The strip—which Titan Books finished reissuing in book form late last year—debuted in 1963, and it was so successful that O’Donnell soon sold the movie rights. To coincide with the release of the film—a massive bomb, alas—O’Donnell was asked to write a novel about Modesty. It was through the subsequent series that I came to fall in love with her. Her origin story emanated from one of O’Donnell’s experiences in World War II. Working in a small radio detachment near the Caucasus, on the border of Iran and Iraq, he had come across a young girl, 11 or 12 years old, walking along the banks of a stream. She was completely alone, dressed in rags, and carrying a small homemade weapon: a piece of wood with a nail driven through it. O’Donnell gave her tins of food, a can opener, and a cup of tea. She smiled in gratitude and then resumed her solo, dangerous wanderings. He remembered the young girl when he created Modesty, because he realized that the kind of character he wanted to invent could not have sprung from any of the girl-shaping institutions of mid-century Britain. She couldn’t come “from a shop or an office or school or nunnery,” he said, and “be what I wanted this girl to be.”

He thought of the refugee child—a displaced person, a girl like many millions of girls around the world today—and wrote a story for her. Orphaned, nameless, and stateless, she wandered for years through the Middle East and North Africa, where she would “steal in the city’s bazaars or live with nomads.” She became the protector of a brilliant but defenseless old man, Lob, a European who knew five languages. He taught her, she defended him, and they loved each other. After his death, she wound up in Tangier, where, at 19 or 20, she took over a crime syndicate, renaming it the Network and becoming the unflinching boss of very hard men, who called her “Mam’selle.” She excelled in hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, criminal strategy, general fearlessness, and a certain kind of crime: jewel heists and bank robberies—never drugs or vice, never anything that could hurt women.

And so—our story begins—we find Modesty retired from her life of crime in her mid-20s, hugely wealthy, powerful, and sexually liberated. (She has an erotic inclination toward men she has rescued from danger.) She is saved from a life of comfortable boredom by the intercession of Sir Gerald Tarrant of British intelligence, who regularly enlists her help in foiling various types of espionage and plots against the empire. Sometimes these duties require her to fight crime while naked; other times she must temporarily succumb to the sexual sadism of some villain or another—something James Bond was never required to do in the name of Queen and country—but she always triumphs in the end. There isn’t a man in the whole world who can take her down.