ONE-EYED JACK

'One-Eyed' Jack McBane is an agent with the MIA.

That acronym stands for the Military Intelligence Agency, apparently a rather large and impressive member of the American Intelligence Community.

In the stat sheet above, it is also listed his affiliation with the New York Police Department. In fact, in the large number of adventures we have of McBane, he is a police detective far more than he is a federal government operative. Indeed, his movement from the streets of the Big Apple to a wider patch comes at the end of the impressive amount of recorded adventures we have of him.

We learn in a brief flashback during the telling of his first recorded assignment with the MIA that McBane had a lieutenant "commanding a crack platoon of U.S. Marines" during the Vietnam War, circa 1972. In a skirmish McBane had suffered a leg injury and should have been left for dead but his sergeant had carried him to safety. Now that NCO is a full bird colonel running a special task force in need of someone of McBane's skills.

"A commie-backed organization has formed an army of revolutionaries, underground fanatics determined to overthrow the American government by military means," he tells McBane. 

     That group is the Army of Revolutionaries, also known as the A.O.R., and it is determined to bring down the legitimate government through any means necessary. To finance its activities it is willing to break any law and commit any crime no matter how many innocents might suffer or die as a result.

     To take on the fight against such a radical, extremist organization willing to do anything and hurt anyone to achieve its goals, the M.I.A. leadership knew it needed someone every bit as ruthless as the opposition and it knew it found that in McBane.

     The reason it knew McBane was the man for the job was how he had operated for some time in his previous occupation, that of a New York City Police Department detective. McBane had been a very 'demonstrative' type of investigator for some time but he ratcheted his act up quite a bit towards the end of his time with that organization, starting with the incident that gave him his nickname.

     Trying to give a perp a bit of a break and getting shot in the face, losing an eye in the process, is definitely one reason to take a harder stance on crime.

     Though McBane's membership in this compendium derives from his membership with the M.I.A., the adventures we have of his time with the NYPD are just as important to follow to understand the character. All his recorded adventures as both an NYPD detective and an M.I.A. agent are listed below.

     This series started out as a British imaging of Dirty Harry transplanted to the Big Apple, with the main character, McBane, becoming even less concerned with the rights of the perps after one cost him his eye. I can 'see' how that would anger a guy.

     McBane's entry into this compendium comes much later, though, when he switches employers and goes to work for the spy organization MIA.

     That switch coincided with the transfer of writing duties from its creator to Gerry Finley-Day, a very accomplished spy comic writer who seven months before had come up with his own ultra-tough operative named Dredger.

     Interestingly, One-Eyed Jack the Cop came into existence three months before Dredger the Spy. All for the same publishing organization, naturally.

     I am impressed with how well these stories are presented and how entertaining they were. Had I known of them and lived in England at the time, I would have been at the newsstand every week to snatch up my copy of the latest adventure.