THE MAN FROM B.U.N.G.L.E.

Larry is an agent with B.U.N.G.L.E.

That organization's full name breakout, or so we are told, is "Batty and Uneducated Nits and Goofs, Larry Especially". That last part seems a bit suspect since other people apparently work for the British intelligence department. We see these other fellows once in a blue moon but Larry, the Man from B.U.N.G.L.E. we get to see every adventure.

When we first meet him and for a good deal of time from then, when we see the unfortunate Larry, it is at the tail end of a mission where he will find himself in one dire situation after another, set to be blown up or eaten or melted or frozen or vaporized or some other unpleasant sounding happening. Almost as if we are in a spy-training class, we will be asked to come up with a way that Larry will be able to extricate himself from whatever predicament he is in. We are never actually shown in these 'help Larry' scenarios how the fellow actually survived but obviously he did because the next week he would be back again.

Later the stories would change to be more traditional missions complete with the pre-brief moving into the action and ending up with a solution that always comes as a surprise to everyone but Larry. It is in these that we learn that the Chief of the department is less than kind to and thinks not-so-nice things about the poor fellow. In one later episode, we find the Chief needing a trained agent for an assignment and he gets on a hotline to somewhere asking for an operative; he is dismayed to find that 001 - 006 are all recovering from horrible missions, 007 is being sent to Japan by M, and that forced him to asked 'that loony lay-about Larry'. There are other not-kind words used to describe him and in many instances of these adventures (okay, all of them) we will see reasons for the less-than-shining opinion about him. However it should be noted that he does triumph each week which has to say something good for him, even if those successes are by accident.

The Man from B.U.N.G.L.E. is most definitely NOT the image one would expect from a British secret agent. He is short. Really, really short. He is almost completely bald with just a few unruly strands of hair though these are usually kept well covered by his constant wearing of a bowler hat. He is very fond of a white trenchcoat over top of a suit and tie. He is myopic to a major degree with thick round eyeglasses. Capping off this less than perfect appearance is a large bulbous nose.

The fine inventive folks in the gadget department of B.U.N.G.L.E. are often coming up with nifty things to help him survive, such as a gyrocopter device which springs from his hat  and cool ray guns now and then, not to mention (because they are hush-hush) rockets in his shoes. Most of the time he forgets he has them or he has flat out forgotten to bring them but when they are there and remembered, they are pretty neat.

The adventures of Larry, the Man from B.U.N.G.L.E. are a delightful series of cliff-hangers. Many of them were really quite brilliant and I found myself trying to come up with a solution before reading theirs. When the style changed from these 'help Larry' situations to traditional storytelling, I was both pleased and saddened. I likes seeing how Larry got into these scrapes in the first place but I missed the 'what should he do' aspect.

The artwork for these spoofs of spy adventures such as the Man from U.N.C.L.E. is really quite good and chock full of eye-pleasing dangers. When the switch to normal tales came, the artwork dropped considerably.