Comics Formulas That Work 1: Nick Fury

This column marks the beginning of another series in the Profiles feature, examining comics notions that work, regardless of genre, and regardless of what corner of comics - either comic books or newspapers - that presented the material to whatever large or small sample of humanity in their original published form.

And, owing to luck of the draw, we come first to the sixties comics concept of Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D., a body of work from the high Silver Age, which, though tangent to Marvel's superhero comics and definitely sharing certain conventions of style, editorial model, and setting with such works, played to its own themes with its own cast in a series of episodes featuring infiltrations, betrayals, attempted coups of the world, mass engagements, and one-on-one rumbles. In essence, this body of stories examined the security perils involved in protecting the world order left in the wake of World War II, and therefore connected the modern angle of high-technology (circa a comics-universe 1967) to a number of figures from that war.

Nick Fury, an infantry sergeant in Silver Age comics about the Second World War, came to pull a second shift in comics, dragging most of his hide, an endless stream of smelly cigars, and a chutzpah that brought him, alive, out of the European Theater of Operations in the 1940s. Refurbished, he continued his fight against new enemies as Colonel Fury, head of S.H.I.E.L.D., an agency that pushed the state of the art for technology, intelligence, and military operations at select points in the Marvel universe.

And, through the hands of sixties talents such as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (concept creators and early writers), writer Roy Thomas, and particularly the under-anthologized Jim Steranko, Strange Tales came to feature a remarkable series of stories, bursting off the page in a way that pulled both from the Lee-era comics model and the themes of front page news. Those fortunate enough to own the originals or canny enough to acquire the recent reprint trade paperbacks might, with the works in hand, wonder why many other pieces hit the stands while these works waited so long for suitable anthologization.

Making or Failing the Grade in Comics

Not all comics, after all, make the cut. Even where, by modern standards, first-tier name talents participate in converting pencil and board to what arrives on the newsstand, the piece that makes it into the readers' hands may fail to satisfy, and these failures often proceed from lack of (or failure to grasp the opportunities inherent in) a suitably fertile defining concept.

When a comic fails to impress me, my critical impulses incline me to define precisely why - generally by inclining me to ask what it did wrong, or, instead, what it failed to do. For instance, to use (or abuse) a semi-recent example, I read a late-2000 issue of Wolverine that Rob Liefeld wrote and Ian Churchill illustrated, and found it somewhat wanting. Why? The formula didn't have enough going for it - I found in that issue a long fight in the sewers, with Wolverine and Spider-Man going up against a small army of semi-humanoid goons.

The presence of some of the required ingredients of a superhero comic, including costumed steroid kings in improbable outfits performing unlikely deeds against some kind of impossible goon or goons did not suffice to make this comic a must-have piece (and I do not mean by this to slight fans of Liefeld or Churchill). It lacked the minimum set of hooks to draw a reader into the book, those storytelling devices that pump the reader's adrenaline, electrify his cerebral cortex, and invite him to relate to the troubles of the hero(es) depicted within a book. All in all, that issue of Wolverine offered a simple fight scene in a marginally interesting arena with a generic nemesis, with only minimal logical justification for the whole series of events.

With omission identified in one piece, it would serve well to analyze a few comics concepts and delve into what made them work. Therefore, with this column begins another series on (aesthetically) successful comics formulae, jumping around with no particular chronological order between a number of well-rounded pieces to observe what creators injected to make them work.

The Thin Line

Nick Fury treatments worth noticing begin with the premise of dangerous geopolitical forces that, but for the exceptional efforts of heroic men, might wash over our civilization like a tidal wave and carry away those elements we consider fundamental virtues of our culture, including, but not limited to, liberty, prosperity, and our national identity. He contends best against things that would change and redefine us in the same destructive sortie, knowing that enemies seek to demoralize, terrorize, and enslave, as well as the more common desires of generic superhero-comics goons to simply rob or murder.

Tom Clancy could tell you that the ubiquitous fears unleashed by hotter decades of the Cold War provide storytelling hooks, as well as a ready-made context for heroism and villainy. Back in its Timely days, Marvel Comics had failed to make a success of communist-bashing superheroes in doomed attempts to repackage Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch, but a retooled version of the conflict between a Free World and a Devouring Power (or more than one) provided the essential conflict in the "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." stories from Strange Tales and the short-lived magazine of the same name.

Heroic men equipped with magnificent hardware to confront the prospective conquerors of the world provided a thin line between the life we know and slavery, serfdom, or death. This line stood more clearly for a generation that fought the Second World War, the younger of whom approached perhaps forty years of age at the time of the appearance of the classic period of S.H.I.E.L.D. stories; and, if they took the proceedings in Viet Nam as somewhere between farce and tragedy, they saw such as an aberration and not the destiny of the United States as a young superpower. The sense of doom and futility much less burdened that generation, since they had seen how the deeds of determined men could make or unmake powers that sought to swallow the world whole.

The Persistence of the War

Central figures in the S.H.I.E.L.D. cast originated in the Sergeant Fury stories of the first half of the 1960s, and the World War Two setting frequently brings elements forward into the later concept. At the cost of ultimately fighting more remnants of the Third Reich than Germany could have ever manifested in its most bellicose heyday, using these connections grounded principal characters in conflicts of an earlier era which had widely-acknowledged factions of good and evil, sparing the corrosive comparisons of moral equivalency which attend conflicts with some variants of totalitarianism.

Though the passage of a generation since the high point of the Nick Fury concept has made his grounding in World War II increasingly troublesome, his history as a veteran of the war in Europe added credibility in 1965, making him old enough to have learned a few tricks and made a few connections over the years without pushing him into the territory of heroes so old that only the supernatural can explain how they still manage to walk the earth (let alone fight crime).

As the principals of the American Civil War generally connected to each other as onetime allies from the Mexican Wars somewhat earlier in the nineteenth century, so, too, would this link cast a tone on the conflicts between Fury, his agency, and the forces of various powers bent on the kind of world domination averted by the collapse of the Axis powers in the forties.

The Geopolitical Menace Du Jour

At any particular point during the "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." stories, an overwhelming menace posed to destroy or enslave the world. That various parties took this mantle of worldwide Threat to Man and overall Devourer of Freedom mattered little; each, in his/its turn, stood ready to send humanity to the dungeon or graveyard and, but for the timely intervention of S.H.I.E.L.D. in general or Nick Fury in particular, would have succeeded.

That the focus of the threat would shift from place to place, rather than persistently remaining in the hand or hands of a particular inevitable faction, also reflected somewhat the experience of those who lived through the Second World War at an age old enough to remember how powers could shift from enemy to ally with no obvious logic to the change. Even where geopolitical interpretations centered communist powers as the origins of all trouble, after all, the source would vary - at moments, global politics observers saw China and Russia alternating roles in a kind of Good Communist Cop, Bad Communist Cop play - and the generation that fought World War II might remember Russia as a previous ally.

History, then, argued for a flexible center of destructive military and political forces, and this worked well with the basic comics notion that readers did not want to see the same hero fighting the same fight with the same villain forever. And, if by the late sixties Americans even tired of the notion of expansionist communist states as somehow threatening - sometimes, after all, they perceived their own society in a similar role - a theoretical enemy loosely based on combinations of salient features of various totalitarian threats could do the job. Thus, Hydra, until the steam ran out of them as an enemy; thus, entrepreneurs of scientific terror; thus, self-promoters who used high-technology organized crime as an instrument towards creating themselves a global base of power.

We could recognize the enemy, after all, by his desire to plant his jackboot in our faces without worrying too much about the language he speaks or the political slogans he cares to repeat. And, furthermore, Cold War logic insisted that only eternal vigilance could contain the ambition of pretenders to world domination. Where men of goodwill struck down one tyrant, then, a combination of opportunity and flawed human nature would guarantee that another might rise to replace him.

In the 1960s, the pervasive sense of danger resonated well with the notion of a succession of contestants the position of Tyrant of the World, each of whom might fall, in turn, only if the united powers of freedom stood against him.

Technological Window-Dressing

These stories definitely reflect a technophile's ethos. Gadgetry abounded in these tales, both for instrumental and aesthetic purposes; while gadgets served to pull Fury free from many a cliffhanger, others appeared mainly for the very weirdness of the concept, including a variety of enhanced garments (essentially anything but Nick Fury's skivvies might serve as armor or armament), accessories (exploding cigars, and other tricked-out tobaccos often too silly to describe), vehicles (flying cars, invisible cars, armored cars, and cars with combinations of the previous features).

While we can snicker at ludicrous gimmicks like the tactical exploding cigar (and what a Three Stooges-like series of images that one elicits!), technology played a pivotal role in the Cold War. Spy planes, spy satellites, remote monitoring devices, or even the infrastructure behind the economies of both East and West, all required deft application of available innovation to sustain hundreds of millions of people even in marginal states. To contend between powers required even more.

The smorgasbord of up-and-coming technology of the pre-computer generation held a great deal to fascinate those born in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the 20th century, human ingenuity would craft the first practical flying machines; by mid-century, these would routinely cross oceans; and by the beginning of the last third of the century, human beings would walk on the moon. Nor did the technological breakthroughs of the era confine themselves to aerospace.

Microconductor technology pushed electronic devices into smaller and smaller packages. In 2001, consumers can procure devices like a color television roughly the size of a cigarette case; in the 1960s, compressing a radio into a similar volume of space stood as a phenomenal achievement to those who remembered the console radios, heavy cabinets that stood about four feet tall and ran on the old technology of vacuum tubes. Audiovisual consumer technology moved into higher fidelities.

Combine the technology of transistors and the breakthroughs of aerospace in the sixties and marvels like the spy satellite become inevitable; and, just as developments like the telephone seemed to threaten to shift the balance of power away from Everyman and into the hands of malevolent powers intent on his subjugation and destruction, so, too, could the wonders of the laboratory provide a means of insulating oneself against creeping tyranny. So much more so, one might assume, would the finesse of science armor against those who attempted to make war by traditional means. And to this equation, if one adds the kind of exaggeration at which comics excel, one reaches the point of bombs disguised as cigars, armored suits that look like cloth, and the entire baggage of pseudotechnology that might both fascinate and amuse readers of that generation and this one.

Science-Fictional Mass Engagements

A Sergeant Fury and the Howlers tale might end in a flurry of machine gun fire and hand grenades; but for a piece set in the technology-heavy and definitely colorful sixties, one could expect considerably more distinctive accessorization.

Fatigues gave way to the skin-tight and frequently leather-black S.H.I.E.L.D. coverall; gunpowder weapons gave way to blasters, zappers, ink-drop energy dispensers, inertial whatsits and sonic whosits of astounding variety, a cornucopia of ordnance and fantasy-tech that seemed to appear in an unending stream from the fevered brows of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, and Jim Steranko. Explosions and fires took on a variety no longer limited by history and expanded into forms provided by the imagination.

Fights, furthermore, no longer strictly belonged on the ground or sea; they might take place underneath the water, in space (in the Helicarrier or outside it) or anywhere made accessible by technology in the age of the first moon landing.

The war comic, the science fiction comic, and the superhero comic all served as ancestors to such large-scale battle scenes. In context such illustrated sequences possibly transcended the ancestral genres each provided its own set of colorful components: four-color costumes, weapons that shot some kind of technobabble-energy, line-art soldiers making impossible escapes and achieving impossible victories.

Terrorist Cult Movements and Malign Overlords

Dramatic interpretations frequently make events more compelling by drawing the cast from a macro-human scale to that of individual heroic (or villainous) figures contending against one another. A feud between civilizations, thus, could render down to something like S.H.I.E.L.D. versus Hydra, each agency representing one of the contentious superpowers.

Hydra served as the central prototype for the high-tech terror cult devoted to world conquest and/or destruction. Keeping things moving and interesting required, however, that Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. have something and someone else to confront. Sometimes, however, no great distinction beyond costuming defined these enemies.

For instance, an army of costumed Hydra goons could (from a storytelling side) step aside for a numerically similar gang of understudies drawn from costumed A.I.M. goons, with their beekeeper-like headgear; or for the Yellow Claw's goons; or, indeed, for megalomaniacal costumed culties so common for the period, like the Legion of the Living Lightning.

One-on-One Rumbles

The Iliad depicts the Trojan War much as a series of personal duels. Perhaps this reflects less an artistic convention and more a preserved memory of a more ancient and duel-centered, ritualistic form of warfare. However, the logic of storytelling may have dictated a focus that portrayed war in terms of one-on-one disputes, such as the pairing of combatants Hektor and Achilles.

Nick Fury, in both the Sergeant and Colonel versions, belonged among a number of heroes that we recognize as meaning business once we see that someone or something has shredded their shirts. Whether confronting Fury himself, or perhaps the Hulk, or even the venerable Doc Savage, these figures use tattered cloth partially as a visual enhancement to their action sequences and, perhaps, partially as a secondary sexual characteristic. The Real Man - cigar-chomping, crass-as-necessity-demands, fist-flinging, unstoppable human dynamo variety - enjoys the privilege of just such a shirtless style. In the one-on-one confrontation, too, we know that the good guys play skins, the bad guys shirts.

Although real-world espionage frequently hinges on extremely complex relationships between many players of often very dubious loyalty, things become easier to resolve, and stories easier to tell, as a duel between exemplars of each of the striving factions. In many ways, rendering violence down to single conflicts places the camera in the best position for appreciating the drama involved. The human costs do less fading into mere statistics for an audience that can see the faces of the principals in extreme close-up.

Frequently, therefore, S.H.I.E.L.D. stories ended with one-on-one rumbles between Fury himself and the Main Goon or his designated proxy. Variants existed even within such formulaic scenes; Fury might attempt to prevail with technique, with character (his refusal to accept defeat), or with gadgets (in abundance). Where these tools showed wear from overuse, luck and the deus ex machina in the form of the timely arrival of S.H.I.E.L.D. compatriots would serve to save his metaphorical bacon.

The Loud, the Weird, and the Dreamlike

One could say that Kirby invented loud, at least in its Silver Age aspect, but Steranko came to Marvel and his role on the Colonel Fury feature with a fine understanding of the prerequisite adrenaline that made the comics of the day work. From finishing Kirby layouts, to doing a passable Kirby style himself, to evolving a distinct Steranko style flavored with a tasty Kirby seasoning, Steranko knew what Kirby had taught about comics. Kirby's best works attacked the reader in a pincer movement that simultaneously accelerated the heartbeat while stimulating the imagination.

To this Kirby essence, Steranko brought in cinematographic and pop-art elements of tone and surrealism that distinctly owed to his own vision, absolving him from a very early point of any credible claims that he worked solely in derivative, though well-executed, forms.

Given the origins of the Nick Fury concept - a World War II comics character of the 1960 grafted, in part, to the techno-spy prototype of period pieces like "Man from U.N.C.L.E." and the James Bond films, and freed of the cinematic limitations imposed by budgets and period special effects technology - one might note that the tone-heavy and dreamlike quality of the later Steranko Fury pieces represented a delightful and unexpected additional feature.

Comics That Try Harder

Though some debate still persists about the point of origin of the philosophy of the more vital pieces of the Silver Age - what we could call "Comics That Try Harder" - we need not enter into the Mighty Comics versus Marvel Comics arguments to understand that the sixties saw a body of work appear from the concern self-designated The House of Ideas which did, indeed, try harder. DC Comics, the elder sibling of all existing superhero comics publishers, changed slowly and sometimes not at all, though it had solid talent and a few entrepreneurs of popular entertainments able to make a more staid approach work through different angles (and look to names like Weisinger and Schwartz here).

For, if in the seventies comics languished in some ways as the Silver Age came to parody itself by excessive recycling of formula approaches, this came from a desire to coast rather than a willingness to charge ahead at full speed. But the Steranko-era Nick Fury piece held back in no particulars astute observation can identify. After all, where you have surrealism, film noir, Kirbyesque bombast, ray-guns, Nazi war criminals, pop art homages, cigar-chomping veterans of the Second World War, secret societies aiming to take over the world, things blowing up, space aliens, spies, alien proxies, leather body suits, zeppelin fortresses, floating islands, and, doubtless, other pieces unfortunately lost to short-term memory, you have in a simple description effectively simulated what sounds like a statement of purest Stan Lee hyperbole and bombast. However, the previous inventory exaggerates nothing.

This ability to give more than one could expect from an action feature displays one angle that made the concept work so well, but a set of components like those mentioned above could, very easily, degenerate a creation into near-incoherence when haphazardly slapped together. If creators worked backwards - say, by tossing out a random set of elements and attempting to find a unifying theme - they could easily invest a monthly work with all the salient deficits that attach to too-frequent megacrossover events. The essence, however, resides in working forwards from the nuclear idea around which such a menagerie can logically orbit without straining the pretext. This, then, shows the strength of the Nick Fury franchise, as realized in the adrenal comics of the 1960s before the ugly aspects of the business side effectively drove Jim Steranko (and, as time went on, many others) from the business of conventional comics publishing; and the excellence of delivery, through Steranko's fabrication on the foundations that Lee and Kirby set down, shows how well the piece can work, even back in the day when superhero comics routinely extinguished other approaches that contended for the same shelf space.

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Column 289. Completed 09-DEC-2001.