Geek: Your first Nick Fury series was a little too controversial for Marvel, and they shut it down after a few issues. What is it about Fury that motivated you to try writing him again?
Ennis: Coming to a character like Nick Fury, it’s a little bit like looking at the Punisher and seeing characters that I like, I can write, and I have an angle on. Not that skewed angle that I approach superheroes from, but it’s seeing something in the character that attracts me directly. Now in the Punisher it’s an obvious one, he’s a character very much based on movies, TV and crime novels of the early 70s. Meat and drink to me! Nick Fury is a little different.
He’s the kind of black ops, master spy, adrenaline junkie who’s never going to give this up. I count that first Nick Fury series among my favorite things that I’ve ever done. I felt that it was 6 issues of high-octane madness and it was exactly what I wanted it to be! However, it’s not surprising at all that Marvel would not build on that. You can’t an ongoing franchise out of a guy who is ultimately a very negative character. He’s a war junkie, a guy who would almost start a war just so he can indulge his favorite passion.
What really interests me about the character is the notion that the guy has been at war for effectively 60 or 70 years and still has the energy for it.
Geek: What sort of madness can we look forward to in the series?
Ennis: The new series, though I can’t say too much about it, will look quite closely at the Cold War. It’s a period of history that fascinates me and we will sort of move through its greatest hits. French Indochina, Cuba because you have do the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam in the early seventies when it’s really gotten going, and then on to Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80s. Those last two allow me to use the Punisher and Barracuda as supporting characters. So, it’s going to be sort of the Marvel MAX ultimate whirlwind cauldron of hell book.
Plus Goran Parlov on the artwork, which is just the icing on the cake. He’s tremendous, he really is.
Geek: Will this series be dark and comical like The Boys or pure action like The Punisher?
Ennis: I think it’s going to be a lot darker. I used Fury as a supporting character in The Punisher a couple of times, and I had him show up as a behind the scenes fixer kind of guy. The last time we saw him in The Punisher he was a bitter old man drinking bourbon and muttering darkly about what was going on in the world. What we’ll see in this story is what turned him into that.
He’s been fighting a war for 40 or 50 years against the ill-defined enemy of communism or communist aggression only to see the whole thing come to an end in 1990. As you know, the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain came down. We’re going to see the frustrations that have led to him being this bitter old man in a bar sending someone like Frank Castle out to do his bidding. |
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