Clive Reston

85 ALBERT EMBANKMENT, LONDON SE1, ENGLAND

Real Name:

Clive Reston. The given name is the one on the file and the one the man answers to. He is a Marvel invention. Sax Rohmer never wrote him. James Bond never named him. The comics are not permitted to name the father either. Alert readers do not need the name.

He is what Doug Moench built when the series required a British field agent who was not Smith and not Tarr: younger, handsomer, funnier, and already damaged. Paul Gulacy drew him, often, as if Sean Connery and Basil Rathbone had produced a son and sent him into the Service. That is not coincidence. It is the joke the book is in on.

Aliases:

Personal Use: Clive Reston, C. Reston, Mr. Reston.

Cover / Operational: Mr. Blue — assumed for the Velcro heroin purchase, Master of Kung Fu #29–31. Other covers as required by MI-6 and, later, Freelance Restorations Limited. The man is a professional. The name on the passport is never the interesting one.

Nicknames: None that stick. He is not “Black Jack.” He is not “Chi.” He is Reston. The absence of a nickname is itself a class marker.

Known Relatives:

James Bond (biological father; never named on-panel, for copyright reasons that the scripts treat as a dare), Violet Holmes Reston (mother), Charles Reston (legal father; fellow agent; husband of Violet), Mycroft Holmes (maternal grandfather), Sherlock Holmes (great-uncle), Sigrina Holmes (great-aunt), Sir Denis Nayland Smith (first cousin once removed), Lancaster Sneed / Shockwave (first cousin once removed, by Smith’s line), Leiko Wu (wife, after the original monthly run; formerly lover), David Wu (brother-in-law), Mr. Wu (father-in-law, deceased).

Melissa Greville (lover, terminated). Mia Lessing / Dark Angel (pursuit, terminated). The record of women is long. The record of keeping them is not.

[ The James Bond Chronology by Win Scott Eckert. ] [ Tarzan Alive by Philip José Farmer. ] [ The Family Tree, this site. ] [ Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3. ] [ Master of Kung Fu #43. ]

Physical Traits:

The Official Handbook tradition files him at 6′1″ and 180 lbs. Blue eyes. Hair gone gray before its time. A good-looking and fit gentleman in his thirties throughout the classic run, dressed, off duty, as if the suit were part of the cover and, on duty, as if the cover had been allowed to wrinkle. He is handsome in a way Tarr is not. In a room of spies he is the one you might hide behind a potted plant, until he speaks.

Gulacy, a film buff, modeled faces on movie stars. Juliette is Dietrich. James Larner is Brando. Richard Blaine is Bogart. Ward Sarsfield is Niven. Reston occasionally resembles Basil Rathbone or Sean Connery. Rathbone is Holmes. Connery is Bond. The artist is telling you the genealogy the lawyer will not let the balloon say.

The voice is educated British: puns, quotations, a father’s aphorisms delivered as if they were still funny. Bond’s love of terrible puns is inherited. So is the drinking. The difference is that Bond seemed unaffected. Reston is not.

Occupation:

British intelligence officer and field agent. Objective: the mission as written. To locate, oppose, and destroy Dr. Fu Manchu when that is the brief. To survive the brief when it is not. To remain, if possible, the man his father was supposed to be, which is a different assignment and the one he keeps failing.

Formerly an officer of MI-6 under Sir Denis Nayland Smith. Founding operative of Freelance Restorations Limited. Returned to MI-6 after Bleeding Black. The private firm was never a retirement. It was a letterhead for the same hunt.

Known Base of Operations:

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

Stormhaven Castle — England (Freelance Restorations Limited).

Formerly a townhouse on Central Park West — New York City, New York (Smith’s).

Formerly an apartment associated with King’s Row, London — the flat to which he delivers Shang-Chi in Master of Kung Fu #33, and in whose bathtub Leiko Wu is already waiting.

Various safe houses, hotel rooms, seaplanes, rocket planes, and other people’s beds in France, Hong Kong, London, Morocco, New York, Switzerland, the Arctic, and wherever Smith pointed next.

Group Membership:

MI-6. Freelance Restorations Limited.

Affiliations:

Dark Angel (Mia Lessing), Fah Lo Suee (involuntary, under mimosa), Melissa Greville, James Larner, MI-6, Dr. Petrie, Shang-Chi, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Black Jack Tarr, Leiko Wu, Rufus “Super Midnight” Carter. Temporary, professional, and often hungover alliances with anyone Smith still trusted after the last bombing.

Enemies:

Brynocki, Cadre of Salvation, Carlton Velcro, Death-Dealer, Fah Lo Suee (typically, and once as a woman he begged to be taken by), Fu Manchu, Golden Daggers, KGB, Kogar, Leopard Cult, Mordillo, Moving Shadow, Oriental Expediters, Pavane, Phansigars, Razor-Fist, Samisdat, Shockwave (Lancaster Sneed), Si-Fan, Skull Crusher, Ward Sarsfield, War-Yore, Maximillian Zaran, Argus and the Red Wolves, and the bottle, which is not a person and does more damage than most of the list.

Skills & Abilities:

- He is not Shang-Chi’s equal in a room, and he is not Tarr’s equal in a doorway. He is their equal in the rest of the spy’s catalogue: infiltration, cover, sabotage, vehicles, the gun, the lie, the timed charge, the charm that opens a door kung fu would only break. The Handbook and the monthly book agree. Tradecraft is the craft. Kung fu is other people’s craft.

- He is a first-rate marksman. The weapon of choice is an ASP 9mm, a modified Smith & Wesson rebuilt for covert work and famous, in another franchise the lawyer will not let this one name, as a 00’s pistol. Reston carrying it is not a prop. It is a family resemblance.

- He is a competent, sometimes dirty, close-combat fighter of the British school. In Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3 he loses the gun and still finishes a Phansigar by pulling a curtain over the man and putting him over a railing. Shang-Chi, mid-fight, is worried about him. The worry is premature. Reston is dangerous without the pistol. He is more dangerous with it.

- He inherited, or claims to have inherited, a Holmesian eye. Deduction, intelligence gathering, the habit of arriving already knowing which object in the room matters. In his first scene the object is a dragon amulet, the mark of the Phansigars. He takes a sudden interest. The interest is correct. The rest of the career is the same motion: see the tell, make the joke, get shot at anyway.

- He can fly what the plot requires. A seaplane. A rocket plane into Mordillo’s trees. A stolen moment aboard Fu Manchu’s spacecraft while Leiko runs and Tarr is in a pit of giant scorpions. Reston is the one who slips aboard. That is not courage in Tarr’s sense. It is the Bond skill: get inside the villain’s machine and pull a wire.

- He is a linguist of the serviceable kind, a connoisseur of the expensive kind, and an actor of the professional kind. Cover identities hold until they do not. Mr. Blue holds long enough to stand in Velcro’s warehouse. Mimosa does not care about cover. Fah Lo Suee’s eyes do not care about Cambridge.

- He is not immune to hypnosis, poison, experimental hallucinogens, or alcohol. The last of these is the one he keeps volunteering for. It has never been quite bad enough to keep him from doing the job. It has been bad enough that the job has had to be done with a hangover. That is not Bond. That is Reston.

History:

Clive Reston was born in February 1947, the result of a brief liaison, in May 1946, between James Bond and Violet Holmes, wife of fellow agent Charles Reston. As the illegitimate son of Bond he is the grandson of Mycroft Holmes and thus the great-nephew of Sherlock Holmes. He is also, by that blood, kinsman to Sir Denis Nayland Smith, whose mother was Sigrina Holmes. The Service, in this family, is not a career. It is a hereditary condition. [ The James Bond Chronology by Win Scott Eckert. ]

The comics will not print the father’s name. They print everything else. Reston speaks of a father who said, “Live and let live… or die, as the case may be.” He speaks of a great-uncle who was a detective. Melissa Greville’s mother knows his father. Gulacy’s faces do the rest. Copyright is a locked door. Moench left the key on the table.

He follows the father into MI-6. By the early 1970s he is Smith’s man: not the aide-de-camp (that is Tarr) and not the living weapon (that will be Shang-Chi), but the agent you send into the party, the warehouse, the island, the bed. Leiko Wu is already in the file as lover and fellow officer. That relationship will not survive the book. Reston will spend the rest of the book failing to accept that.

First Appearance:

Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3 (cover-dated March 1975; 3MAC placement December 1974), “Fires of Rebirth,” by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy. Reston is introduced as an ally. That fact is not a wrinkle. It is the other half of Tarr. Tarr is the giant you meet in a death-house. Reston is the gentleman you meet in Smith’s parlor, after the butler has already failed to be useful.

Shang-Chi has followed a false British agent, survived gas in a sedan, and arrived at Smith’s Central Park West townhouse with a Phansigar amulet. Smith has left. The butler produces Clive Reston. Reston takes a sudden interest in the amulet. Three Phansigars come through the windows. Shang-Chi drops two and worries about the Englishman. The Englishman, disarmed, still finishes his man. They go to London. At the end of the trail, Dr. Petrie is discovered to be very much alive. Reston has been, from the first page, present at the correction of Shang-Chi’s original sin. [ Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #3. ]

Trivia printed with that issue still holds: alert readers may infer that Clive Reston is the son of James Bond, although for copyright reasons that name is never explicitly given. This reference does not infer. It records.

The MI-6 Years:

Moench’s reconstruction of the book into an espionage thriller is also Reston’s reason for existing. Smith becomes the head of a team. Tarr is already there. Reston arrives in the Giant-Size. Leiko Wu arrives in Master of Kung Fu #33. Shang-Chi is folded in as an informal agent. The Rohmer hunt acquires Fleming weather: villains with islands, gadgets, femme fatales, and nuclear punch lines. Reston is the Fleming weather in a suit.

The Velcro job is the template. Smith wants a heroin kingpin bankrupted. Reston goes in as Mr. Blue, a buyer. Shang-Chi and Tarr come through undersea tunnels to make a diversion so Reston can walk out. It does not go that cleanly. Razor-Fist. Panthers. A nuclear arsenal under the fortress. Reston, unarmed on a ledge, wants to go after the missiles. Tarr wants a way out. Shang-Chi finds the rope. That is the trio in miniature: the romantic, the brute, and the man who will actually move. [ Master of Kung Fu #29–31. ]

Reston, in that stretch, is already the voice of the book’s new direction:

That's the trouble with back-tracking, Tarr — you run into people you've already met.

[ Clive Reston, Master of Kung Fu #30. ]

They take a liner home. Reston and Petrie fly. Smith, Tarr, and Shang-Chi arrive at Victoria Station to a robot with gun-barrel eyes that addresses Reston by name. Tarr thinks Mordillo. Tarr is right. Reston takes Shang-Chi to the new London flat. Leiko Wu is in the bathtub. Reston strongly hints that they were lovers. She hints just as strongly that they are not. That is her first scene in the series, and it is already Reston’s wound. [ Master of Kung Fu #32–33. ]

He introduces her anyway, because he is still a professional, and because he is still in love:

You'll like her, Chi. Leiko's one of the best agents Smith's got — you and I included ... and a classier woman you won't find anywhere.

[ Clive Reston, Master of Kung Fu #33. ]

Mordillo takes her. Reston pilots a rocket plane into the East China Sea because there is no landing strip, and because Leiko is on the island. Tarr tells Smith that Reston has a “personal involvement” and that he, Tarr, should have gone instead. Smith says there is far more at stake than the lives of three agents. There is. There is also a man flying a plane into trees for a woman who has already left him. Shang-Chi will be the one who gets her out of the hourglass. Reston will be the one who cannot find Mordillo in the smoke. The pattern is set. [ Master of Kung Fu #34–35. ]

The rescue is also the beginning of Shang-Chi and Leiko. Reston remains on the team. Remaining is not the same as accepting.

The Triangle:

By Master of Kung Fu #44 he has stopped pretending the fire is out. The Golden Daggers war is on. Smith has been shot. Petrie is the mole. Fah Lo Suee is back. Reston, who can do almost anything a field man is asked to do, cannot do the one thing the plot now requires, which is to be graceful about Leiko.

I know what's been going on between you and Leiko — but I still can't help what I feel. I've tried to turn it off, Lord knows, but this is one fire inside me that can't be doused by booze. So I guess I'm your rival, Chi — and since you're also a friend, I owe you a warning — I make a bad rival. I fight dirty.

[ Clive Reston, Master of Kung Fu #44. ]

He does. Not with a knife in Shang-Chi’s back. With the slower knife: the reminder, the drink, the moment on a Swiss shore when the triangle becomes a speech and Leiko shuts it down. Fah Lo Suee’s people take him. Mimosa does the rest. Master of Kung Fu #46, “The Spider Spell,” is Reston’s issue in the way the Arctic wireless is Tarr’s. A spider tattoo on the chest. A British agent begging to be taken with the daughter of Fu Manchu. Leiko, not Reston, is the one who gets Shang-Chi out of that particular death. Reston escapes the boat, swims, talks too much, drives off alone, and is captured again. MI-6 interrogates him as a possible Benedict Arnold. Smith, recovering, still sends him north. The jet is shot down. Fah Lo Suee finds Reston and Larner in the wreck. Fu Manchu’s men wreck her troops. Reston slips aboard the Doctor’s spacecraft. Shang-Chi joins him. While Reston sabotages the controls, Shang-Chi locates his father. They come down from orbit together. Then Shang-Chi walks out of Smith’s game, and so does everyone else. Reston included. [ Master of Kung Fu #44–51. ]

They come back. They always come back. A renegade faction inside MI-6 tries to have Shang-Chi, Leiko, Tarr, and Reston murdered by War-Yore, so that the Service will not have to sign the order. Reston blames Smith. Leiko explodes at both of the men who think the triangle is still their subject, asserts her independence, and storms off. Shang-Chi believes the romance is over. Reston, some months later, apologizes to Smith. Smith considers resigning. Reston is dating Melissa Greville. The fire, it turns out, can be doused by substitution. Substitution does not hold. [ Master of Kung Fu #54–61. ]

Stormhaven and Freelance Restorations:

MI-6 turns on the team in earnest. Shockwave. Brynocki. Ward Sarsfield, who looks like David Niven and behaves like the Service’s id. Smith, Reston, and Melissa run for Stormhaven Castle and are captured there. Tarr is shot on the floor of his own future headquarters. Shang-Chi arrives half-conscious. Fah Lo Suee returns, as she does, on her own terms. Sarsfield dies. The castle remains. Smith, having been hunted by his own office, founds Freelance Restorations Limited and hangs a shingle on the stones. Reston goes with him. Of course he does. The father went into the Service. The son does not know how to go anywhere else. [ Master of Kung Fu #72–97. ]

Before the shingle, Morocco. Smith is taken by the Leopard Cult. Reston and Leiko go to get him out. They receive unexpected assistance. They also decide, at the precise moment when the most helpful thing they could do is not this, to give each other an orgasm. Leiko later confesses to Shang-Chi. Reston, confronted, denies it, thinking he is defending her honor. Shang-Chi cold-cocks him. The friendship is strained. The book does not pretend otherwise. Reston is not a cad in the Victorian sense. He is a man who will take what was once his if it is offered, and then lie about it in a way he believes is noble. That is worse than the sex. Shang-Chi hits him for the right reason. [ Master of Kung Fu #84–87. ]

Melissa is dropped. Dark Angel is pursued. The drinking, which was already in the #44 speech, becomes a problem large enough to have a name. When Smith retires from adventuring, Tarr takes the firm. Shang-Chi is an infrequent agent. Reston remains on board. Remaining is still not the same as being well.

After the Original Run:

The original monthly book ends in 1983 with Shang-Chi a fisherman in Yang Yin. Reston is not in that village. He is in the Service’s weather, where he belongs.

Marvel Comics Presents #1–8 (1988) reunites the cast. Leiko is taken by Argus and the Red Wolves. Shang-Chi is poisoned and given, by doctors, no more than a year. Reston’s drinking meets Shang-Chi’s mortality and loses. He gives the bottle up. That is not a sermon. It is a field man noticing that the one friend who will not be a spy is dying, and that being drunk for it would be the final Bond imitation he cannot afford. Reston, Tarr, and Leiko help him take a sample of the Elixir Vitae from Shadow-Hand. Master of Kung Fu: Bleeding Black (1990) is the last of the Doctor’s medicine. Whether it cured the toxin is uncertain. Shang-Chi faces extended life or imminent death with inner peace. Reston is there for the hunt. He is not there for the peace. [ MCP #1–8. ] [ Master of Kung Fu: Bleeding Black. ]

After Bleeding Black, 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 triangle closes in the only way a spy story can close it without killing someone: the philosopher leaves the board, and the two agents remain on it together. Fah Lo Suee no longer holds any high-ranking position in the Service. The circumstances are not revealed. [ Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu #1–6, in-world 1990–1993. ]

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. Shang-Chi and Leiko are still attracted. She remains faithful to Reston. Fu Manchu and Moving Shadow appear to die. Shang-Chi goes back to the island. Reston is last seen doing the thing he was built to do: standing with Tarr 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 Tarr. The photograph is the correct last image. The original Reston is a member of a firm. He does not photograph well as a hero. He photographs well as a man standing next to people who are.

The Character:

Smith is the hunt. Tarr is the body. Leiko is the equal. Shang-Chi is the conscience. Reston is the Bond picture that the book hangs on the wall and then refuses to let you enjoy without cost. Publication History on this site has already said the useful sentence: he resembles a younger and more vulnerable version of James Bond; while Bond is a successful womanizer and seems unaffected by heavy drinking, Reston struggles with alcoholism and a romantic rivalry with Shang-Chi; the resemblance is intentional; it is clear that Reston is Bond’s illegitimate son and the grand-nephew of Sherlock Holmes. The sentence remains the right one. What follows is only the mechanism.

He is introduced as the ally. That is the structural joke. Tarr is the trap. Reston is the handshake. Shang-Chi has spent his life among Fu Manchu’s instruments, who bow and then try to kill him. Reston smiles, quotes his father, and then tries to keep him. The keeping is the problem. Reston wants Shang-Chi on the team, Leiko in his bed, Smith’s approval, and a drink. He can have three of those, on a good week, and never the combination that would make him whole.

The Bond pastiche is the surface. Moench is not writing a pastiche. He is writing the bill. Bond beds the girl and lights a cigarette. Reston beds the girl and loses her to a man who will not light one. Bond’s liver is a running gag. Reston’s liver is a subplot. Bond’s fatherhood, in this genealogy, is a weekend in 1946. Reston’s sonhood is a career. The 00 license to kill is inherited. The indifference is not. That is why he works in a series about games of death and deceit. He can play the games. He cannot pretend they are only games. The puns are a lid. Under the lid is a man who told his rival, out loud, that booze would not put the fire out, and then spent years trying to prove the speech wrong.

John Saxon’s Roper, in Enter the Dragon, is the other parent of the performance: the wisecracking Western pal who walks into Bruce Lee’s war and does not belong there except by friendship. Gulacy replaced Saxon’s face with Connery’s. The book replaced Roper’s easy charm with a man who is charming and not easy. Shang-Chi’s give-and-take with Reston is the Lee/Saxon rhythm rewritten as a love triangle. It is also the Holmes rhythm rewritten as family. Reston has the great-uncle’s eye and none of the great-uncle’s solitude. Holmes could live in a sitting room with a violin. Reston lives in other people’s operations and other people’s beds, and calls it living.

He is brave. That should be said without the sneer the character sometimes earns. He walks into Velcro’s house as Mr. Blue. He flies a plane into trees. He sabotages a space station while Shang-Chi faces the Devil Doctor. He takes a curtain to a cult assassin in his first ten minutes on panel. Cowardice is not the flaw. The flaw is that bravery, in Reston, is entangled with performance. He needs to be seen to be the son. Shang-Chi does not need to be seen. Tarr does not know how to be seen except as a mass. Reston knows exactly how he looks. Vanity is not a small sin in a profession of disguises. It is the sin that makes the disguise leak.

Leiko is the leak. He loves her. He says so. He introduces her to Shang-Chi with a compliment that is also a surrender he has not admitted yet. He fights dirty and then remains friends, which is a more interesting trick than winning. The Morocco lapse is the ugly version of the same love: not a femme fatale’s victory over a hero, but two professionals taking comfort because the cultists will be there in the morning and because the philosopher is in another hemisphere. Leiko confesses. Reston lies to protect her. Shang-Chi hits the lie. Years later they marry, after Shang-Chi has gone back to an island and the board has only agents left on it. That marriage is not a theft. It is what remains when the third point of the triangle chooses peace. Whether it is happy is not the original book’s business. That it happens is the original book’s honesty. Reston got the girl. He got her after he had already lost her, and after he had learned, at last, to put the bottle down. Bond never had to learn that. That is why Bond is a fantasy and Reston is a supporting character in a tragedy that belongs to someone else.

Call him a pastiche. Call him the grandson of Mycroft and the son of a 00. Call him Mr. Blue, the man in the bathtub argument, the man with the spider on his chest, the man Shang-Chi punched in Morocco, the man who quit drinking because a friend was dying. He is Smith’s kinsman, which is genealogy, and Shang-Chi’s friend, which is an achievement he nearly talked himself out of. The original Shang-Chi — the man of Honan and MI-6 and the fisherman’s retirement — is incomplete without him. The philosopher needs a spy who stayed shiny enough to look like the enemy’s cinema and cracked enough to be real. Reston is that spy. He inherited Bond. He earned the hangover. Then, once, he earned the putting of it aside. That is the character. It is not tidy. It is why he is worth the dossier.

Clarifications:

Clive Reston should not be confused with:

- James Bond, his father. The resemblance is the point. The identity is not. Bond is the legend. Reston is the invoice.

- Sherlock Holmes, his great-uncle, or Nayland Smith, his cousin once removed. The eye is family. The drinking, the women, and the jokes are the other side of the family.

- Black Jack Tarr, 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.

- The later Marvel officer who, in Wisdom, X-Men, and MI-13 crossovers, fights Martians, Jack the Rippers, and Dracula’s armies, and who uses Shang-Chi as a paranormal asset. That is Marvel’s Reston. It is not this one.

- The Reston of Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings (2022), sent on a fake rescue so that someone else can steal a set of rings this continuity does not recognize. The original Reston is not a ten-ring errand. He is a field man in a world of pistols, islands, and Fu Manchu.

- The unnamed MI-6 officer chloroformed by Everett Ross in a deleted scene of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). Cinema borrowed a name, or a shadow of one. It did not borrow the character.

- “Sir” Clive Reston, a knighthood that appears in some later databases and does not appear in the original files. The knight in this firm is Smith.

For a more detailed exposition of Clive Reston’s activities, See: Chronology.