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Surfacing from the oceans of 1970s British comics as part of Rebellion’s current salvage operation comes police detective Jack McBane, curing New York’s crime problem one .44 Magnum-sized entry wound at a time. John Wagner created One-Eyed Jack for Valiant when Judge Dredd was just a gleam in the writer’s eye, although the conspicuously rigid moral code and ballistic approach to justice makes the connection between the strips too tempting to resist. But One-Eyed Jack‘s roots are more interesting than its descendants. As well as giving his creation a name adjacent to Ed McBain, Wagner knew the air of enchanted alarm about 1975 New York brewing in British kids who were observing the place through endless episodes of Kojak, and picturing all American cops as the guy called Dirty Harry in something too X-rated to get into. Harry would never have squeezed himself into a luggage locker just so he could leap out and shoot the criminal who opened the door; but when McBane does it, it’s cue Lalo Schifrin all the same. I read the reissued comic for Tripwire.
The Leopard From Lime Street is another reprint in the same series and from a similar era, this time from Buster. In theory the big-hearted boy scratched by a radioactive leopard is a character aimed at a young audience, but the cues that writer Tom Tully takes from Stan Lee include the one about aiming above his readers’ heads and carrying them upwards in the draught.
And at the same place, a quick look at Dredd/Anderson: The Deep End, three comics stories set in the world of the 2012 Dredd film. As it happens I liked Dredd a lot, although it was four and a half years ago and spin-offs from it at this stage might have something to do with keeping the breadth of a live-action Dredd property on display just as a Mega-City One TV show starts to move forward. It’s not as if the comic hasn’t mapped Cassandra Anderson’s early days nicely already, but the character is one of the few that’s rich enough for all the parallel what-ifs to stay appealing.
