24-page issues instead. While I'd greatly prefer new adventures of my favorite TV spies, this is still good news. As I recall, this was a pretty good series, and it deserves to be back in print and readily available. (Presumably Boom! plans a trade paperback collection following the individual issue reprints.) I'll be curious to see what they do for cover art. The artwork pictured in the press release is one of the original covers (I think from issue 1), but obviously with twice as many issues, Boom! will have to come up with at least three new images. Will they repurpose some of Gibson's interior artwork, commission new art from him, or hire new cover artists? Some good new Avengers art might make it worth re-buying this books even for fans who already own them. No doubt the impetus for this reprint is red-hot writer Grant Morrison (currently burning up the shelves with Action Comics in DC's New 52 initiative) rather than Steed and Mrs. Peel themselves, but I sincerely hope that if these books sell well, Boom! will take advantage of their license and offer readers some new adventures of spy fans' favorite Avengers. Fingers crossed on that!

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Avengers Bonus Disc!

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Avengers Bonus Disc!

When Optimum's The Complete Avengers: 50th Anniversary Edition Region 2 DVD collection came out in the UK last May, I lamented buying the company's individual series releases, because only the 39-disc complete set included an exclusive extra disc of bonus features. And among those features were my own personal Holy Grails of Avengers fandom, the weird 8mm short films Diana Rigg made following her color season, The Golden Schlussel and The Mini-Killers. For some reason (well, supposedly because she was paid as much as she eaned for all of On Her Majesty's Secret Service!), she agreed to star as a very Emma Peel-like character in what amounted to expensive German and Spanish-made fan films. (A friend alerted me that another such project, Das Diadem, was included as an Easter Egg with the Series 5 DVDs, though–frustratingly–I have yet to discover it.) Now, happily, it's been reported on The Avengers International Fan Forum that the bonus disc will be made available on its own next month! So fans who bought the individual seasons (myself included) won't miss out after all. (A&E did something similar years ago when they included an extra bonus disc in their Region 1 Complete Emma Peel Megaset.) Retail is £11.99, which seems a tad steep for a disc of ultimately rather skimpy bonus material (compared to that which is already available on the season sets, anyway)... but who am I kidding? I'd probably shell out as much for a bootleg of the Diana Rigg shorts on Ebay anyway! I'm just so glad they're making this disc available on its own that I won't complain at all. The Avengers: Special Features Disc, a Region 2 PAL release, is available to pre-order at Amazon.co.uk. Here's the whole list of the features found on the disc, which span all six seasons of the seminal spy series (including, happily, two more of those cool episode reconstructions of lost first season episodes!):

• The Golden Schlussel Rare short film starring Diana Rigg
• The Mini-Killers – 4 Part mini-series starring Diana Rigg
• Director Laurence Bourne interview
• "Wish You Were Here" – Top Ten Avengers locations featurette
• "Death At Bargain Prices" – Alternate end tag
• Episode reconstruction – "Hot Snow"
• Episode reconstruction – "Toy Trap"
• Newly discovered Series 5 archival trailer
• German cinema trailer

Avengers Soundtrack Coming This Summer!

On August 8, Silva Screen Records will release something spy TV fans have been clamoring for forever: a proper soundtrack for  The Avengers!  It won't be the more famous music of Johnny Dankworth (who composed the catchy theme for the Honor Blackman seasons) or Laurie Johnson (for the Emma Peel era), however, but the equally rousing and too often overlooked music of Howard Blake (Flash Gordon) from the show's sixth season, which paired Patrick Macnee's dapper secret agent John Steed with Tara King (Linda Thorson). Apparently, the tapes containing these master recordings (long thought lost) have recently surfaced, and will form the basis of Silva's 2-CD set The Avengers: Original Tara King Season Score. Here's the label's description:

Brought into the job late in the series in 1967 by Laurie Johnson, and on the recommendation of Bernard Herrmann, Howard Blake scored ten episodes in the sixth and final series starring Linda Thorson as Tara King alongside the stalwart Macnee. From big-band sound with modern jazz inflections and spooky trombone choir, flutes and vibraphones, to bass clarinets, solo piano, timpanis, amplified harpsichord, 'wah-wah' guitar and Fender-Rhodes electric piano, Blake created a rich and relevant score that remains a classic to this day.

Among those ten episodes are such Tara classics as "Game" (one of my favorites), "Super Secret Cypher Snatch," "All Done With Mirrors" and "Noon Doomsday." Jaz Wiseman, who produced the fantastic special features on Optimum's recent Region 2 remastered Avengers DVDs, is designing a 16-page booklet "with full colour stills and extensive notes on music and episodes" to accompany the double album.  While the CD won't be widely available until August 8, it will be available at the end of this month exclusively through Silva's website.  Some of Laurie Johnson's music has made it to CD in inferior new arrangements or original recordings occasionally interrupted with voices listing queue numbers and whatnot (that's still the Johnson release to get), but this will be the first ever straight-forward score release for the series. Clearly, The Avengers: Original Tara King Series Score is the must-have spy soundtrack release of the summer! 

Thanks to the astute posters on The Avengers Fan Forum for breaking this exciting news.

New Spy DVDs Out This Week and Last: Elke, Avengers, Bad Hair and Deceptive Bionic Affairs

Wow, this is one of those weeks with just a ton of new spy DVDs! That's why it's taken me an extra day to compile this post. As always, please consider supporting this site by buying these titles from the Amazon links here if they catch your fancy.

Covert Affairs
On a huge day for spy releases, USA's summer hit Covert Affairs (which made my own list of the best new spy TV shows of 2010) is probably the biggest domestic release. Covert Affairs (review here) stars Piper Perabo as freshman CIA officer Annie Walker. While there are a few of the soap opera elements that have haunted the genre since Alias, Covert Affairs is mainly a spy show as workplace dramady. I've always been a fan of the "desk" side of the spy drama, and I think Covert Affairs handles the office politics better than any other US spy series I can think of. (Certainly better than the melodramatic histrionics of CTU!) Of course, this is still a USA show, which means it's got its share of in-the-field excitement as well. It's a solid, fairly believable, character-driven espionage series that should appeal to all fans of the genre. If you missed it on TV, give it a try on DVD. Extras include commentaries on three episodes featuring stars Piper Perabo and Christopher Gorham, executive producers Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and David Bartis and show creators Matt Corman and Chris Ord, deleted scenes, a gag reel, an exclusive tour of the Covert Affairs set, featurettes ("Welcome to The Farm," "Blind Insight") and a descriptive narration of the visual elements of the series for visually impaired viewers. Covert Affairs: Season One, a 3-disc set, retails for $59.98, but can currently be ordered from Amazon for nearly half that. 

Circles of Deceit

From Acorn comes another obscure British spy series—this one from the Nineties. Circles of Deceit stars ITV mainstay Dennis Waterman (The Sweeny, Minder) and consists of four TV movies made in 1995 and '96: Circle of Deceit, Dark Secret, Kalon and Sleeping Dogs. Waterman plays a former special-forces operative who remains on call for MI5. His assignments find him taking on Irish terrorists, tracking down professional assassins, and pitting his wits against ruthless drug dealers. But, true to the genre, some of his deadliest adversaries are his devious bosses who keep him on a need-to-know basis, forcing him to rely on his instincts and his training in a world of betrayal, danger, and deceit. Guest stars include Derek Jacobi, John Hannah, Peter Vaughan and Leo McKern (The Prisoner). Retail for the 2-disc set is $49.99, but naturally Amazon's got it for substantially less.

The Prize
Four years ago it was rumored to be part of a Warner Paul Newman Collection on DVD, but that never materialized.  Two years ago, Warner reps said it was still in the works.  But it still didn't appear. Now, The Prize is finally available... but on MOD instead of DVD, from The Warner Archive. It's still fully remastered though. Writer Ernest Lehman shamelessly rips off his own script for North By Northwest in this lightweight Stockholm-set thriller starring Paul Newman, Elke Sommer and Edward G. Robinson. Instead of a biplane, Paul Newman outruns a... truck. (Um, yeah. Not quite as exciting.) Instead of rudely interrupting an auction to evade the baddies by getting himself arrested, he rudely interrupts a nudist meeting for the same reason. It’s not a great movie like Hitchcock's, but it's a damn good imitation and it's seriously entertaining. And, best of all, it’s got Elke... and that’s all that really matters.  A day with another Elke Sommer spy movie on DVD is a good day.

The Bionic Woman: Season Two
Universal follows up last fall's release of Season 1 of the cult classic 70s show with The Bionic Woman: Season 2. Lindsay Wagner stars as Jamie Sommers, bionic agent of the super-secret OSI (Office of Scientific Investigations) who undertakes increasingly dangerous covert missions at the behest of her boss, Oscar Goldman. Unlike the truncated first season, the second season includes a full 24 episodes. Better still, it also includes two crossover episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man so you've got the complete package! Retail is $39.98; Amazon's got it now for $26.99.

The Complete Avengers
Last week saw the UK release of Optimum's The Complete Avengers: 50th Anniversary Edition. This is the big one. This set assembles all five sets (Seasons 2-6 as well as the few surviving first season episodes) of special features-laden, remastered Avengers DVDs that Optimum put out over the past two years. The picture on these discs looks better than you've ever seen it before, but the individual releases were plagued with technical issues. Fortunately, this complete set contains fixed versions of all the discs, minus all the flaws. So if you've been holding out, well, then you're in luck. Buy now. If you've been buying all the individual releases, well, the bad news isn't over yet. You see, the best feature of this massive, 39-disc set is an exclusive bonus DVD containing the Holy Grail(s) of Avengers curiosities (well, my own Holy Grails, at least, ever since I learned of their existence 13 years ago): the 8mm short films Diana Rigg made following her color series, Das Diadem (The Golden Schlusse) and Mini Killers. For reasons known only to her, Rigg agreed to star as a very Emma Peel-like character in these silent fan films made by wealthy German and Spanish amateur auteurs. By all accounts, they're weird and not worth thirteen years of pursuit. But I still need to see them, and they're still wonderful extra bonus features. And they're still available only with this set, along with a featurette on the show's locations, some archival trailers and a few more first season episode reconstructions. And besides that new stuff, of course you also get all the amazing value-added content from the individual releases.  The only thing you don't get is The New Avengers. I'm not sure why Optimum didn't just go all the way and include that too, but it's available on its own (and at quite a bargain price right now on Amazon.co.uk). The Complete Avengers: 50th Anniversary Edition, a must-own spy title if ever there was one, sells for a prohibitive £143.99 on Amazon.co.uk.

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of James Bond and Mrs. Peel
Finally, though it's not a spy series, another new DVD from last week worth noting is the BFS release of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders starring Doctor Who's Alex Kingston and, more relevantly, co-starring Daniel Craig and Diana Rigg. But the combination of James Bond and Emma Peel together isn't even why I'm mentioning this. I'm mentioning it because of Craig's hair, which definitely counts in the "misfortunes" category of the title.  In fact, all three of those words in that tagline on the cover refer to the hair: "Notorious. Scandalous. Unforgettable!" As a document of the current 007's worst hair ever, this DVD earns a mention here.

DVD Review: Agatha Christie's Marple: The Geraldine McEwan Collection
Featuring one of Timothy Dalton's best TV roles!

Miss Marple is in the news right now thanks to a new project at Disney that apparently recasts the famous spinster detective as, well, Jennifer Garner. I’m not sure if the message to take from that is that 38 is actually Hollywood’s current idea of “old,” or that Disney is shelling out a huge amount of money to the Christie estate in order to buy a brand that younger audiences have zero awareness of and then alter it in such a significant way so as to completely alienate the older audiences who do know the character. The former is depressing and the latter seems just ludicrous, yet it’s still the more logical conclusion. Personally, I’m kind of curious. I’ve been a big fan of Garner since Alias and of screenwriter Mark Frost since his fantastic novel The List of 7 back in the 90s, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and at least see where this goes, even if I’m scratching my head as to why they didn’t just set Garner up with a different female investigator more appropriate to her age and image. (Honey West, perhaps?) Anyway, in the face of a contemporary, thirty-something American version of the character, surely Christie purists must be reconsidering their outcry over the comparatively subtle changes enacted upon Miss Marple for the current ITV series!

ITV’s latest take on Agatha Christie’s evergreen sleuth might annoy such purists with the way it shakes things up a bit, but if you’ve always responded to Christie’s pulpier sensibilities, as I have, then you’ll probably enjoy it. Marple (as its simply called), starring Geraldine McEwan (in its 2004-2007 seasons anyway; she was later replaced by Julia McKenzie), takes Christie’s least pulpy detective, the aged Jane Marple, plays up the most lurid and sensational aspects of her cases and then (and here’s the genius bit) doesn’t have Miss Marple bat an eye at any of it. In any version, Miss Marple was always pretty unflappable when it came to the dead bodies that always seemed to pop up in her life (even when they were charred beyond recognition), so why should she raise an eyebrow at some of the more lurid liberties this series takes? The murderous pair of illicit lovers from one story, for example, are transformed from heterosexual adulterers into lusty lesbians. Would the Grand Dame of mystery fiction have written it that way? No (not at the time when she was writing, anyway), but that doesn’t mean that such a twist isn’t right at home within the plot of her novel!

Miss Marple herself remains the prim and proper picture of post-war British class and manners, yet she still gets her hands dirty by investigating murders–an act in itself a most inappropriate breach of accepted behavior. Likewise, Christie’s mid-century readership could satisfy their own literary bloodlust by tucking into the adventures of such a lady in pages written by a bona fide Dame! Yet all this lip service to decorum hid a thirst for the macabre and the sensational just as insatiable as that of American readers devouring the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which didn’t bother to disguise their lurid, pulpy roots. Indeed, Christie’s books barely disguised them themselves. The covers may not share the spattered blood, drawn guns and heaving breasts of American pulp magazines, but they did share the fonts–and at least the hint of blood. Each episode of this 21st Century Marple series also shares those fonts. The 1950s typefaces (ripped straight off a paperback!) that open each feature-length mystery set the tone for the adaptations to follow. They may change the details and they may sex things up, but they’re true to one aspect of Christie: they appeal to their audience’s basest instincts.

As in any British mystery series, espionage elements are bound to pop up in the odd episode of Marple. But more of what makes this series of interest to spy fans will be the guest stars. Practically every episode is packed full of familiar faces from the worlds of James Bond, The Avengers, Spooks, The Saint and other series well known to readers of this site. The debut episode in Acorn’s box set, “Murder At the Vicarage,” offers both spy stars and spy plot elements. (Though with Christie, it’s always possible such elements could prove red herrings.) Herbert Lom, for example (certainly no stranger to Sixties spy fans; he even issues a very Drefuss-like wheeze at one point that you expect to be accompanied by an eye tick and the exclamation, “Clouseau!”) plays a character named Augustin Dufosse who was a French resistance fighter during WWII, as was his grandson. (Unlike the eternal pre-war setting of Poirot, Marple is situated to great effect in post-war Britain.) Furthermore, another character turns out to have been an SOE operative engaged to that grandson. The Colonel who gets killed (and that’s no spoiler; Colonels are always getting killed in this sort of thing) commanded a desk in London during the war and saw to it that a supply drop meant for them went instead to his confederate so they could split the proceeds after the war. That background provides Lom and his confederate with suitable motives to murder him, but of course the intrepid Miss Marple (more frequently referred to in this series as "Jane") soon discovers that practically everyone had a motive for murder, so that’s really not much help. I’m just illustrating some of the spy connections. Other spy celebrities in the cast include Lucifer Box creator Mark Gatiss as a suspect assistant vicar, Saint veteran Jane Asher, Hannay star Robert Powell as a doctor, Spooks’ Tim McInnerny as the head vicar and Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachael Stirling, as his wife.

I like the way director Charles Palmer (Doctor Who) handles the reveal as Miss Marple pieces together what actually happened at the episode’s conclusion: a montage of pans against a great, swelling bit of score as all the right images whirl around in her head. This sequence sets the tone for the very stylish series to follow. Every aspect of the production, from the direction to the opulent set design to the sweeping score to the lush cinematography is flashy, which might at first seem inappropriate for Miss Marple, but which really livens things up for modern audiences while at the same time serving to accentuate her overriding ordinariness amidst all this flash. And, similar to George Smiley, it is this apparent ordinariness, this unassuming quality, that enables Jane Marple to quietly unravel the most tangled murder mysteries to everyone else’s amazement.

“The Body in the Library” introduces former Avenger Joanna Lumley as Dolly Bantry, Miss Marple’s Watsonish sidekick. She returns to the series much later (after Julia McKenzie has inherited the role from McEwan), but her repartee with Jane is so good that I found myself wishing she were in all of them. As long as you’re shaking things up from the books this much, why not introduce a permanent television sidekick, like Captain Hastings in the early seasons of Poirot?

Here, Lumley is decidedly more Edina than Purdey, but she’s fantastic, and her New Avengers fans will enjoy her nonetheless. James Fox and Ian Richardson lend further gravitas to the formidable guest cast, and the tight Christie mystery plot (complete with her signature misdirection) remains intact even if the culprit or culprits themselves are slightly altered. McEwan’s Miss Marple is shown to be more knowingly worldly than the usual portrayal (wherein she at least pretends to be less so, for the sake of propriety), and things that might have shocked more classic incarnations of this sleuth roll right off of the Teflon-coated McEwan. (Um, but she’s still not a thirty-something American!)

There really isn’t a bad episode in the lot here, but far and away the highlight for spy fans has to be “The Sittaford Mystery.” (Despite the fact that Christie’s novel of that name didn’t even feature Miss Marple as a character, she’s been worked into the plot reasonably enough for the sake of television.) Personally, I was sold from the very beginning when we’re treated to a title reading “Egypt, 1927” over an image of Timothy Dalton in khakis and a pith helmet. And a mustache! In an Egyptian tomb! Even if you’re not a fan of Agatha Christie (in fact, possibly moreso if you’re not), if that’s the sort of thing that excites you, you need to track down this episode!

After some thoroughly satisfying archeological shenanigans, we cut to twenty-five years later, when Dalton’s character, Clive Trevelyan, is a successful politician meeting in consultation with none other than Winston Churchill (not a character in Christie’s novel, but played here by Robert Hardy… of course). We learn that Trevelyan is very likely his successor as Prime Minister… so long as nobody murders him, of course. Lots of newspaper headlines and newsreel footage stylishly fill us in on the character’s career in the interceding years as an Olympic skiier, adventurer, war hero and now politician.

As you might surmise from its sensational tomb-raiding beginning, “The Sittaford Mystery” plays up the pulpiness of the story more than any other. The direction goes overboard (in the best possible way) right from the start with canted angles galore. I honestly don’t think there’s a single level camera shot in the entire episode. It might get a little annoying, but at the same time it serves to appropriately sensationalize the proceedings and up the pulp ante that comes automatically with a story that begins with a mustachioed Timothy Dalton in an ancient tomb! The same gleefully over-the-top approach goes for the art direction and costumes and cinematography. We’re treated to great pulpy colors and purposefully studio-bound sets, like a taxi that Dalton and McEwan share in a snowstorm which doesn’t actually move. Only the camera does (canted, of course), in a motion to suggest movement of the stationary, studio-bound cab as artificial snow whirls all around.

Even though it’s stylized in a BBC-style, digital sort of stylized, “The Sittaford Mystery” still resembles nothing so much as a Hammer Gothic. And if Hammer and Miss Marple previously didn’t go together and still don’t sit well with some fans, well I’m sorry; I never knew it, but apparently that’s exactly what I wanted to see! (Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll say the same thing about Jennifer Garner playing Miss Marple.) Director Paul Unwin plays up the Gothic side of the story further by having Dalton brood alone in his study in his castle (Oh yes! Dalton lives in a castle. A snowbound castle, no less! How cool!), haunted very literally by the ghosts of his past, presented in the flesh (so to speak) in stark white video effects. The implication is certainly there, even, that these ghosts are literal, but Christie purists can easily choose to view them as figments of Trevelyan’s imagination, too. Besides living in a castle and talking to ghosts, Dalton goes for walks “out on the moor” to think (even Christie’s novel, which also features an escaped convict, owed a debt to The Hound of the Baskervilles—a connection the filmmakers waste no opportunity to drive home) and keeps a falcon.

If you’re thinking al this (plus a golden scorpion purloined from that Egyptian tomb said to carry a curse) surely foretells a bad death in a mystery of this ilk, then you’re right… but the good news for Dalton fans is that it doesn’t come until more than halfway through the story, and even then Trevelyan is still very much a presence via flashbacks. Despite a reliable ensemble (including a pre-Education Carey Mulligan), this is truly Dalton’s show here, and he makes the most of it!

If “The Sittaford Mystery” has a downside, it’s just that Miss Marple herself doesn’t really have that much to do in it—certainly not until the second half, at least. Instead, beautiful potential couple Charles Burnaby (Chaos' James Murray) and Emily Trefusis (Sherlock’s Zoe Telford, who is excellent) lead the on-site investigation, belying this story’s origin as a non-Marple novel. (The couple are the only detectives in the book.) But what it lacks in Marple herself, it makes up for in trains, castles, snowstorms, Lagondas, deaths foretold on Ouija Boards, Evil Dead-style zoom-ins on creepy cuckoo clocks at canted angles and Winston Churchill to boot! It’s all more Hammer than Christie (driven home by the controversial final shot), which might drive the great Dame’s fans a bit nuts, but is frankly fine with me. (And maybe after contemplating Jennifer Garner as their heroine, it will seem fine to them in retrospect, too.) I’ve seen and read enough Christie in my time to appreciate a slightly atypical take on the material, and for Timothy Dalton fans like myself, “The Sittaford Mystery” really can’t be beat.

While nobody can beat T-Dalt, there are still more spy stars to turn up in Marple. Other episodes include Live and Let Die’s Jane Seymour (in a meaty role), Keeley Hawes, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Richard Armitage. All in all, there’s a lot to like in Marple: The Complete Geraldine McEwan Collection, and it certainly proves that you don’t have to be entirely faithful to the text to make good entertainment. With that in mind, I think I’ll remain cautiously optimistic about the next incarnation of the character to feature a TV spy—Ms. Garner.