Long-lost letters between James Bond creator Ian Fleming and the cartoonist who first drew 007 for newspapers have surfaced after nearly 70 years, shedding new light on how the world's most famous spy got his look.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed the correspondence in its 5 August 2026 magazine issue. The letters, exchanged in the late 1950s, show Fleming and artist John McLusky working together on a James Bond comic strip for the Daily Express, the British newspaper that carried Bond's adventures to readers alongside the novels.

Only a few pages of the exchange have survived. They were recently excavated by McLusky's son, Sean McLusky, who has been selling his father's original Bond artwork through London's A Gallery, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

One detail from the letters is already circulating among fans. Fleming, writing in 1958 about how Bond should look on the page, urged McLusky to avoid giving the character "an American-shaped head and a duck's haircut." The instruction is vintage Fleming — blunt, vivid, and specific. Fleming also commissioned another artist to draw a 007 portrait based on his written notes, intending the picture as a visual reference to inspire McLusky's work.

The find matters because James Bond had no fixed face in Fleming's original novels. The books described him — dark hair, a cruel mouth, a scar on his cheek — but the early editions carried no cover art depicting him, leaving readers to imagine their own Bond.

McLusky's comic-strip Bond, which debuted in the Daily Express in 1958, became one of the earliest visual identities for the character — predating Sean Connery's first screen appearance in Dr. No by four years. For many readers, McLusky's clean-jawed secret agent was their first image of 007.

The surviving correspondence adds a piece to that history. Fleming's hands-on involvement with the strip's art direction — commissioning reference portraits, micromanaging the shape of Bond's head — shows how carefully he steered the character's transition from page to panel, even as the novels themselves left Bond's face deliberately undefined.

For context, Bond's comic-book life has continued well beyond the McLusky era. Dynamite Entertainment launched a James Bond Origin series in 2018, and a new James Bond 007 comic illustrated by Jason Masters was announced at Comic-Con in 2015. The Ian Fleming estate has also set guidelines for authors writing new Bond novels: introduce new Double O agents and set stories in the twenty-first century, as reported by CrimeReads in May 2026.

The letters themselves are the headline, though. A creator's notes on how his character should look, found in a drawer after seven decades, give Bond's origin story one more chapter.