Ultimates #21, April 2013
1965. We entered the age of acronyms.
SPECTRE. SMERSH. UNCLE. THRUSH. THUNDER. Et al.
The spy craze had given birth to super secret organizations for both good guys and the bad.
Enter SHIELD, 55 years ago. Nick Fury had already joined the Marvel Universe as WW 2 commando Sgt. Fury in 1963. And he showed up later that year in Fantastic Four, 20 years in the future (present day) as a CIA officer. But now he was ColonelFury, head of the super secret spy agency SHIELD. (Originally, Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage and Law-Enforcement Division.)
In 12 short pages, we are not only introduced to SHIELD, but the villainous Hydra (Not an acronym, one of the few) and of course those great gadgets like the crazy heli-carrier. Comics, as noted previously, do not have budget constraints. Artists can go wild, and as we know when it came to wild tech, Kirby always delivered. All the bells and whistles of the Bond films, plus much, much more.
As a very young reader, I appreciated that Fury was a unique character; living in two different eras, in Sgt. Fury and in Shield. And that he interacted with Captain America and Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) in both of those eras.
SHIELD was another great Lee and Kirby creation, but the series became something extraordinary when Jim Steranko took over, first pencilling over Jack’s layouts, and eventually writing, pencilling, inking and even coloring some those epic SHIELD stories himself. (More on that in the next post.)
Dave Bullock’s modern cover is a pseudo-homage to one of Steranko’s great Shield covers, SHIELD # 4, with the uniform almost identical, minus the dagger on the boots. The background references the groundbreaking pop psychedelic look that Steranko himself was creating at the time.
If Marvel ever decided to create a SHIELD animated series, I’d want it to look exactly like this.
