Don't yield! Back SHIELD!

…or Wally frolics among the pages of his favorite statist, Cold War comic book series.

It’s been a slow week. We had a new roof put on the house last week. We’ll be launching into phase three of our “home revitalization” in the next few days — tearing up the lawn, replanting with drought-resistant plants, some flagstone work for the patio. In the meantime, though, a slow week.

So when I saw a package sitting on the front porch yesterday, and it turned out to be my eagerly anticipated copy of Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD Vol. 1, things started to perk up. I dived right into the book, revisiting old comic book ground I hadn’t traipsed through in more than 40 years.

This very handsome book includes all the Strange Tales pre-hardcore Jim Steranko stuff. Steranko did draw over Jack Kirby’s layouts for the last three stories in this volume, but he didn’t begin to blossom as artist and writer until just after the last story presented here. So this hardcover is made up of 20 short SHIELD stories from Strange Tales #135-153 and Tales of Suspense #78 (technically, a Captain America tale), plus a pre-SHIELD Nick Fury appearance in Fantastic Four, circa 1963. Kirby fully illustrated maybe five of these yarns, although he provided breakdowns for all of them. John Severin, Joe Sinnott, Don Heck, Howard Purcell, and Ogden Whitney picked up the art chores to varying degrees of success on the remaining stories. So all the series’ initial up’s and down’s, and its shaky footing for almost two years before Steranko’s earthshattering run, are here to experience again. The 1965 Stan Lee-Jack Kirby SHIELD debut in ST #135 is just as I remembered it from age 10 — a quick 12 pages of boffo action and excitement, featuring hooded HYDRA baddies, a super-cool airborne Porsche, and that wonderful heli-carrier that’s now survived 43 years with little variation (that’s how cool Kirby was). Classic. From there, though, the SHIELD series doesn’t quite take a full nosedive but it does move into spotty territory. Kirby’s pencils immediately disappear, for one thing, which hobbles the first five-part HYDRA story, although it manages to be fun overall. A three-part story about an assault on SHIELD headquarters benefits tremendously from a partial return of Kirby. But a two-parter about a guy called The Druid is a real low-point, and the multi-part introduction of AIM (the guys with the bright beekeepers’ outfits) is really just a rerun of the earlier HYDRA tale. Things look up with the last four stories, one penciled by John Buscema and the final three by Steranko. These episodes mark the return of HYDRA, which was a very good thing that later became exhilarating when Steranko fully took over the series.

Don’t get me wrong. Despite some weak stuff (most of which I’d forgotten over four decades), this is a pretty solid collection. And for fans of Marvel’s “coming of age” in the mid to late 1960s, the book’s a lot of fun. And it provides essential background for a full appreciation of Jim Steranko’s brief, shining comics career, which should make up all of Vol. 2. Now that, friends, will be a reprint volume to be reckoned with.

Before government agents scared me...

Speaking of Nick Fury, which I was in my last post, here’s the cover of the very first Marvel comic I ever bought with my own money — Strange Tales #135, which featured the debut of “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD,” a glorious 12-page story scripted by Stan “The Man” Lee and drawn by the great Jack “King” Kirby. (The bonus was a fantastic 10-page Doctor Strange story by Steve Ditko in the back of the book.) This was May 1965, I was 10 years old, the comic cost only 12¢, and of course the cover caught my eye. After all, I’d just spent eight months watching The Man from UNCLE on TV and had only that month seen Goldfinger for the first time — and I was still too young to see government agents as threatening. Very, very neat stuff for a youngster living in the middle of the Cold War.

Anyway, I collected that first full uninterrupted run of SHIELD stories right through 1968 or 1969, then sold them all for pennies when I moved away to college in 1972. I wish to God I still had ’em. But here’s the good news. While web-browsing yesterday afternoon, I discovered that all the episodes (Strange Tales #135-153) right up to Jim Steranko’s groundbreaking run have been collected for the very first time into a hardcover book as part of the Marvel Masterworks series; they’ve also thrown in Fury’s appearance with Captain America in Tales of Suspense #78 (1966) and his 1963 pre-SHIELD appearance in Fantastic Four #21 (1963). Naturally, I ordered a copy right away. I’ve been dying to read these tales again for more than two decades. (I imagine the Steranko tales will appear eventually in a Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury Vol. 2, and I’ll order the book as soon as I hear of it. But those mindblowing, state-of-the-art stories, which shook up the comics industry in the late 1960s, were republished a few years ago in a paperback edition, so I’ve revisited them recently. It’ll be great to have them in hardcover, though.)

Life is good.

Warning: HULK contains tobacco images!

I’m told that trailers for The Incredible Hulk, which opens Friday, include the warning “Contains depictions of tobacco consumption.” I hadn’t noticed. But I have noticed that smoking is so rare in movies these days that when it does occur, it’s almost startling.

I’m wondering, though, who’ll do most of the politically incorrect smoking in the Hulk film. My guess: Samuel L. Jackson as the traditionally cigar-chomping Nick Fury, director of SHIELD, whose post-credits cameo in Iron Man was, as I recall, free of the beloved stogie.