Blaise And Bond

Is Modesty Blaise a female James Bond? No, she is an independent character - although they would make an interesting team. Modesty ran an international criminal organization called "The Network," retired young and rich and then agreed to help the Secret Service mainly because she preferred an active retirement.

I have only just started to read Modesty Blaise but my previous discussions of Bond are here, here, here and here.

Blofeld's Successors

There are at least two worthy successors of Ian Fleming's Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the founder and director of SPECTRE:

Max in Andy Diggle's The Losers;
Zala in Stieg Larsson's Millennium novels.

Dig these guys. Code Name Max, "Blofeld meets Rumsfeld," exists for impossibly many decades and apparently in different places simultaneously. Zala is a GRU agent, then a defector, then a crime boss and also an abusive father.

Both Fleming and Larsson have been graphically adapted so this is all comics-related. I discuss the Larsson graphic adaptation here and here and Fleming here, here, here and here.