Pick of the Week

Story by Garth Ennis
Art by Goran Parlov
Cover by Dave Johnson

Size: 32 pages
Price: 3.99

A glass of champagne in your hand. A terry cloth robe. Recounting the glories and defeats of your past into a microphone attached to a reel-to-reel. Three passed out hookers in the bed next to you.

Who among us hasn’t been in that situation?

When Fury MAX #1 opened we saw Nick Fury, sitting forlornly in a chair, wearing a terry cloth robe, a burning cigar and a glass of booze in one hand, and a microphone attached to a reel-to-reel in the other, as he recounted his disastrous adventure in French Indo-China. Now, as Fury MAX #4 opens up and we’ve moved on to his next mission in Cuba, the camera has pulled out to reveal three sleeping hookers in the bed next to him. I can’t imagine what we’ll see when he move on to the next arc.

When we last saw Nick Fury he was stumbling mutely into the jungle, having suffered a severe concussion while the French Indo-Chinese natives (now calling themselves Vietnamese) roundly defeated his French Foreign Legion allies. He had been surrounded by death on a grand and vicious scale and because of his injury he couldn’t do anything but watch it all happen. We’ve now moved ahead to 1961 and Fury, with just a touch of gray in his temples, and still a field operative with the CIA, is now training the Cuban exiles who will lead the invasion of Cuba that the world will come to know as The Bay of Pigs.

And Nick Fury is not happy.

He’s not happy about being stuck as a training officer who never gets to see any of the action in the field. And he’s not happy about this whole plan to invade Cuba. He thinks that it has disaster written all over it.

Over course it does. Garth Ennis is a student of war history. Even if you’ve never talked to him about the subject, that much is evident just from reading his books. Here he uses Nick Fury to make some very trenchant points as to why the CIA’s plan to use Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in order to overthrow the new Communist leader Fidel Castro is probably going to end in disaster. Sure, Ennis has the benefit of hindsight (The Bay of Pigs was a disaster) but he gives good reasons why a man as astute in the art of war and its tactics as Nick Fury would have good reason to worry that he is sending his trainees to their deaths.

Of course, not everyone is gung-ho about the invasion plan. A group of grizzled and angry old Cuban exiles who are working with the U.S. government to overthrow Castro don’t exactly love the plan either. But they think it has a better chance of succeeding if Castro is dead before the invasion even begins, and that’s where our old friend the colonel comes in.

They want Nick Fury to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Fury MAX is so much fun it’s hard to adequately describe why, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Garth Ennis is one of the ten best writers currently working in comics and he’s at his best when he’s writing war comics. He doesn’t get to do it that often because the market doesn’t support them so he sometimes has to backdoor into the war genre with books like these. And that’s fine because if there’s anything better in comics than war hardened, profane, world weary, hyper-capable, ladies man Nick Fury written by Garth Ennis then that’s news to me. The fact that the book is set in the “real world” dealing with real events and real people is just icing on the cake. As Fury fights and fucks his way through history we know that ultimately he’s not going to stop the Vietnam war, and he’s not going to crush the Communist regime in Cuba, but dammit he’s going to try and the failure of the mission probably won’t be on his shoulders, but most likely it will be due to the politicians or the unrelenting march of history. There’s a certain sadness to Fury MAX: we know that he’s doomed to failure, and in fact, Fury usually knows it too.

This book would still be good based on the writing alone, but with artist Goran Parlov it elevates to something great. He’s worked with Ennis before and you can see why they are working together again: they have great comic book chemistry and it shows on the page. When you’re visualizing a Garth Ennis script like this you’ve got to not only be able to convincingly handle the technical side of things and draw a wide variety of weapons and vehicles and planes, but also convey war situations and accurately portray an array of nationalities. Parlov does it all and then some. He doesn’t skimp on pages or detail and his gritty cartoony style is perfect for a book like this. He’s a solid storyteller who, like Nick Fury, does what it takes to get the job done.

If you’ve heard about this book and have though about giving it a try, you don’t need to have read the first three issues, Fury MAX #4 is set up as a jumping on point, and it’s a good one.

It’s rare that a book like this comes out of nowhere to instantly become one of my favorites (and it’s triply rare that the same book will become a favorite of Josh, Ron, and myself) but here we are with Fury MAX.

Conor Kilpatrick
I hope the next arc doesn’t reveal a donkey…
conor@ifanboy.com