If there’s one thing anyone knows about Nick Fury, white or black, it’s that he has secrets. His secrets have secrets. And those secrets have secrets. And so on. He IS clandestine personified.
So what’s the big deal of this issue? Fury “confesses” that he’s been protecting the world – secretly – since World War 2 from alien threats, from before the Avengers, thankyouverymuch! He’s had to do some pretty terrible things in order to keep these horrors unknown from the world – but not from The Watcher! Motive? I think so!
This issue reminded me of Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov’s Fury MAX series but whereas that title focused on Fury getting mixed up in the 20th century’s biggest conflicts, Jason Aaron’s take in this issue is the secret history of the 20th century - the ones all the conspiracy theorists are on about including alien invasions and are actually true! Unfortunately, it sounds more fun than it reads.
This series went from being a murder mystery to a double murder mystery back to a single murder mystery – the ducking and weaving is ok, I guess, but in the wake of Fury’s issue-long speech? It’s underwhelming. We get answers but rather than a big A-HA! it’s more of a oh… k…. zzzzz…… Probably because the questions in the first place were pretty dull. Who killed the monster in the weird dimension Strange and Punisher have been standing around in for three issues? Who cares – what is that monster anyway!?
On the one hand, Fury’s telling us things that are supposed to be scandalous, or at least morbidly interesting, and they’re not, and on the other, it’s revealing a quality to Fury’s identity we already knew about. Fury’s been involved in secret ops for years?! Duh. The real questions that we want to know about – what is the Unseen (which is on the cover)? Why is Fury so old suddenly? Did he kill The Watcher? – remain unanswered.
The issue has really great art from Mike Deodato once again who shows us a range of imaginative alien craziness from soldiers to generals, ships and robot suits, and even what murdering a planet looks like.
Maybe if you’re a Fury fan, you’ll enjoy this more. Maybe it’ll read better in the collected trade. But as a single issue, I found it quite unsatisfying and boring.
Original Sin #5
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