Hoo, boy.  Fantastic Four #700 came out last week and I thought that had a lot of backstory hooked onto it.  Nick Fury came along just a year or two after the FF and his story is so tangled by its very nature that it makes everything that has happened to Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben since ’61 seem straightforward.  Fury #1, a one-shot commemorating the 60th anniversary of the character, pays homage to so many episodes of his life that the “official synopsis” at the start of the book doesn’t come close to giving anyone a chance of understanding what’s going on.  But that’s just how our boy Fury wants it!

 

In 1963, the new Marvel Comics was doing killer business eating DC’s lunch by doing everything they did, better.  Around the time FF was beating JLA in circulation, Marvel decided they needed a war comic to offset Sgt. Rock.  Cue the Howling Commandos, an elite unit of (socially progressive, racially integrated) Army Rangers cruising around the European theater blowing up ratzis real good.  Sgt. Fury, their cigar-chomping leader, was a slightly older contemporary of Captain America’s, but while milksop Steve Rogers had to wait for the Super Soldier Serum to be useful on the front lines, young Nick was unlucky enough to have been trying to make himself useful at both Guernica and then Pearl Harbor when both places got blown to smithereens a few years apart by the Spanish and the Japanese, giving him his lifelong rager for killing anyone who even looks like they might be leaning Fascist.  

 

Sales on the book were OK, but not great. The previous year the first James Bond flick, Dr. No, had been released, followed by From Russia With Love, and pop culture went on a spy jag.  The Man From U.N.C.LE. was on TV in ’64, soon followed by Mission: Impossible, and all of a sudden kids wanted to be secret operatives winning with stealth and suavity, not charging pillboxes with guns a-blazing.  

 

Stan and Jack had just reintroduced one WWII hero by thawing him out of an iceberg; even while his 1940s adventures struggled along in the original mag, Nick Fury got a makeover of his own. The mod version appeared in ’65, having risen up the ranks to become a colonel and top agent of the world’s greatest covert organization, S.H.I.E.L.D. (acronym to be figured out later, many, many times).  But still with a little of that infantry edge to go with the intrigue.  With a limitless budget, Marvel’s spy org immediately went big with an aircraft carrier- IN THE SKY!- and legions of sophisticated androids called Life Model Decoys that are perfect replicas of whoever they are supposed to emulate just long enough for the cliffhanger at the end of the issue where IT SEEMS Nick or whatever high-value target just got killed. You know, like a Doombot, but for good.  Plus doohickeys and gizmos of every stripe.  The loving rendering of which turned Jim Steranko into one of the first rock star comic artists.

 

Every decent spy org needs a SMERSH or a KAOS, or at least a KGB, or who are you spying on?  And so Hydra was born at the same time, followed by A.I.M. and Zodiac, and one guy in particular named Scorpio, able to do whatever he needed to do to be annoying thanks to a mysterious device called the Zodiac Key, a kind of low-rent Cosmic Cube.  Somewhere around here Nick started sporting his trademark eyepatch, blaming it on eye damage from shrapnel he took back in the war, but had been too busy killing fascists to do anything about for twenty years.  Also it was discovered that even though he had been no pup when Truman was in office, he was still throwing down harder than ever in the Nixon years because of something called the Infinity Formula, which gave him Super Soldier-like resistance to aging, but, sadly, the inventor and purveyor of the substance had begun showing fascist-like characteristics and had to be dealt with harshly.  Good thing Nick had a stockpile of the stuff.

 

Twistos, reversals, and double-crosses have always been the name of the game just as much as science-fantasy weirdness.  Scorpio was revealed to be Nick’s brother Jake, who infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. as Nick in order to Bring It Down From Within!  Big brother Nicholas put a stop to that and then showed little bro how it was done by impersonating HIM and bringing Zodiac Down From Within, hard!  Which brutal disrespect (along with a beatdown by the Defenders for good measure) proved so distressing to young Jake that he made good and damn sure SOMEBODY really got killed, by shooting himself in the head.

 

Which didn’t stop him from coming back as an android ANYWAY because the Zodiac Key itself had plans of its own.  But Nick didn’t care and let the West Coast Avengers handle it because by this time he had bigger fish to fry as the LMDs all over the place had gotten SO good that they had decided, not unreasonably, that maybe it was time to let some ORIGINALS get killed in THEIR place, and teamed up to Bring Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division Down From Within!  Which situation led to Fury having to infiltrate the organization he was already in so as to DOUBLE Bring It Down From Within, which nested madness destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D. altogether, although by that time everyone was so confused no one was quite sure what, if anything, had happened, and the Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage and Logistics Directorate soon emerged from the rubble with no one the wiser.  (Bob Harras and Paul Neary’s immortal Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D., ’88, your editor-in-chief’s high-water mark for Fury-reading.)

 

Except for the Skrulls! who had been plotting to Bring Down whatever version of S.H.I.E.L.D. was left standing From Within as a precursor to doing the same thing to the entire human race and ultimately the universe itself because that kind of thing is THEIR WHOLE POINT AS A SPECIES.  And young Mike Fury! son of Jake, who took over as the New new Scorpio because he truly was furious at how his uncle had treated his dad, only to become even more furious still when it turned out his whole backstory was all a lie and he decided to atone by joining S.H.I.E.L.D. himself. Until he got fired because he heard the Punisher had killed uncle Nick which caused him to reach peak furiosity and he went berserk trying to get revenge, not realizing that OF COURSE the version of his uncle that Frank had blasted was an LMD!  Keep up, lad!  Fortunately, he was himself killed shortly afterward for the betterment of everyone because no one bothered to make an LMD of him.

 

But don’t worry, there is still Fury offspring in the fold because of a thing called Ultimate Marvel wherein cheeky Euro creators decided THEIR Nick Fury should be Sam Jackson.  And Mr. Jackson, a comic book fan from way back, did not miss the opportunity to play the character in over a dozen MCU vehicles and counting.  Which led to a generation of young Marvel-philes don’t give a crap about any of the above (as indeed, you may not either) and think either Fury ALWAYS WAS Sam Jackson, or at least should have been.  Thereby creating a problem when the Ultimate universe came to an end about a decade ago, cleverly solved when it turned out that Nick had had a dalliance with a lady of African descent some decades ago, leading to the birth of Marcus (“Nick Fury Jr.”) Johnson.  And clearly the lies and double-crossing continue, because either the woman was a shape-shifting alien whose genes totally overwrote Fury’s or she actually was sleeping with one Mr. Samuel Leroy Jackson at around the same time, because Nick, Jr. looks NOTHING LIKE his alleged dad except for the possibly Lamarckian-inherited tendency toward left eye damage.

 

But it’s a good thing he’s there because it means he can hold down the fort while his dad ages up fast (having used the last of the Infinity Formula to do a solid for the Winter Soldier) and travels to the moon to shoot The Watcher in his big ol’ head for reasons never fully explained, except that it allowed him to harvest an eye and become the Watcher-like Unseen himself, until the Watcher reappeared (not an LMD, just Terribly Impressive in his own right) and made him his Watcher-“herald”.  Which is odd in itself because no one announces the Watcher’s presence.  He isn’t trying to destroy your planet and doesn’t want to be the center of attention if he does go anywhere.  I guess you can hardly expect a cosmic entity to have a “sidekick”.

 

But why, WHY am I telling you all this, I hear you saying.  “Sir, I have been reading this “review” for some time now and I am no closer to determining whether or not I should lay down my six bucks (actually $5.99, but keep the change) for this current issue of a Fury #1 comic book that actually came out this decade!”

 

BECAUSE that is the essence of the whole book!  Writer Al (Immortal Hulk) Ewing had to name check sixty years of the most tangled chronology in this single double-sized one-shot!  It opens with Samuel L. Fury using a hydrojet, rebreather, and handy 10-second-intangibility watch to penetrating the undersea “Lock Box”, hidey-hole to all kinds of hypertechnologrical goodies even better than the stuff he used to get there (Al Gore had been going to use it to store boring old Social Security, until he was defeated by the combined might of the mysterious Electoral College). 

 

As soon as he re-materializes, a bunch of masked agents have him dead to rights already!  Causing him to flash back to the time earlier that very day when he got in the special cab to pick up his latest orders!  But the cab driver knew too much about them!  So Nick Jr. had to put a gun to his head and ask him what’s up?  At which point the “cabbie” disappeared, having been revealed to be nothing more than a telepathic projection powerful enough to say suspicious dialogue while actually driving a cab!  Which was intriguing enough to send Nick Jr. to break into his own vault where these agents have been fed false information by none other than- Scorpio, who set up the whole bit with the cab!  Although this is a new new, etc. Scorpio who looks and acts a lot like Scarlet from the old G.I. Joe series.  

 

Anyway, Fury Jr. would be about to be killed by these agents whom she tricked to stop him after she needlessly lured him to the place where she was about to commit her crime, but it turns out HE tricked HER into tricking him because the agents whip their masks off and they’re all LMDs of Sam- I mean, Nick Jr., and they obey HIS orders to take HER out!  But she kills them all effortlessly with slick moves!  But Fury himself is not so easy!  He ducks her reverse roundhouse kick but it turns out she WANTED him to duck it so the special “nano-active gel” pellet on her boot heel (in the old days it would have been plain ol’ acid) can melt the the door of the safe she cunningly maneuvered their fight to the vicinity of!  After which she is able to reach in and withdraw- the Zodiac Key, and teleports out triumphantly!  Check and mate, you fool!

 

But that’s just the beginning!  Nick obvi had a teleport of some kind himself, because an hour later he is back in his pad in the city sipping from a champagne flute and letting the genetic scanalyzer that he has next to the bathroom work on the single hair he picked up from the fight.  While he waits, he leafs through some “picto-files” (similar to those you might keep in mylar bags) to get some backstory on what is going on.  That’s the cue for the art team to switch up and let first Tom Reilly and then Adam Kubert take over from Scot Eaton and Cam Smith to wink at the style of the earlier books.  Then back to the present day as Ramon Rosanas flips it to cosmic mode for a look at what’s going on with Nick Sr. and Uatu on the moon.

 

Think you understood that?  Think you have the guts, the grit, the athleticism, trickery, and armament to follow in Nick’s teleport-tracer and figure out what’s going on?  Then pick up “Who Is… the Scorpio?” and realize that you’ll never know for sure.

 

Rating:
ComicsOnlineModelDecoy has been programmed to give this 5/5 stars for 6 decades of sheerest insanity encapsulated in 40 short pages.

 

—

 

Remember to keep Sam Having Infinite Extra Life Decoys for more reviews, interviews, and everything spy pop culture!