Peter O'Donnell grounded most adventures of Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin in the espionage and crime genres. But this fanciful tale sees them (and their spy colleague Maude Tiller) shrunken to the size of mice by evil scientists, running around a kitchen. Here they're rigging a trap out of household items. The story title spoofs the shrinking-themed satire "Gulliver's Travels" (1726) by Jonathan Swift.

Enric Badia Romero drew the strip from 1970-1978 and again from 1986 to its finale in 2001. Neville Colvin also had a lengthy tenure, from 1980-1986, with a finer (and to my eye, less glamorous) line. Willie still looks kinda like Steve McQueen, though.

This strip number ends in "A" and has "for syndication only" written across the bottom. London's Evening Standard newspaper originally published Modesty Blaise six days a week, skipping Sundays, and then offered the strip for syndication in other newspapers as well. But the Standard's Saturday edition ended in 1973. To keep syndication going six days a week, the creators numbered Monday-Friday strips consecutively, and the optional Saturday strip had the same number as Friday, but with an "A" appended.

Typically the "A" strips contained superfluous material so that Evening Standard readers didn't miss an important plot point. However, this particular strip was originally planned as #5212, as penciled in the top left corner. Something happened to push it forward three days from Wednesday publication to Saturday (thus #5214A), so I hope Evening Standard readers were not confused by its omission.

The page is 20.5" x7.125" while the art is 18.75"x5.5". Modesty's text in panel two took one more row than anticipated, necessitating the word "arriving" to be pasted on top of art instead of the pre-planned white space. Some minor script revision resulted in the words "out for me" in the final panel also being pasted as a correction. I do not know why a ripped piece of green paper is affixed to the upper right corner, but it will not come loose. Other Neville strips have the same green paper.

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