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Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of...SHIELD Volume 2
This should really be called Jim Steranko Vol. 1 because it is 100% Jim. First, let me tell what this volume collects. In this volume we have Strange Tales #’s 154-168 as well as the first three issues of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. This spans a period of time from March 1967 to August 1968 and each title came out monthly. Steranko illustrates every issue and writes every issue save for the first one, which was handled by Roy Thomas. Fury shared Strange Tales with Dr. Strange so both guys shared the cover. Fury was on the odd numbered titles while Strange was on the even numbered titles. Each of Fury’s stories was 12-pages long except for the last five issues. I did say this was all-Steranko and I wasn’t kidding. Jim pens a six-page introduction, talking about his time on Fury as well as starting to work with Marvel, his arguments with Stan about his writing on the title (including a story on how he was fired once) and all the initiatives he had planned for Fury. It’s really interesting to hear Steranko talk about the style that really revolutionized the business. He tends to get a bit self-congratulatory at times, even putting in quotes from other author’s about himself, but I would probably do the same thing if I had the impact that Steranko did.
Spoilers Ahead
-Strange Tales #154- Steranko really unleashes here, since he’s been released from the shackles of just finishing Kirby’s art. The splash page is just awesome. He’s still in a very traditional mode early on in his run, as evidenced by the paneling used in this issue. We have our cast of Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, Laura Brown (daughter of the first Supreme Hydra), Sitwell and Bronson, the latter being a Hydra agent in disguise. This issue features a Hydra super-robot attacking Fury and Bronson frames Brown as the Hydra leader in one of SHIELD’s new devices. There’s a great panel here of Fury in bones in black and white spirals that showed new and interesting things were on their way thanks to Steranko.
-Strange Tales #155- We see the fantastic Vortex machine in this issue as another Hydra agent has infiltrated SHIELD. Fury is attacked by two Hydra assassins and he makes quick work of them. So Fury finds one of the infiltrators as Bronson hypnotizes Dugan and Sitwell to attack Fury. Their hypnosis eventually fails and Fury is able to escape them, overload the Hydra machine and find Laura Brown.
-Strange Tales #156- Bronson takes Brown away but he brings her to the Hydra base. Fury is seemingly killed in an explosion on the heli-carrier as Bronson reveals he’s running Hydra and he delivers an ultimatum to the world. There’s a bomb on the Heli-carrier that will destroy the whole world. Fury reveals he’s not dead and was actually inside the Hydra base. The big reveal (in a great double page spread) was Baron von Strucker was really behind Hydra.
-Strange Tales #157- Fury was captured last issue but he makes his escape a device that makes him invisible. There is some jaw-dropping splashes here of Fury battling Hydra goons before battling Strucker and his Satan Claw! Fury puts up a fight but it’s not enough by the end of the issue.
-Strange Tales #158- Fury continues his hopeless fight but he manages to escape. He isolates von Strucker and uses a Hydra device to put Strucker’s face on his own. Unfortunately, the Hydra agents unmask Fury and send him into a deatomizer and Fury’s dead. Von Strucker leaves with Brown and once they are safely away Strucker reveals he’s actually Fury since he put two masks on Strucker. Furthermore, he’s put the Doomsday Device on the Hydra base and up in smoke it goes. Bye-bye Hydra!
-Strange Tales #159- The gang relaxes out in the city as all of Fury’s cronies take off on leave. Fury heads off to his pad, shaves, and goes to a secret SHIELD base where he spars with Capt. America in front of the SHIELD agents. Contessa Valentina Allegro De Fontaine makes her first appearance here, too. This was good breather between big arcs but kept enough going in the 12-pages to make it interesting.
-Strange Tales #160- There’s a great splash page here showing the Blackout of New York from the year before and Fury and Cap reveal to new arrival (and Atlas classic) Jimmy Woo how the Blackout was actually caused by them. We go back in time (with Fury first donning the black leather outfit that he would continue to wear) and an alien invasion that was centered in the Statue of Liberty. Fury seemingly falls to his doom off the top of Lady Liberty and Cap free-falls to his doom on his way to Reed Richards.
-Strange Tales #161- Reed and the Thing save Cap who tells them what’s been going on. Fury continues fighting off the aliens when Cap shows up with a new device that siphons the electricity off the city to defeat the aliens. That’s what caused the black out. Fury never found out who was behind the whole thing until now; The Yellow Claw.
-Strange Tales #162- Fury gets his new invisible car, showing that Fury had gadgets like Bond, possibly even cooler. Fury searches for Yellow Claw and he finds some of his flunkies and dispatches of them easily. Fury tries to impersonate one of the flunkies to get into Claw’s stronghold but his ruse is discovered and Fury drops into a watery trap.
-Strange Tales #163- Fury battles free from the octopus and manages his escape. Claw tells us that he has stolen an AIM weapon that will bring the world to its knees. His niece, Suwan, doesn’t like all these dastardly plans. Clay Quatermain makes his first appearance here as a smiley SHIELD agent and both of he and Fury dispatch AIM agents to try to steal what Claw was trying to get. Claw kills three AIM scientists to get the information he wants but Fury impersonates the fourth one and Claw vaporizes him by issue’s end!
-Strange Tales #164- Whew. Fury isn’t dead. Suwan has teleported him away at the last minute. She sends him back to SHIELD. Claw is now in space with his deadly weapon. Fury is healed but he is suffering from black out problems that could end his life. Fury speeds off anyway and finds Yellow Claw. Fury ends up trapped on Claw’s ship and is in the middle of the death ray that will wipe out Manhattan.
-Strange Tales #165- Dugan and the rest of SHIELD head out to rescue Fury in a glorious double page splash. Fury chases an armored Yellow Claw but is hopelessly outmatched and Claw runs off in victory to his plane as he gets away.
-Strange Tales #166- Fury heads out after Claw and finds him in an underwater lair. SHIELD takes care of Claw’s ship as Fury navigates a really trippy few pages to get to Claw. Jimmy Woo is captured by Claw as well. Suwan runs off to save him as Fury descends upon Claw. Suwan is inadvertently killed in their battle and Woo claims revenge on both men.
-Strange Tales #167- Woo is shaken by the death of Suwan. What happens after that splash page is one of the big reasons to buy this book. It’s a four-page giant splashpage with Fury and SHIELD battling Yellow Claw. It’s just fantastic action shots that lead to Claw being revealed as a robot and final splash page that us readers see as Dr. Doom behind the whole thing in one giant chess game.
-Strange Tales #168- We end Fury’s run in here with a quirky story showing Fury battling an alien that has landed on Earth and becoming a gelatinous beast but it was all a dream, until Dugan mentions something about a UFO landing.
-Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #1- Fury’s first solo books starts with three silent pages (much to the chagrin of Stan Lee). It shows Fury’s LMD getting taken out by Fury and a strange Scorpio device. The pacing of the first issue is amazing and it really shows Steranko’s outside influences. Fury battles Scorpio, who happens to have his ship destroyed by a man looking to make it big in the crime world but he’s shot down after his money was given to the wrong person, and that person suffers a terrible fate, too. Everything was woven together so well and worked perfectly as a stand alone story.
-Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #2- Woo becomes a full-fledged member of SHIELD after passing his tests and he’s immediately thrown into the fire as he and Fury are kidnapped by some crazy scientist who calls himself Centurius. He wants to destroy the world and remake it as his own Garden of Eden. Fury and Woo manage to take out this weirdo thanks to the serendipitous arrival of a movie film crew. Another well-paced issue. There’s a silent page of Fury and Contessa getting it on that the Comics Code Authority at first found too risqué and made Steranko change it.
-Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #3- We end with a fantastic murder/horror mystery set in Ireland dealing with a ghost hound and a haunted moor. I feel like I’ve read this one recently but I can’t place where I’ve read it. It could be that it is just a familiar story (by that I mean it’s been copied a lot) but whatever the case it was an awesome way to end this collection and the art and pacing was again fantastic.
-The Bottom Line- Paroxysm. If you like that word then you will like this volume since that word appears about 10 times in this title. That’s the only criticism I can levy upon this book. This is really one of the best collections featured in any Masterwork collection and I really feel it stands up to anything they’ve ever released. It’s amazing that 40 years later that the art still leaps off the page. The pacing of the stories is equally as fantastic and it showed what an adept writer Steranko was. This really set Fury apart from the other Bond imitators and really put Fury on the course that he’d follow the rest of his time in Marvel, a no-nonsense spy with gadgets galore and the ability to get out of any trap set for him. There were some well-placed extras, including Steranko’s inking try-out on the Nick Fury, Agent of DEATH, the name before it became SHIELD, some original pages without the CCA changes, a cover illustration and the full four-page spread. It’s easily the best collection I’ve read in a long time and it could challenge as the best collection ever collected in Marvel Masterworks. The only question is what’s next for Fury? Steranko wrote #5 and that was it, and there are only 11 more issues left so there is material for another Fury Agent of SHIELD collection, but it could never compare to this. This gets the highest recommendation ever and you need to read this book if you call yourself a comic book fan.
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