Still, echoes of Mack Bolan's creation remain audible, perhaps most obviously in the form of Marvel Comics' Bolan-inspired Punisher, but I suspect also in the form of less direct derivatives, like that lead figure in the original NCIS, Leroy Jethro Gibbs. So far as I know there has never been any public acknowledgment of conscious inspiration or influence here on the part of show creator Don Bellisario or anyone else "in the know" about it. Still, it would be a bit surprising if, given his generation and his particular line of work, Bellisario had never, ever, heard of the Executioner series and its hero Bolan, and still more surprising if there wasn't at least some indirect influence given how big the phenomenon was at its peak--and the numerous parallels between Bolan, and (at least where his personal back story is concerned) Gibbs. Like Bolan Gibbs was a young man from a blue-collar background in a relatively provincial part of the Northeast (indeed, it may not be wholly irrelevant that just as Bolan comes from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Gibbs' Pennsylvania has a Pittsfield of its own) who enlisted in the armed forces, and became a sergeant in a special forces section of their branch (Bolan an Army Green Beret, Gibbs a Marine Scout Sniper) with sniping as their specialty and a reputation for excellent marksmanship. While away at war (Bolan in the Vietnam War, Gibbs in the 1991 Gulf War) "ethnic" gangsters destroyed each of their families (Italian Mafia in Bolan's case, a Mexican drug trafficker in Gibbs'), after which, on returning home, each man used his skills as a special forces soldier, specifically relying on his prowess as a sniper, to exact personal revenge on those they held responsible for their loss in a vigilante action that the law could never countenance, but with which the audience is expected to sympathize.
Of course in other respects the situations are different. There is what exactly they had in the way of family. The young Bolan who went off to war had yet to settle down and marry, with the result that his family consisted of his parents and siblings, whereas Gibbs was a married man with a wife and daughter. The circumstances of the destruction of their families were also different, Bolan's father Sam, trying to make ends meet in the wake of a heart attack forcing him to shift from his old job to a less demanding but lower-paying one at the steel plant, took out a loan that seemed safe enough at first but proved to be predatory. Repayment being beyond his means he unsurprisingly failed to pay up, leading to the loan officers having the affiliated Mafia henchmen beat him up to make him somehow come up with the cash he didn't have. This drove his daughter Cindy to go and plead with them to lay off--something they agreed to do if she entered their employ as a prostitute to "work off" her father's debt, an offer she accepted. As it happened, her younger brother Johnny found out about what she was doing and told dad, who, apparently driven to madness by the news, shot the women, then Johnny, and then himself. By contrast it seems that Gibbs' wife simply happened to witness a crime, and the killer she was in a position to testify against decide to keep her from ever being able to testify. And of course, there was what the heroes did afterward. The vengeance Bolan exacts on the Mafia in Pittsfield--a whole series of actions that leave a very large number of gangsters dead and no doubt about the party responsible in the view of either the Mafia or the authorities--places him squarely outside society, while being just the beginning of the "War Against the Mafia" that is the book's title, and the theme of the series through the decade. For Gibbs the revenge killing is a one-shot incident he buried in his past as, after departing the Marines, he joined the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and rose through the ranks to become the senior functionary he is by the time of the TV series--though of course, like just about every popular hero of the type, he is not unknown to act the "loose cannon" and so look less Bolan-like in the process.
Still, having described the two characters' arcs it should be clear that any attempt to adapt Bolan's story would easily see the creator end up with something that looks a lot more like Gibbs'. After all, if Bolan's creator Don Pendleton in 1969 could expect that his readers would see the elder Bolan's destruction of his family as ultimately the fault of the Mafia's preying on them this is less the case today. His taking a gun and shooting his children, his wife and himself is what we today call a "mass shooting"--discussing which it is today all but taboo to seek explanation, those who violate it being vulnerable to accusation of excusing it (a stance that is not only unfair but, self-servingly from the standpoint of those who prefer such things not be discussed, putting consideration of social and economic factors, and criticism of what they mean for human life, beyond the pale). And of course the complex of prejudices regarding gender, religion, race further problematizes the matter, given the news that prompted the elder Bolan's action. Certainly were Bolan not an Irish-American but of a certain other background the conventional response would be to call his act of violence, particularly in regard to his daughter, an "honor killing"--remembering which facts is an unwelcome reminder to many that traditionalist notions of female and family honor in America are not so different from those of peoples that mainstream Americans prefer to treat as an utterly alien Other whose barbaric behavior toward their womenfolk is absolutely unlike anything ever seen in the West. Meanwhile even if oblivious to the ethno-religious double standard prevailing in such matters (as a great many persons who think of themselves as "progressive" are) the "woke" would at least speak of Bolan's father's "toxic masculinity" in dealing with his failure to provide for and protect his loved ones in the way that he did (while those with a broader, richer, social perspective will think about what Sam Bolan's hard luck says about working class life in America). Altogether, if no reasonable person would deny the destructive role of the Mafia in the episode, many would blame the elder Bolan and his backward values for his ultimately having killed himself, his wife, his daughter, with this, in turn, coloring their judgment of Mack Bolan. After all, not only does his course raise the eternal controversy over the legitimacy of vigilante action, but the view of Bolan's actions as a matter of Mack, refusing to accept his father's inability to confront either his personal mistakes or the bigger social reality behind them as ultimately the culprits, laying the entire blame on ethnic gangsters as he goes on a racist vigilante killing spree--and indeed, between this and Bolan's own recognition of the impossibility of his task (one vigilante wiping out the whole Mafia?), many would see him as the product of a sick, bigoted, culture simply having lost his mind. The result is that even if Bellisario had actually consciously thought through an adaptation of Mack Bolan's story as the basis of Gibbs' back story, his keeping that particular sequence of events in his own narrative was totally out of the question, and electing instead for the plain and simple murder of Gibbs' wife and daughter by the thug against whom he exacted his personal revenge was probably the only way that he could have gone if he was serious about getting a show on the air in 2003.
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