Peter O’Donnell, 1920 – 2010

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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3 Responses

  1. John Ostrander says:

    Reading O'Donnel's Modesty Blaise, aside from the pleasure of it, is like getting a free lesson in the art of writing for the graphics medium. Not a panel is wasted. Every single one moves the plot and/or the characters forward. There IS a formula and the main characters are very clearly conceived and have parameters but what O'Donnel could and did do within those parameters was always fresh and compelling. I was talking to Denny O'Neill once about O'Donnel and he confessed that reading Modesty Blaise made him want to throw his typewriter out the window. (For you youngun's, typewriters are what we used before we had computers.) I asked Denny how O'donnell could do that time after time and he said, "It's easy. He's better than we are." 'Nuff said.

  2. David S. says:

    I have to confess that I haven't read all of Mr. O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise strips, but I have read nearly all of his Modesty Blaise novels and both short story collections including "Cobra Trap," the title story being The Last Modesty & Willie Story. In an interview he conducted 8 years ago, he said that he thought about publishing it posthumously and then thought "Don't be so bloody pompous! Do it now!" I'm glad he did so that the fans don't have to read somebody's attempt to reconstruct an outline that he left behind a la Tolkien & Herbert! All three will be missed but at least they're immortalized in print.

  3. Lars Johansson ( Pre says:

    Mr O'Donnell created my favourite female character of all time, and one of my overall most favourite fictional characters overall. I'll never forget his work, it was always quality, even when there was lower points.Whenever you read those first Modesty stories, it's almost like she comes alive, right off the pages. The characters feel like they are real people.