Nick Fury and
Dr. Strange, oddly enough, were the TWO series that first convinced me that the "artists" (so-called) WERE the CREATORS. They were just so "extreme".
Many "Marvel" fans have NO idea that for the entire run of
Nick Fury in
STRANGE TALES, there were only 2 people writing the stories: JACK KIRBY and JIM STERANKO.
The problem, from the first (apart from the usual one) was that Kirby was so busy-- the whole idea of having him "cut back" to layouts was NOT to show other pencillers how to do it, it was so he could WRITE more stories uncredited & unpaid. And so, Kirby only did 3 episodes where he did FULL pencils-- and those had 3 different inkers (Dick Ayers - okay; Frank Giacoia - terrific; Mike Esposito - adequate).
On top of that they had a revolving door of pencillers working over Kirby's STORY layouts: John Severin, Joe Sinnott, Don Heck, Howard Purcell, more Don Heck, Ogden Whitney, John Buscema, and finally Jim Steranko.
And, you had 4 people doing the finished dialogue: the editor, Jack Kirby (1 ep.), Denny O'Neil (1 ep.) and Roy Thomas (1 ep.).
Considering how FLASHY the art looked after Kirby departed, it's no surprise that few people feel, like I do, that Kirby's WRITING on
Nick Fury was
far superior that Jim Steranko's. I mean, except for the one episode where he wrote dialogue, he wasn't even getting CREDITED for his writing!
Before moving on, I would like to point out one amusing glitch caused by an editor doing dialogue on stories he DID NOT in fact write. It's in "
Operation Brain Blast" (
ST #141 / Feb'66). Kirby closes out the first Hydra sequence halfway thru the episode, sends his men off for a furlough, and says he's gonna grab some shut-eye. The NEXT panel has Fury walking down a hallway and get mentally assaulted by the new E.S.P. division. And then the next continued sequence starts immediately. The problem, as I recall, is that the narration reads "
Meanwhile", instead of... "
TWO WEEKS LATER..." Not only does it make it look like there is NO break between stories, but, because Fury is in a completely-different part of SHIELD HQ, it makes it appear he's in two places AT THE SAME TIME.
Some people have wondered, how did a new guy like Steranko manage to take over writing as soon as he did? It's simple, IF you know what's going on behind the scenes. The editor loved riding high on Jack Kirby's work. Well... he LEFT the series one episode BEFORE Kirby did. And so, Kirby's final episode (the one where the dialogue suggests Fury had crossed paths with "Agent Bronson" -- really the Supreme Hydra in disguiuse-- back in WW2), the dialogue was taken over by Roy Thomas. NOT the story-- the dialogue. Kirby was already writing the stories. He ALWAYS was.
That episode was already Steranko's 3rd doing pencils & inks over Kirby's STORY LAYOUTS. When Kirby left. Steranko took over doing HIS OWN story layouts. HE STARTED WRITING right then. But this was not reflected in the credits, because Roy Thomas was doing his 2nd episode on dialogue. Unlike his editor, Thomas LOVED to write, and wanted to write. He once said he had "little interest" in SHIELD. But the truth is, he didn't want to stick around on a book that was already being written by somebody else. So after only 2 episodes, HE left. And Steranko was then free to do HIS OWN dialogue.
Kirby had basically done 2-1/2 parts of a massive "trilogy". Think of it as if he'd done "
STAR WARS", "
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK" and the first half of "
RETURN OF THE JEDI". All Steranko had to do was NOT screw up the last hour of the 3rd film (so to speak). HE DIDN'T. Kirby already figured out Strucker was the Supreme Hydra, Steranko revealed it, and KILLED him off. WOW. (And, truthfully, he stayed dead for decades.)
TROUBLE set in when Steranko started his 2nd storyline. The problem was... his editor's huge ego couldn't handle Steranko getting TONS OF FAN MAIL. So he started to engage in even more "editorial interference" than usual. To the detriment of the series.
J. David Spurlock pointed out in a magazie article around 20 years ago, that when Steranko wrote the 2-part sequence "
Project Blackout", it was NOT a flashback. It became a flashback on the orders of the editor, who had a supposedly-"clever" idea (IT WASN'T) to tie it in with the 1965 NYC blackout 2 years earlier. There's 2 problems with this. It caused MULTIPLE continuity glitches (trying to squeeze the sequence in between 2 panels of the "A.I.M." storyline, Fury wearing the wrong outfit in the action scenes, the E.S.P. division being out of commission, etc.), and, the whole point, tying it into the blackout, only was mentioned in a SINGLE narrative paragraph on a page where nothing in the art suggested anything to do with the blackout. You had to bend over pretty far backwards for it to make sense, if you tried thinking about it at all.
After I read about this, on my own, it occured to me that if this happened once, why not twice? On the last 3 pages of "
Armageddon" (
ST #167 / Apr'68), it's suddenly revealed that, first, The Yellow Claw Fury chased underwater was a ROBOT-- and, second, that the entire scenario was-- SUPPOSEDLY!!!-- controlled by Dr. Doom, and had been for more than 2 years. This is one of the biggest "WTF"s in 60s Marvel history.
Decades after-the-fact, I finally figured out how that should have gone. During "
Behold The Savage Sky!" (
ST #165 / Feb'68), The Yellow Claw mentions unleashing robot replicas of himself. What happened was, he ESCAPED, and Fury spent 2 entire episodes chasing down one of the robots. The final 2-page spread should have shown the REAL Yellow Claw, in a hidden base, watching and laughing, and saying, no doubt... "
THE WORLD SHALL HEAR FROM ME AGAIN." -- as Christopher Lee did at the end of each of his
FU MANCHU films.
What clinched it for me was seeing several episodes of the 1950s TV series "
THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU", in which Fu appears in the opening credits-- PLAYING CHESS. Just as we saw in that final 2-page spread.
All this apparently was a bizarre aversion by the editor to bringing back
The Yellow Claw. Connected with this was
TALES OF SUSPENSE #39 (May'63), "
The Stronghold Of Dr. Strange". In what I now believe was the FIRST
Iron Man episode, written & drawn by JACK KIRBY (before the origin story was done but then published earlier out of sequence), we get an involved sequence that introduced readers to Tony Stark, Stark Enterprises, Iron Man, and an international criminal with a daughter and an EX-Nazi sidekick. It's clear to me that Kirby intended to bring back The Yellow Claw right then, and make him Iron Man's recurring arch-enemy. But it was nixed at the last minute, the villain's name was changed, he was NEVER seen again (despite a HUGE build-up), and then,,, about a year later... Iron Man wound up getting an ASIAN arch-enemy anyway, in the form of The Mandarin.
I tampered with the cover; here's how I believe it was supposed to look...!
Anyway, in
ST #168, Fury thinks on how he's not sure if the villain he was fighting was EVER the Yellow Claw-- or if there EVER WAS a real Yellow Claw. How's that for re-writing history, to no purpose?
