LIVE AND LET SPY

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)
dir: Guy Hamilton

LIVE AND LET SPY
Crazy #2, February 1974
w: Stu Schwatzberg & Roy Thomas
a: John Buscema & The Crusty Bunkers

The cover has then current Bond Roger Moore with original Bond Sean Connery.

The Crusty Bunkers were a group of inkers led by Neal Adams. There are 60 people that this could have been so let's just say it was Neal Adams.

007 James Bond (Roger Moore)'s newest assignment requires him to go to New Orleans to investigate the deaths of agents who were there looking into Dr. Kananga, dictator of the carribean island of San Monique. As he's told of his newest assignment by M (Bernard Lee), he has to hide the woman he was with in his apartment. Here it's several women.

Christine Keeler was a woman who brought down many government officials in Britain by having affairs with them. That was once all it took.

Bond first needs to go to the United Nations in New York City and his cab driver (drawn as ex-NYC mayor John Lindsay here) is killed on the way there. This leads him to a voodoo store in Harlem...

---which leads him to the Fillet of Soul restaurant. It is owned by Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto) In the back of the restaurant Bond meets Mr.Big and his henchmen, one of whom, Tee Hee (Julius Harris) has a prosthetic metal-cutting arm. Roger Moore had earlier played The Saint, character of another pulp spy franchise.

He also meets tarot reader Solitaire (Jane Seymour. She was 22 when this came out even though she's drawn as middle aged here).

Reference is made here to Shaft in Africa, part of the blacksploitation wave Live and Let Die was cashing in on.

Every James Bond movie introduces a gimmick at the beginning. This time it was a magnetic wristwatch.

Bond has taken Solitaire's cherry, thus taking away her psychic powers, so the staff of Fillet of Soul has no use for her, and she is on his side now. Mr. Big demands to know if they've slept together and Bond refuses to reveal it. Mr. Big reveals that underneath a rubber mask he is actually Dr. Kananga and orders bond to be taken to the swamps in New Orleans and fed to crocodiles and he narrowly escapes.

Another item in the Bond formula is the villain revealing his plan to James Bond before killing him. Mr. Big/Dr. Kananga reveals he is a heroin dealer, growing poppies on land that is ignored because the locals there believe it is haunted. Big and his men later kidnap Solitaire and sacrifice her in a voodoo ritual at San Monique.

This parody conflates several different scenes. It looks like a minstrel show here but it's actually the funeral procession in New Orleans. They don't bother using voodoo priest Samedi (Geoffrey Holder), who they kill by trapping in a coffin full of snakes. When they get Mr. Big for attempting to assassinate them, it's after the two of them are taken to his lair and lured over a shark pool. Bond uses his magnetic watch to retrieve a gas pellet, which Mr. Big ends up swallowing.(see below)

In the epilogue, Bond and Solitaire appear to be safe, but Tee Hee shows up on the train trying to kill Bond, but he kills Tee Hee by detaching him from his prosthetic arm.

Note Sean Connery is one of the other Bond villains in the last panel. Robert Shaw fought Bond in the climactic train scene in From Russia, With Love.


LAFF AND LET DIE
Cracked #116, May 1974
a: O. O. Severin (John Severin)

Bobby Riggs was a tennis player who believed he could “beat any woman” and was beaten by Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes tennis tournament.

Cotton Comes to Harlem was a seventies film.

There's a long speedboat chase scene, much of the time the boats are airborne on land, which goes through a wedding, but that isn't used in the Crazy parody.

LIVE AND LET SUFFER
MAD #165, March 1974
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

From 8 “James Bomb” Bomb Movies

Mrs. Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), who also came to James Bond's flat to let him know of his assignment, wasn't in the other parodies.

Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me, both of which had Roger Moore, were also made between The Man with the Golden Gun and For Your Eyes Only. The punchline is that Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz would be the next Bond, I guess because he was popular? He hadn't done any acting roles or was ever considered for one before or since.