James Bond

Luxury car brand Aston Martin has enjoyed a nice relationship with the James Bond franchise, with the car company hand-building 10 of their DB10 models for 007 to use in Spectre. And while you won’t be able to get your hands on the DB10, Aston Martin is releasing a limited edition DB9 series — and you can own one if you have $250,000 just laying around. Oh, you don’t? I thought everyone did.

After the success of Skyfall, all Spectre needed to do was announce a release date and audiences would flock to the 24th James Bond adventure without any help. Its posters don’t even have to be particularly clever – all they need is Daniel Craig’s handsome mug, a gun, and maybe a sharp-looking suit. The latest poster has all of that and some guy in a creepy skull mask, so let’s call this one a little better than average.

Daniel Craig was cast as James Bond back in October 2005 and almost immediately there was controversy. A London newspaper ran the headline the next morning “The Name’s Bland – James Bland” and fans started up the site danielcraigisnotbond.com urging moviegoers to boycott Casino Royale. Now, three films into Craig’s era as 007 (with the last being the most critically and commercially successful James Bond film of all-time), the actor is talking about leaving the franchise and, in a sign of how far public opinion has reversed, fans couldn’t be more upset.

James Bond has always been more of a figure than a character, sliding through the decades as constantly fluctuating collection of what society enjoys at any particular time. 007’s evolution into something more complex and human in the Daniel Craig era is also a reflection of the times. This is what we want out of an action hero in 2015. Now, Spectre looks to take this route to its natural conclusion. According to director Sam Mendes, his film will answer one of the great unanswered questions in cinema: Where did James Bond come from?

In addition to resurrecting 007’s oldest nemesis, 'Spectre' looks to bring back the “Bond woman” in a big way.

Technically, we don’t know who Christoph Waltz is playing in Spectre. But he sure looks like he’s a rebooted version of James Bond’s old arch-nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld; legendary terrorist and leader of the evil organization SPECTRE. And even if it turns out that Waltz isn’t technically playing Blofeld, as the head of the reborn SPECTRE, he’s basically playing a new version of the same guy. Which got us thinking: What other classic Bond characters would we like to see added to current 007 continuity? Who should Daniel Craig square off with or romance with a pithy one-liner? In no particular order, here are our five top picks (along with five videos of the original versions of the characters in action):

Daniel Craig’s James Bond doesn’t know what the word “spectre” means. But James Bond fans do.

Given the evolution of the women in James Bond films (and the evolution of actual thinking in real life), maybe it’s time we started referring to them as Bond Women instead of Bond Girls — Bond Girls just sounds like they’re posing for a beer calendar. At any rate, new photos and information from Spectre have arrived to give us a proper introduction to the ladies of Bond’s latest outing.

On this day in 1958, the world’s most famous MI6 Agent took to the world of comics for the first time, as Ian Fleming’s James Bond brought his hard-drinking, womanizing, spy-killing adventures to the pages of UK newspaper The Daily Express just five years after the launch of the novels with Casino Royale.

Ahead of San Diego Comic-Con 2015, Dynamite has announced that writer Warren Ellis and artist Jason Masters will be the creative team on a new James Bond ongoing series this November. Having acquired the James Bond licence last year --- it was one of Dynamite's SDCC announcements for 2014 --- the publisher will launch the series, titled James Bond 007, starting this November.