The Sandbaggers is one of the most brilliant television series I’ve seen, so it was something of an experience to open up Queen & Country, a comic book bought on random, and find an exact replica of the premise for Ian Mackintosh’s 1978-1980 series. The homage is deliberate, and although I am tempted to reprimand Greg Rucka for stealing The Sandbaggers, merely filling it with different characters and moving it up to our own time, I am so in love with The Sandbaggers that I am really just happy to have it all back. Mackintosh’s brilliance was to create a realistic spy series with emphasis on the bureaucratic infighting back home, (which shouldn’t work but it did), and Greg Rucka has updated this beautifully, replacing the Cold War-plots with similarly styled stories of his own, (interestingly, terrorism is a major factor in both versions). Rucka follows, and never surpasses the old master, (who disappeared and supposedly died in an airplane accident in 1979, but personally I believe he was taken by aliens), but he breathes enough fresh air into it to make it worthwile. And Queen & Country is far better than the third season of The Sandbaggers, which was filmed after Mackintosh’s death and partly written by others, (the fact that the he managed to write four episodes after his own “death” certainly lends credibility to my alien abduction theory, now doesn’t it?)