Nick Fury Vs. Fin Fang Foom #1 // Review
Brighton, England. October of 1940. Nick Fury and Red Hargrove are performing a daredevil airshow for the locals. There isn’t much in the way of cash. Money seems to be drying-up all over the place. Then Sam shows-up. Sam’s an old acquaintance of theirs. They've done work for him before he fury is not interested. Doesn't want to get involved in war until the US enters the war in Europe Sam's working for a private outfit, though. There's danger in the South Pacific in. Nick Fury Vs. Fin Fang Foom #1. Seasoned storyteller J. Michael Straczynski is joined by artist Elena Casagrande and colorist Nattia Iacono.
A private contractor is sending arms to China in order to support its war against Japan. They’ve run into a delivery problem and they need Fury and his Howling Commandos to investigate. At first they’re not getting a whole lot of coherent information from the locals. An old man speaks of “a cloud with teeth.” Makes about as much sense as anything until that actually SEE the thing and it begins speaking to Nick Fury...directly in his mind. He’s going to go crazy fighting the thing, but his only hope for survival is in entering a cave...that turns out to be the monster’s den.
Straczynski is in the rather enviable position to be able to essentially write his own ticket in the pages of a comic book. He’s a successful author and producer who has put togethe quite a lot over the course of several decades. And if the guy who created Babylon 5 wants to do a one-shot featuring a few characters who aren’t exactly hugely popular....who is to stop him? As expected, Straczynski does an excellent job with the overall pacing of the action and intrigue with some very witty bits of dialogue here and there.
Cassagrande’s design on the monster is incredibly brilliant. SHe fuses her own style with the style of monster creator Jack Kirby in a sharply stylish way that both pays homage to the great artist AND allows the monster to look like a much more contemporary creation. Kirby’s style is so integral to the basic form of Fin Fang Foom that few other artists manage to bring the creature off in a way that makes sense. Cassagrande’s fusion of her style and Kirby’s is made all the more intense with some grogsou perspective work on an aerial combat between a bi-plane and a giant dragon above the mountains in China. Beautiful stuff.
Above all, Straczynski is clearly a huge fan of the comics and is very careful to place the one-shot well within the overall tapestry of a Marvel Universe continuity that not a whole lot of people necessarly feel the need to make too much fuss about. In the end, this is actually a really cool prequel to Strange Tales #89 from July of 1961. That’s a staggeringly obscure sort of a thing to be working on, but it is a HELL of a lot of fun. The issue feeds itself quite well into contemporary understandings of the lead-in to WWII and works quite well as an old school monster horror story.
