One of the cool things about the internet is how it’s become much easier to find obscure comics from all over the world, such as bandes dessinées, science-fiction serials, and stories buried in old magazine anthologies. For every comic that actually gets translated for release outside its original country, such as Valerian or Yoko Tsuno, there are dozens more that don’t. Many of these are long out of print and kept alive online by small communities of fan translators and preservationists.
Finding a good one can feel like striking gold. This goes double for newspaper comics, which are often viewed as disposable in ways that graphic novels aren't. Surprisingly few of them ever pick up an international audience.
Exceptions include Andy Capp and Fred Basset, British strips that have substantially outlived their original creators. They do not include the British Dennis the Menace, which debuted in Beano in 1951, five days after Hank Ketcham started a strip by the same name in America. The British adventure comic Modesty Blaise, created by the late Peter O'Donnell, was virtually unknown in the United States during its original newspaper run, from May 1963 to Feb. 2001.
While it has a dedicated audience to this day in much of the rest of the world, over 25 years after it ceased publication, Modesty Blaise was only intermittently carried in American newspapers. This is usually blamed on its frequent nude scenes, which made it too spicy for American audiences. (Modesty is her name, not her practice.) The one exception for years was the Detroit Free Press, and even it censored a couple of strips. The few fans that Modesty Blaise had in the U.S. more often came from a line of novels written by O'Donnell, or one of the two film adaptations. 1966's Modesty Blaise, a campy box-office bomb starring Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp, still has a cult following, which led to Quentin Tarantino executive-producing the in-name-only My Name is Modesty in 2004.
If you're too young or too American to have read the original Modesty Blaise strips, they're classics of the format. While not every storyline has aged well, Modesty Blaise is one of the great adventure comics of the 20th century. I read Modesty Blaise for the first time thanks to the aforementioned online preservationists, but the entire original run of the strip is currently collected in 27 paperback volumes from Titan Books released between 2004 and 2017.
While you may have to do some digging to find them all, every volume of Titan’s Modesty Blaise collections, which include commentary from O’Donnell and multiple looks behind the scenes of the strip, is still in print at time of writing. If you like spy movies, crime dramas, or crime shows like Leverage, you ought to check out Modesty Blaise. Modesty Blaise was "born walking" as an orphaned refugee in the Middle East after World War II, with no knowledge of her birth parents or nationality.
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