And I say good. This is a great story, on it's own. If the studios just wanted to push another safe, G-rated, comic-property, waste of time down our gullet, and this gave them cold feet, then I'm glad it got quashed.

Maybe "It will make your eyes bleed" will find its way onto Tarot as a pull-quote.

That's cool, Mike. You really should read an issue of Tarot, though. It will make your eyes bleed (if that's your thing).

And yes, my expectations were on the high side- I loved Preacher & Hitman, and thought Transmetropolitan was consistently well-drawn. I didn't find the humor in Fury funny, and thought the violence was too much. I thought Robertson's art turned over-rendered and ugly. That is not to say he's a bad artist, he just didn't draw in a style that appealed to me. In fact, given the story and art, I'd say "ugly" is the first adjective I'd use to describe Fury.

I stand corrected, Omar. Like I said, I have read very little of the 1960s Fury stuff. It doesn't matter, ultimately, because as you point out, the series doesn't need to be about the 1960s Nick Fury. It's a story of a warrior who doesn't want to stop fighting but can't admit it.

Awesome covers, though.

Uh...how so?

Granted, it's not quite as egregious as the current crop of Popular Franchise: Fairy Tales miniseries, but it is a sad commentary on the current comics market when a writer of Ennis's caliber telling a story of the series' caliber has to weld it onto one of the existing trademarks to get the tale to the printers and the shelves.

Seriously, there are loads of very, very Cold War Marvel characters in the 60s -- Iron Man, Hank Pym, etc. -- but ironically, Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. are among the very few Marvel heroes of that era who literally never battled a Soviet opponent during that entire decade.

In point of fact, very little of the Bond genre involved taking on the Soviets. The Bond movies pointedly changed some of Fleming's definitely Soviet novel villains into the non-national, and in fact somewhat anti-ideological SPECTRE. The Man from UNCLE actually had a Russian as one of the heroes of the show, with both the USA and USSR putting aside their differences to take on the greater menace of THRUSH. Bond parodies like In Like Flint and Get Smart used generic mad scientists or HYDRA-esque independent terrorists as baddies.

Calling that material a Cold War trope is a grotesque misreading, insofar as the entire superspy genre of the 1960s was bizarrely insistent on moving the conflict away from the East-West divide. To the extent that any of it plays off of the Cold War, it's by utilizing villains who exploit Cold War tensions (and Cold Warriors) for their own nonideological pursuit of power. It is, in short, a deconstruction of the Cold War before the fact, often using stereotypical Nazi imagery to refger back to the decade when the USA and USSR were on the same side (well, sort of).

Ennis may write it in for his story's purpose, but it is a "writing-in" that exists nowhere else, and one that seems to have been pinnned on a genre and a character that Ennis...well, I'll stay with "grotesquely misreads."

Loved Fury's appearance in the Mother Russia arc as well.

In any case, though, I did like this series. I regarded it as absolutely positively 100% outside of "regular" Marvel contiunity, which was good, since it alloed Ennis to do things with the character you would never get away with if this was the same guy who was always playing poker with Steve Rogers, Reed Richards, and Ben Grimm.

I wrote a very in-depth review of this miniseries when if first came out in 2002. Here's a link:

http://www.geocities.com/benherman_2000/writings/column026.html