Black Jack Tarr

85 ALBERT EMBANKMENT, LONDON SE1, ENGLAND

Real Name:

Jack Tarr. The given name is used in files. The man answers to the nickname. He was not born Black Jack. The Service hung that on him, and he kept it because it was accurate.

He is a Marvel invention. Sax Rohmer never wrote him. Smith’s aides in the novels are Petrie, Weymouth, Kerrigan, Shan Greville. Tarr is what Englehart and Starlin built when they needed Smith a body: a giant who could take a punch Shang-Chi would not waste on an old man in a wheelchair.

Aliases:

Personal Use: Jack Tarr, J. Tarr, Mr. Tarr.

Nicknames: Black Jack. “Black” is the Service’s verdict on the manner, not a racial designation and not a pirate romance. It names the hardness. Shang-Chi he addressed, for years, as “Chinaman.” See The Character.

Known Relatives:

None of record. Parents unnamed. No sibling, spouse, or child appears in the original continuity. The nearest thing to a family is the team, and the nearest thing to a wife was Anna, who left him in 1948 because he had already married the job.

[ Master of Kung Fu #70. ]

Physical Traits:

A powerful giant of a man. The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Update ’89 #7 files him at 6′6″ and 300 lbs. Black hair; a black mustache that Gulacy and his successors treated as a permanent part of the silhouette; a face built for scowling. He is not handsome in Reston’s way. He is unmistakable. In a room of spies he is the one you cannot hide behind a potted plant.

The body is the instrument. Nothing seems to faze him until it does. Shang-Chi levered him over a balcony rail the first time they met and still had to work for it. Bombs throw him. Scorpions do not finish him. A gunshot at Stormhaven drops him and does not keep him down. By the Gulacy years the back bothers him. He is still the largest object in most of his panels.

The voice is working-class British: dropped g’s, “bloody,” “awright,” “birds.” He does not sound like Reston and he does not sound like Smith. Reston inherited Bond’s vowels. Smith inherited Holmes’s rap. Tarr inherited a parade ground and a pub. That is not a joke at his expense. It is how Moench tells you which class of Englishman is actually willing to walk into the mansion first.

[ Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Update ’89 #7. ] [ Master of Kung Fu #17. ] [ Master of Kung Fu #48. ]

Occupation:

British intelligence officer. Aide-de-camp to Sir Denis Nayland Smith. Objective: to keep Smith alive, to carry out the order, and to finish the men the order names. Not the hunt as a vocation. The hunt as a job. That distinction is the whole of him.

Formerly British Army. Formerly British Foreign Service, Hong Kong. Formerly MI-6. Formerly Smith’s private muscle in New York. Later a principal of Freelance Restorations Limited. Later returned to MI-6. Last seen, in the original continuity, still in the work.

Known Base of Operations:

85 Albert Embankment — London, England (Secret Intelligence Service / MI-6).

Stormhaven Castle — England (Freelance Restorations Limited).

Formerly “Murder Mansion” — New York. In Master of Kung Fu #17 the trap is sprung at Rye. In #70 the same house-of-traps is placed on Long Island. The geography is not consistent. The architecture is: hidden death-traps, a control room, a nude portrait, and a man who retired into suspicion. It is Tarr’s house even when Smith is using it.

Formerly Hong Kong (Foreign Service). Formerly London. Field work in the Amazon, Florida, Switzerland, the Arctic, Morocco, Singapore, and wherever Smith pointed.

Group Membership:

British Army. British Foreign Service. MI-6. Freelance Restorations Limited (field principal; later the man who still makes the call after Smith’s retirement).

Affiliations:

Sir Denis Nayland Smith (commanding officer, the one loyalty that cost him Anna), Shang-Chi (first an enemy, then a friend), Clive Reston, Leiko Wu, Dr. Petrie, James Larner, Melissa Greville, Dark Angel / Mia Lessing, Rufus “Super Midnight” Carter, Shen Kuei (intermittent), Fah Lo Suee (intermittent, never trusted). Temporary and always professional alliances with CIA assets when the board required it.

Enemies:

Dr. Fu Manchu, the Celestial Order of the Si-Fan, Fah Lo Suee (typically), Shockwave / Lancaster Sneed, Maximillian Zaran, War-Yore, Kogar, the Oriental Expediters, the Golden Daggers, the Black Demon Sect, Carlton Velcro, Samisdat, Argus and the Red Wolves, the Leopard Cult, and anyone who mistakes Smith’s aide for a civilian.

Skills & Abilities:

- He is not Shang-Chi’s equal in a room, and he is not Zaran’s equal in a duel. He is their equal in refusing to stay down. Size is not a super-power. It is a fact the book keeps using. Federal agents, robot knights, Si-Fan, cultists, and a pit of giant scorpions have all had the same problem: there is a great deal of Tarr to finish.

- He has completed the ordinary brutal educations of Army, Foreign Service, and MI-6: firearms, vehicles, first aid, military science, the short version of every language a field man needs, and the long version of how to run a sting on short notice. The Handbook and the monthly book agree. The gun is the craft. Kung fu is other people’s craft.

- He is a close-combat specialist of the British school: weight, leverage, a willingness to hit first. The first fight with Shang-Chi is not a humiliation so much as a measurement. Shang-Chi has to use the balcony. That is the point of introducing a giant. The son of Fu Manchu is not wrestling a clerk.

- He has access. A word from Smith, later a word from Tarr, moves offices, flights, safe houses, and extra shells. When MI-6 turns on the team, he still knows where the doors are. When Smith founds Freelance Restorations, Tarr is the man who walks into the embassy and interrupts Shang-Chi’s attempt at a private life.

- He is obstinate. Publication History on this site has already named it the most obstinate temperament in the series. Obstinacy is not stupidity. It is the talent that keeps a field man walking toward the bomb, the mansion, and the reunion he should have refused. Anna understood that talent. She left because of it.

- He can narrate. In Master of Kung Fu #47–50 a one-way wireless microphone lets him tell Smith what the Arctic looks like while the rest of the team is inside Fu Manchu’s mountain. The device is Bond gadgetry. The voice is Tarr: colorful, ungrammatical, and the only honest camera in the room.

History:

Jack Tarr was born in 1920. The year is this reference’s speculation, grounded in the apparent age of the man who served in the Second World War and who, in 1978, can still speak of a love affair thirty years gone. He is of the generation that went from parade ground to empire’s last offices without ever being asked whether the offices were worth it. [ Master of Kung Fu #70. ]

The Army came first. The Foreign Service came after the war. By 1946 he is in Hong Kong, working with Sir Denis Nayland Smith and with a woman named Anna. She is the only person in the original continuity who gets through the shell. The work gets through it faster. In 1948 she leaves. Her verdict is the correct one: he is more devoted to duty, and to Smith, than to her. He will spend thirty years proving her right. [ Master of Kung Fu #70. ]

MI-6 follows. Detachment to Smith follows that. By the late 1960s he has, on this chronology, put in a career’s worth of years and retired to New York, where he builds the Murder Mansion: a private house stuffed with hidden death-traps. A man who spends his working life walking into other people’s traps will, in retirement, invent his own. It is not a hobby. It is a personality. [ Master of Kung Fu #17. ]

First Appearance:

Master of Kung Fu #17 (cover-dated April 1974; 3MAC placement September 1971), “Lair of the Lost!”, by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin. Tarr is introduced as an antagonist. That fact is not a wrinkle. It is the character.

Shang-Chi has just broken from Fu Manchu and believes he has killed Dr. Petrie. A Daily Bugle photograph places Smith in Rye, New York. Shang-Chi wants to explain himself. Smith wants revenge. Tarr is the instrument. The mansion seals. Federal agents fall. Robot knights fall more slowly. Then the Britisher: nothing seems to faze him until Shang-Chi levers him over a balcony rail. Shang-Chi finds Smith in the wheelchair, tells him to stand, and leaves him with a sentence that becomes the series: what one knows is not always the truth. Tarr has been beaten by the son of the man Smith has hunted for sixty years. He does not forgive that quickly. [ Master of Kung Fu #17. ]

Petrie is alive. Smith accepts the explanation. In Master of Kung Fu #18 Tarr is already at Smith’s shoulder when they recruit Shang-Chi on a New York street. He does not like the recruitment. He says so. He claims Smith needs no Chinese vigilante while Smith has him. Smith disagrees. The pattern is set: Tarr will follow the order, and he will complain about the order, and the complaint is how you know he is still himself.

The early issues keep him in that register. He and Smith walk into Fu Manchu’s headquarters without Shang-Chi and are captured for it (#21). On the Amazon he fights, watches the guide Raymond Strawn relish a slaughter, and begins, against his habits, to prefer the company of the man he still will not properly name (#23–25). When Fah Lo Suee kidnaps Smith, Tarr and the newly introduced Clive Reston go to Shang-Chi because they have to (#28). Friendship is not yet the word. Necessity is.

The MI-6 Years:

Moench’s reconstruction of the book into an espionage thriller is also Tarr’s reconstruction. Smith becomes the head of a team. Reston arrives in Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3. Leiko Wu arrives in #33. Tarr is already there, the senior field man, the one who does not look like a film star and therefore looks like the Service. Shang-Chi is folded in as an informal agent. Tarr is the man who picks him up at penny arcades and harbors and tells him Smith wants him.

The Expediters war is the first time the job tries to kill him for being on the right side of it. A mole inside the agency. British spies murdered. Shang-Chi has quit Smith’s lies; Tarr plays the only card that works on Shang-Chi — you can save lives — and gets him back (#38). Shockwave is Lancaster Sneed, Smith’s nephew. Petrie is planting the bombs. Tarr’s home is exploded. He survives. Extra shells in a Zurich-bound office are another bomb. He is in hospital while the others fly toward Fah Lo Suee and the Arctic (#44–47). That is Tarr’s luck: he is large enough to live, and never large enough to be somewhere else when the blast goes.

He arrives late to the mountain. Late is still useful. Fah Lo Suee tells him Fu Manchu means to knock the moon from orbit. Tarr sends Larner for demolitions, finds Reston and Shang-Chi and Leiko, and is put in a pit of giant scorpions for his trouble. Shang-Chi joins him there. They get out. Larner dies blowing the mountain. Shang-Chi seemingly kills his father in orbit. Tarr has done the unglamorous half of an apocalypse: the running, the telling, the pit. [ Master of Kung Fu #47–50. ]

After the moon, Shang-Chi has had enough of MI-6’s deceit and death. Tarr, Leiko, and Reston agree. They quit. The book does not let them keep the resignation. A renegade faction inside the Service hires War-Yore to erase them. Smith is still Smith. The games resume.

Hong Kong and Kogar: Smith sends Tarr undercover against a smuggler whose crates hide neutron-bomb microdots. Tarr goes in as Black Jack Blue. Kogar orders him to kill Shang-Chi as a loyalty test. He says he does not care. Kogar believes him. The reader is not required to. The line is field craft, and it is also the residue of the man who met Shang-Chi as an enemy. The two facts can occupy the same mouth. Tarr blows the cover when the moment requires it. The base goes with the plans. [ Master of Kung Fu #62–69. ]

Anna:

Master of Kung Fu #70, “Home to Die,” is the one issue that is Tarr’s before it is anyone else’s. A note signed Anna. A locket he gave her. Thirty years. He takes Shang-Chi to the Murder Mansion a week early. The house seals. The Black Demon Sect is inside it. Dr. Chow, the defector Tarr was supposed to escort, is a CIA fiction. The nude portrait of Anna is a door. The woman in the demon mask is Anna. She leads them now. She has come back to collect the bill for 1948.

He shoots her in the shoulder. He takes off the mask. She tells him he never had time for her. The CIA takes her away. He throws the locket in the water. He walks away from the house and from Anna forever. The mystery of the lost love is revealed, and the world of espionage is shown to be cruel and inhuman, which Tarr already knew and which the issue makes him know again. It is not a redemption. It is an autopsy. [ Master of Kung Fu #70. ]

Stormhaven and Freelance Restorations:

The Zeck years keep him in the machinery. Shang-Chi and Leiko go after an abducted Tarr on Mordillo’s island. At Stormhaven he storms the castle, takes two killers, and is shot. Sarsfield taunts him on the floor. Zaran puts a blade to his throat. Shang-Chi, Tarr, and Reston go on the run from MI-6. In Morocco Fah Lo Suee hypnotizes him, then unmasks the play: she is cutting a deal with the next leadership, she wants a joint strike on Fu Manchu in New York. Smith refuses to trust her. Tarr is the one who has to stand in the room while the people who think in decades use him as furniture. At Pier 23 he and Smith try to defuse a nuclear bomb while Fah Lo Suee takes a dagger in the back. The bomb does not go. The Doctor’s night does not end. [ Master of Kung Fu #72–89, selected. ]

In 1980, by 3MAC, Smith founds Freelance Restorations Limited. Tarr is the interruption: he walks into the Hong Kong embassy in New York and pulls Shang-Chi and Leiko out of a private life and into a cult extraction that is already a lie. Stormhaven is fitted as a headquarters. Shang-Chi tentatively joins. The work is the same work with a private letterhead. Financing is a problem because they only take jobs they believe in. Fah Lo Suee offers to become a backer. That is not a solution. [ Master of Kung Fu #93–97. ]

He remains in the original run through the Day years: Pavane and Razor-Fist, Operation: White Heat, Li Ching-Lin, the last war with Fu Manchu. In #118, while Shang-Chi faces the Doctor in the fortress, Tarr and Reston destroy what can be destroyed from the outside. The long war ends, for a time, without Tarr in the inner room. That is the correct room for a son who has become a person. Tarr’s room is the perimeter. He has always been the perimeter.

After the Original Run:

Marvel Comics Presents #1–8 (1988) finds Smith retired. Leiko is taken by Argus of the Red Wolves. Her left hand is the message. Tarr is the man who still knows how to call Shang-Chi back into the games. Shen Kuei assists. Shang-Chi is poisoned. Doctors give him a year.

Master of Kung Fu: Bleeding Black (1990) is the last elixir. After it, on this chronology, Shang-Chi returns to seclusion. Leiko returns to London. Tarr, Reston, and Leiko go back to MI-6. Reston and Leiko marry. The private firm was never a retirement. It was a letterhead for the same hunt.

Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu #1–6 (2002; in-world 1994) is Moench and Gulacy again. Tarr and Reston request Shang-Chi’s aid against a mastermind called the Ghost, believed to be the Comte de Saint-Germain, in possession of Nikola Tesla’s Hellfire Objective and of Leiko. The Ghost is Fu Manchu. Fu Manchu and Moving Shadow appear to die. Shang-Chi goes back to the island. Tarr is last seen doing the thing he was built to do: standing with Reston in the Service, asking the weapon to come back one more time.

In Journey into Mystery #514–516 he appears only in a photograph, with Shang-Chi, Leiko, and Reston. The photograph is the correct last image. The original Tarr is a member of a firm. He does not photograph well alone.

The Character:

Smith is the hunt. Reston is the Bond pastiche who drinks too much and loses the girl. Leiko is the equal. Shang-Chi is the conscience. Tarr is the body. The book needs a body. Without him, Smith’s orders have nowhere to land except on a philosopher who does not want them.

Publication History on this site has already said the useful sentence: he exhibits the most obstinate traits of any character; he invariably addresses Shang-Chi as “Chinaman,” as a term of affection rather than by name; despite the gruff manner, readers feel fondness for him; it is one of the successes of the series that they are drawn to him in spite of his flaws. The sentence remains the right one. What follows is only the mechanism.

He is introduced as the enemy. Smith wants Petrie’s killer. Tarr builds a house that kills. Shang-Chi walks into it because he wants to apologize. That first meeting is not a misunderstanding that later sentiment erases. It is the truth of how the British state meets the son of Fu Manchu: with a trap, a giant, and a racial epithet. The series then does the thing pulp is not required to do. It lets the giant change his mind without pretending he was kind.

The word is Tarr’s vice when he still thinks Shang-Chi is the enemy. It is not Doug Moench’s sermon, and it is not this reference’s. In time they become rather close friends. The tone, context, and intent change. It is used as affection, endearment, the only nickname a man like Tarr knows how to give. In time he discontinues it. That is character growth: not from bigot to saint, but from hostility to welcome acceptance, with the book’s acknowledgment that the prior use is now unacceptable. The stain is not fully washed out. It should not be. A friendship that forgets how it started is a lie. This one remembers, and then it chooses the man anyway. [ Fu Manchu Is Not A Racist Stereotype, this site. ]

Loyalty is his religion. Smith is the altar. Anna is the offering. The 1948 departure and the 1978 reunion are the same scene played twice: a woman who wanted a person, a man who could only be an officer. He does not learn. Learning would require him to become Reston, or Shang-Chi, or someone who can quit. He cannot quit. When Shang-Chi walks out of MI-6, Tarr is the one who fetches him back with lives to save. When Smith founds a private firm, Tarr is the one who knocks on the embassy door. When Smith retires, Tarr is the one who still has Shang-Chi’s number. The obstinacy that made him ugly in #17 is the same obstinacy that makes him the friend you want in a scorpion pit. The book is honest about the price. The price is Anna in the water, a locket discarded, a house he will not live in again.

He is not nice. Nice is Reston’s failed project. Nice is what Shang-Chi attempts on days the world will not permit. Tarr is useful, loud, prejudiced, brave, and loyal past the point of wisdom. Readers like him because the book likes him without washing him. Gulacy’s film-star faces go to Reston, Larner, Blaine, Sarsfield. Tarr gets a mustache and a mass. He looks like the man who would actually be sent. That is why he works. In a series about games of death and deceit, he is almost incapable of the second game. He can be hypnotized. He can be tricked. He cannot be made elegant. Fah Lo Suee uses him and he stays used until the play is unmasked. Smith uses him and he stays used on purpose. Shang-Chi uses him last, and only because Tarr asked to be used.

Call him a bigot who got better. Call him a patriot who could not love a woman as much as a brief. Call him the giant on the balcony, the voice on the wireless, the man in the pit, the man who throws the locket away. He is Smith’s aide-de-camp, which is a job title, and Shang-Chi’s friend, which is an achievement. The original Shang-Chi — the man of Honan and MI-6 and the fisherman’s retirement — is incomplete without him. The philosopher needs a brute who stayed. The brute needed a reason to stay that was not only Smith. He found one. He still said “Chinaman” while he was finding it. Then he stopped. That is the character. It is not tidy. It is why he is worth the dossier.

Clarifications:

Black Jack Tarr should not be confused with:

- Any aide of Nayland Smith in the Sax Rohmer novels. Tarr is not Petrie, Weymouth, Kerrigan, or Greville. He is not a Rohmer character. Writeups.org’s claim that Rohmer created him is an error. Englehart and Starlin created him in 1974 for Master of Kung Fu #17.

- The later Marvel officer who, in the 2010s, is promoted to director of MI-6, monitors Shang-Chi in London, and storms White Dragon’s estate (Deadly Hands of Kung Fu vol. 2, 2014). That is Marvel’s Tarr. It is not this one.

- The MI-6 betrayer of Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings (2022), who sends Leiko and Reston on a fake rescue so that he can steal the Ten Rings and accidentally summons an alien parasite. The original Tarr does not steal from Shang-Chi. He fetches him.

- Ultimate Marvel’s Jack Tarr, head of MI-6’s Special Section under Pete Wisdom. A namesake in another universe.

- Clive Reston, who shares the Service and the missions and is a different class of Englishman with a different wound. Reston inherited Bond. Tarr inherited a job.

For a more detailed exposition of Black Jack Tarr’s activities, See: Chronology.