The Comic-Strip Heroine I'll Never Forget
The excitement in the Long Island theater where I first saw Pulp Fiction was unlike anything I’d previously experienced at the movies: Everything people were saying about Quentin Tarantino, the boy-genius director, was true. But the picture stirred me most profoundly—alerting me that there was an intelligence behind it that was in some small way in sync with my own—when I caught sight of the book John Travolta reads on the crapper, first at Butch’s apartment and then in the diner bathroom: Modesty Blaise.
Modesty Blaise was my secret self the year I was 15, the subject of ardent daydreams and the first female character I encountered who was truly in charge of something other than a hospital ward, or a school, or a household. She ran an organization full of dangerous men,
