For more than 60 years, James Bond has thrilled movie audiences with his globetrotting exploits – battling a collection of iconic villains, romancing a plethora of beautiful women, and tinkering with various gadgets.
What Bond observers sometimes forget, however, is that the super spy’s adventures actually began on the page in a series of novels by writer Ian Fleming, who based Bond on a variety of figures he met during World War II. Those same observers also might not realize that Bond has highlighted more than his fair share of comics, and they range from movie retreads to wholly original stories.
Here is a very brief history of 007 in the pages of comic books.
First up are the movie adaptations, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._No_(comics)" rel="nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>DC Comics publishing an adaptation of Dr. No in 1962 and Marvel Comics following with adaptations of For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy. It wasn’t until 1989 that fans got an original Bond adventure with Permission to Die, an Acme Press series that was written and illustrated by Mike Grell. Grell brought the same sense of gritty action and character dynamics that drove his iconic run on Green Arrow to Bond, resulting in a story that proved the super spy could outlive his movie counterparts.
The next publisher to create original Bond comics would be Dark Horse, who acquired the rights from Acme in 1992. Even then, Dark Horse faced issues; the miniseries A Silent Armageddon only saw two of four planned issues released, while the story Minute of Midnight set the stage for a planned James Bond ongoing series that never came to pass. Given that Dark Horse at the time was known for its licensed comics, including Terminator and Star Wars, having a Bond ongoing would have been a great way to expand on the character in between movies.
The longest and most successful run of James Bond comics would come when Dynamite Entertainment acquired the rights to the character. Dynamite was willing to take Bond in a variety of different directions: a modern day series saw writers like Warren Ellis (Planetary) and Benjamin Percy (Wolverine) tackling the super spy, while miniseries were dedicated to Bond’s boss M, his CIA ally Felix Leiter, and M’s secretary Moneypenny. The standout is James Bond Origin by Jeff Parker (Agents of Atlas) and Bob Quinn (Kill Your Darlings). Per its title, Origin follows a young Bond as he fights his way through World War II and eventually joins MI6; astute readers will notice that this mirrors the experiences that led Ian Fleming to create Bond.
2026 marks another major shift for James Bond in comics, as IDW Publishing recently announced that it had acquired the Bond license during New York Comic Con. That’s an exciting development as IDW’s published incredible licensed comics including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic the Hedgehog, but the publisher is going all out by getting Grant Morrison to write the opening arc. Considering Morrison’s penchant for writing genre-bending comics that define the medium, like All-Star Superman and New X-Men, they’ll definitely deliver a Bond adventure to remember.
Ian Fleming once famously said, “There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.” After years of the license shifting hands and creative directions, Grant Morrison and IDW might be the ones to finally get more people to keep turning the pages on James Bond comics.
