JAMES BOND #1, the first episode of VARGR, is out this coming week. This is a commission via the Ian Fleming estate, and is very specifically the Bond of the books, not the films. If you're an aficionado of the books, consider this, even though it's set in contemporary times (because neither I nor the estate wanted to do period pastiche), to fall somewhere in the last half of the literary canon. This is why there are no significant changes to the Bond of the books in VARGR - the film Bond is necessarily more fluid. This is meant to be Fleming's Bond.
(As I said to, I think, GQ, the other day, I think Idris Elba is the only choice to succeed Daniel Craig in the films. Idris is a massive presence, a brilliant actor, and incredibly smart about story construction.)
This job turned out to be both incredibly hard -- I had to do a LOT of research, a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading to try and approximate Fleming's method, and ended up writing a huge long treatment to assemble the thing -- and incredibly easy, as the estate has been an absolute pleasure to work with. They even forgave me for not being able to resist a film-style cold open for the first issue. Come on. I might be writing the proper Bond, but some things are just too tempting, and I may never get another chance to do that.
Jason Masters is, of course, the other half of this book, and the other half of the Fleming method - he brings all the detail to the page, makes the world real and observed in the way Fleming did in prose. I feel a bit terrible for making him do things like Google Street View his way down the route I take into Friedrichshain from Mitte, but I can't deny the pleasure of getting him to draw the TT tower or a favourite bar.
It's a wintry book. I wanted to go to places I knew, more or less, as Fleming did. My Berlin is, perhaps, his Jamaica - a place I go to drink and think and write. And the first time I went to Berlin was in deep winter. I believe I finished my original outline in a coffee shop off Torstrasse. The front of that notebook was full of all the things I knew about Bond: his preferred breakfasts, the source of the shirts and suits he liked, the brand of cigarette he smokes when he can't get his bespoke cancer sticks.
Between this and Karnak, I'm really ready to write a nice guy again. Maybe Ben will get around to drawing that FELL script I wrote for him many years ago, so that I can write another one and have a decent human being in my head for a while. (Vivek Headland, the current lead of INJECTION, is a nice enough bloke, but eccentric and difficult, and he hurts my head sometimes.)
