"is the kind of villain to make a Bondophile salivate." In general Stanley praised Amis for emulating "the celebrated Fleming Effect". Stanley was less convinced by Bond, observing that his "essential swinishness is being replaced by some kind of dilute humanism". The reviewer for The New York Times noted the reduced numbers of gadgets employed in the book, when compared with the films, that they felt had "overshadowed the personality of the secret agent"; overall the reviewer felt that "Mr. Amis has now given Bond back to the readers." Oberbeck commented that Bond "has become a sensitive man-of-ethics who suffers pangs of doubt and remorse over the 'senseless' violence of his profession". Oberbeck went on to say that Amis "never quite captures the bizarre beat of a Fleming pace"; most telling, according to Oberbeck, was that "the greatest flaw in Amis' conception of Bond is that he has attempted to transform the consummate spy-hero into something he was never meant to have been: a man with a job". Sally Beauman, writing for New York, believed that "Amis has all the obvious ingredients for success", including "an exotic troubled international setting, a beautiful girl, frequent imbibings, and even more frequent killings; and, most imperative, a villain. Yet the book drags and becomes a bore." Beauman complains that the story lacks suspense and that Bond is far too gloomy: he's more like Ingmar Bergman's creations than Ian Fleming's hero. Beauman attributes the novel's failure to the "differing characters of the authors." A fiftieth anniversary review in The Guardian called Col. Sun "the most repellant racial caricature of all, a descendant of Fu Manchu and other fiendish orientals, noting that "Amis channels Fleming . . . as a connoisseur of ethnicities." The review notes that "Amis, by March 1968, had already made public his Damascene conversion from left to right, and signed a group letter to the Times titled Backing for US Policies in Vietnam." Adaptations Serialisation (1968) Colonel Sun was serialised on a daily basis in the Daily Express newspaper from 18 March 1968 to 30 March 1968. Comic strip (1969–1970) Colonel Sun is the only non-Fleming Bond novel adapted as a comic strip by the Daily Express newspaper. It was adapted by Jim Lawrence and drawn by Yaroslav Horak and published in the Daily Express from 1 December 1969 to 20 August 1970 and was subsequently syndicated worldwide. In December 2005,