The Comic-Strip Heroine I'll Never Forget (Atlantic)

Saw the movie long ago, will have to find a copy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/modesty-blaise-caitlin-flanagan/550916/

Modesty is the invention of an English comic-strip writer named Peter O’Donnell. In the early 1960s, an editor asked him to create a new character, and he decided that “it was about time that somebody woke up and produced a female who would be able to do all the hero stuff as well as—or perhaps better than—most men.” Modesty is a secret agent who works on special assignments for British intelligence, so (to O’Donnell’s great frustration) she is most often compared to James Bond. They’re really nothing alike. Bond’s life begins and ends with each mission. Modesty, by contrast, exists in a fully realized world, with homes—in particular, her sumptuous penthouse overlooking Hyde Park—friends, lovers, and a range of interests. She enjoys attending country fairs, going to the theater, dressing up, riding horses, cutting gems, rescuing animals. She never enters a scene without an exact description of what she’s wearing, right down to her shoes. O’Donnell maintained that the key to her character is that while she is incredibly brave, capable, and—when the situation demands it—lethal, she is also exceedingly feminine. “She doesn’t just kick people in the head,” O’Donnell once said of Modesty. “She’s very tender and vulnerable.”