Octopussy, the short story by Ian Fleming is a great little story about James Bond paying a visit to a man who murdered one of his friends 20 years earlier and "taking care" of him. It's short, sweet, not too confusing and filled with Flemings trademark, quality writing. As a comic strip, which would normally focus on action, it should have been a disaster. This adaptation by James Lawrence and Yaroslav Horak is AMAZING.
They succeed by using the short story and embellishing it in ways that take nothing away from the original. They add a backstory that fleshes out the characters in great ways.
In the original story the murdered man was one of Bond's mentors, the man that taught him to ski among other things. In the comic version we meet his family and see that there was so much more to the man, and his relationship to 007. Action sequences are added where needed and true to Fleming's style, there are sexy moments.
As if that weren't enough, this volume also contains the story, THE HILDEBRAND RARITY, originally from the FOR YOUR EYES ONLY collection. Again, Lawrence and Horak take one of Fleming's thinner stories and flesh it out to a proper length and character. Again they succeed admirably.
These strips were published in the London Daily Telegraph between November of 1966 and December of 1967, but they feel as fresh today as they did 35 years ago. The stories and the art is timeless- both a tribute to Ian Fleming's work and that of Lawrence and Horak.