Assuming your humble blogger hasn’t missed something in his research, the comic we’re going to be looking at today was, fifty years ago, the first to feature Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD — as opposed to Sgt. Nick Fury, leader of World War II’s Howling Commandos — in a headlining role since the cancellation of, um, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, back in 1969. Not that the eye-patched director of the Marvel Universe’s foremost spy agency had been at all out of sight through the first half of the 1970s; indeed, for a while he seemed to be popping up in one book or another almost every single month.
But even with the huge expansion of Marvel’s publishing line during that period, no one had tried to revive Nick Fury and/or SHIELD as an ongoing feature… at least, not until the middle of 1976, when the recent return of two ostensible “tryout” titles, Marvel Spotlight and Marvel Premiere, to their original purpose of showcasing a variety of properties (following their hosting of long runs of “Son of Satan” and “Iron Fist”, respectively), meant that there were suddenly a lot of slots open either for brand-new properties (hello, Woodgod!) or established characters (the Warriors Three, anyone?) to be given a fresh shot at solo stardom.
Shepherding Nick Fury in this latest venture were a couple of talents familiar to regular Marvel readers, though their specific roles here might be other than what their fans of 1976 would have been expecting. Jim Starlin — a comics auteur best known for drawing as well as writing trippy cosmic sagas such as Captain Marvel and Warlock — would only be writing this time out; this was a first, at least so far as his professional published output was concerned. Meanwhile, Howard Chaykin — an illustrator (and sometime writer) who was on something of an especially productive streak at the moment, with one original series concept (“Monark Starstalker”) as well as a second one featuring a Robert E. Howard sword-and-sorcery character (“The Mark of Kane”) taking up three consecutive issues of Marvel Premiere around the same time Marvel Spotlight #31 came out — was primarily associated with fantasy and science fiction projects. While he’d also done some work with more grounded, “pulp”-style adventure heroes (The Scorpion for Atlas Comics, “Dominic Fortune” for Marvel), he’d largely steered clear of stories set in the present-day, mainstream Marvel Universe.
Simply based on their resumes, then, Starlin and Chaykin weren’t necessarily the guys you’d expect to deliver a Nick Fury story that would make a major, and mostly permanent, addition to the character’s continuity — all while largely eschewing the high-tech, fantastical trappings that had been associated with Fury ever since Jim Steranko’s SHIELD run of the 1960s.
Indeed, the book’s cover (pencilled by Chaykin, with inks by Klaus Janson), with its imagery of Fury leaping/falling from an imaginatively designed aerial vehicle is about as close to the super-spy milieu as this comic ever comes. Rather, as will soon become evident, we readers of September, 1976 were about to experience a taut, grounded crime/espionage action thriller; one which, outside of one fantastic element — the “Infinity Formula” of the story’s title — came about as close to “realism” as the Marvel Universe ever got in those days.
And now, without further preamble:
If “Duncan” — someone high enough in SHIELD’s ranks to be called on to cover for Fury as “acting head” at a moments notice — was ever referenced (let alone actually appeared) in another story, either before or after this one, I’m unaware of it. (I suppose Starlin could have been nodding to Fred Duncan, the FBI agent who’d served as a government liaison to the X-Men, as first seen in issue #2 of that series; the man could have switched security organizations somewhere along the way, after all.) Anyway, we don’t see much more of SHIELD past this point, so it hardly matters who’s running the place.
When the “modern” version of Nick Fury had first been introduced, back in 1963’s Fantastic Four #21, it had seemed plausible to portray him as being essentially as vital and vigorous as the guy in the Sgt. Fury comic, set some twenty years earlier; after all, two of the FF’s own members were WW II vets, themselves. More than a decade later, however, one had a hard time overlooking the fact that the longtime director of SHIELD must be pushing at least sixty, yet hardly seemed to have been slowed down by age in the slightest.
Starlin’s “continuity implant” concerning Professor Sternberg and his longevity serum resolved this issue pretty much for all time — and did so rather elegantly, in your humble blogger’s opinion.
I’ve seen commentary on this story that finds fault with the Infinity Formula solution because they think it makes Nick Fury seem less heroic: in their reading, he has access to the secret of eternal youth, but selfishly refuses to share it with the world. As I see it, however, Starlin has successfully avoided that trap by presenting the Infinity Formula as being at least as much a curse as a blessing; after all, the very first thing it does to him is to age him sixty years overnight. Fury has been taking the serum for the last thirty years not because he wants to live forever, but because he doesn’t want to become a very old man before his time. Sure, you can argue that he should have been trying harder to find another solution to his dilemma over the last three decades; but it’s hardly fair to accuse him of hoarding a 100% beneficent scientific miracle for himself.
As he deals handily with Madame Renour’s hired thugs, Nick reflects that the woman would never have employed such poor specimens “back in Viet Nam during the Fifties when we were doing some spy work for the French government.” It’s a colorful little biographical tidbit that has next to nothing to do with the current narrative, but fills in some of that mysterious gap in time in Fury’s life between the end of World War II and his joining SHIELD. (Decades later, a solo-working Howard Chaykin would get the opportunity to add still more details to Fury’s 1950s resume with his 2011 miniseries, Avengers 1959.)
In our Marvel Premiere #33 post of a week ago, we discussed how Howard Chaykin’s style had evolved since his entry into the comics field in the early ’70s; this page is a good example of several of the elements he’d chosen to emphasize within the last couple of years, including creative page design, simplified but still expressive rendering, and a dramatic use of sold black.
Returning to our story… Steel Harris continues to gloat over how he’ll use his leverage over Fury, joking, “Hell, maybe I’ll even have Fury make me an agent.” He’s interrupted by one of his underlings, who’s just received word that the SHIELD director has arrived. “He’s in town?” replies Harris. “Good! Have the boys bring him in.” But it’s too late for that…
Fury finally notices the helicopter a couple of minute later when it dives towards his car, and someone in it begins shooting a machine-gun at him…
The men in the car turn out to be a couple of Steel Harris’ underlings. Another car containing Harris himself pulls up a few moments later, and Fury — still hanging off the side of the cliff — hears the boss order the men to keep an eye on the crash scene long enough to verify the deaths of all involved before returning to the casino…
As Fury speeds back to the Golden Dagger casino, he knows he’s racing the clock; it was harder for him to put down “Gloves” than it should have been, which means that the delay in his taking his annual dose of the Infinity Formula is already having an effect.
Meanwhile, back at the casino, Harris is beginning to feel desperate as well…
Is it a remarkable (and extremely convenient, narratively speaking) coincidence that both Fury and Harris are due to take their annual doses of Sternberg’s serum at virtually the same time? Why, yes; yes, it is.
The page that follows is another fine example of Chaykin’s design-forward approach, as we see him devote a whole panel’s worth of space to a single word:
Heh. I always did like the Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine.
Jim Starlin’s script for “Assignment: The Infinity Formula!” may not be 100% airtight, plotwise, but it gets the job done, and Howard Chaykin’s stylish, streamlined graphic storytelling complements it perfectly. Fifty years later, this story still holds up as one of the single best done-in-one comics produced by Marvel during this period, at least in the opinion of your humble blogger.
In its own time, Marvel Spotlight #31 seems to have been generally well-received, assuming that the letters of comment published a few months later in MS #33 were a representative sampling of fan opinion — although sales apparently weren’t good enough to justify the revival of a full-fledged Nick Fury series. Rather, the character would immediately return to his now-accustomed role as part of the woof and weft of the greater tapestry of the Marvel Universe (with his very next guest appearance coming in nothing less than the very next issue of Marvel Spotlight, #32, featuring the debut of Spider-Woman) — which is where he’d remain until 1988, when the miniseries Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. would finally give him anotherheadlining gig.
“Assignment: The Infinity Formula!” did have at least one very important detractor back in the day, however — none other than Marvel Comics publisher (not to mention Nick Fury’s co-creator) Stan Lee. As Jim Starlin recalled decades later for Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (Harper, 2012):
Stan always had trouble with the stuff I did… I had Fury embezzling funds so he could get this formula that would extend his life. Stan was so upset by it he said it would never be used in Marvel continuity, or ever reprinted.
Wait, “embezzling funds”? I know that this post doesn’t include scans of every single panel of this story, but please trust me when I tell you that nowhere in its seventeen pages is there any hint of Nick Fury embezzling funds from SHIELD (or anyone else) to pay off the unscrupulous Dr. Sternberg. (If there had been, I would probably have been as dismayed as Stan Lee allegedly was). Perhaps Starlin did originally have that element in his plot, but it didn’t make it into the final version of the script for whatever reason. Or he might simply have misremembered the specific reasons for Lee’s objections, all these years later; it’s not hard to imagine the whole idea of Fury being subject to extortion, or, alternatively, being dependent on a skeevy and probably illegal drug, rubbing Lee the wrong way.
In any event, it did take quite some time for Marvel Spotlight #31 to be reprinted, at least in the United States (its appearance in 1981’s Savage Action #9, a Marvel UK publication, may well have evaded Lee’s notice). By 1998, when “Assignment: The Infinity Formula!” turned up in the trade collection Grandson of Origins of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee was no longer involved in Marvel’s day-to-day publishing operations; the story’s only subsequent American reprinting to date, according to the Grand Comics Database, was in 2015’s S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Complete Collection Omnibus, released just three years before Lee’s passing.
As for the story’s place in Marvel’s “official” continuity, the first post-MS #31 reference to the Infinity Formula that I’ve come across is in the aforementioned Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D., published in 1988; the most recent is in 2019’s Amazing Spider-Man (2018 series) #33. So, yeah, Doc Sternberg’s serum has hung on through the decades; and though the lore has been tweaked here and there (for example, Fury now appears to have shared the formula with at least a couple of his Howling Commandos buddies at some point; well, I guess those guys knew what they were getting into), it seems likely to hang around for the duration. And why not? It’s a great way for Marvel to be able to continue featuring a relatively youthful, credibly badass Nicholas Fury, Sr., in its books, while retaining his World War II military service as an important part of his backstory,
Reed Richards and Ben Grimm should have been so lucky.
Hi, Alan.
Wow, I vaguely remembered this story, but had completely forgotten that Starlin had written it! It’s actually pretty good by Starlin’s standards. (I never was a big fan of his scripts, though his plotting was usually spot-on.)
What most impressed me revisiting this story is – as you say – how swiftly Chaykin’s storytelling had evolved. His art in that one issue of DETECTIVE COMICS from 1974 (?) looks crude in comparison. Here we have little touches like the use of inset panels (the close-up of Harris saying “Fury! This is your doing!”) and the incorporation of sound effects in the art (“Jackpot!”). Only six years later Chaykin’s confidence as a creator would lead to AMERICAN FLAGG, the first 12 issues of which are nigh-perfect in terms of world-building and pacing.
Thanks for the memory, Al!
I got this issue new off the racks and had also forgotten that it had been written by Starlin. Having since read a collection of Steranko’s run, I think Starlin’s script emulated Steranko’s style reasonably well. As of September 1976, the only Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD story I’d read was the first one as reprinted in Son of Origins of Marvel Comics.
I could just cut and paste my response to Captain America #153, discussed some years ago…
“it might be interesting to note that the first ten-odd pages of #153 tidied up an old plot thread that came to a head in this issue: Nick Fury’s sawn off because Val has been making eyes at Cap. The grist of his complaint is that he’s an old grey warhorse, while Steve Rogers popped up young as the day he was snap-frozen.
All well and good – except four years later in Marvel Spotlight #31, Jim Starlin and Howard Chaykin show how Nick’s been taking his “Infinity Formula” for the last 30 years, the annual application of which keeps him looking as young as he did back in The Big One – which kind of renders the whole plot about Fury’s age complex completely redundant.
I guess they just decided to sweep it under the carpet and presume everyone’d forget about it*. And one supposes they had to come up with something to explain how Fury was able to be a WW2 vet while remaining an active SHIELD Director 30 years later.
(* how could they know a grumpy old pedant would be waiting 45 years to bring up the subject…?)”
More like 50 years now; anyways, had I seen this on the stands at the time I wouldn’t have purchased it on account of being mired in my Chaykin moratorium (on account of his work in Amazing Adventures #18…ridiculous grudge? Moi?)…having long since purchased it, his Toth influences were quite to the fore in some parts, but it’s a solid job otherwise (much like that Solomon Kane story highlighted last week). Was Starlin doing much other script-drawn-by-other-hands at the time? I think I would have found a story written by him set in the present day slightly confuzzling, given his previous efforts (someone certainly liked that Carabo, though).
I wonder if “Duncan” was simply a slip of the tongue, and Starlin meant to say ‘Dugan’?
Afraid I didn’t like this so much, for exactly the reason Baden Smith gives above. I was a major Englehart fan back then, based primarily on his early Avengers and Captain America. He’d established a certain tension in the Steve/Nick bromance originating at least in part, as Baden says, with Fury’s resentment of Cap’s youth. MS #31 was one of the first instances I can recall in my collecting days, where one writer decided to completely ignore (or was totally unaware of), what another writer had done and flat-out contradicted what had been established. The fact that it took over a decade for this story to even be referred to again suggests that it may not have been met with unanimous approval.
Starlin was known to have worn his Moorcock influences on his sleeve, and I wonder if he was also inspired here by Philip José Farmer’s classic ‘A Feast Unknown’ (1969), featuring Lord Grandrith as the thinly disguised Tarzan, a previously upstanding hero who had ‘sold his soul’ for the sake of a potion granting eternal youth?
I totally understand that something had to be done to address Nick Fury’s increasing age, but I’d have wished for maybe a new development in Fury’s life that reversed the effects of aging, and that would have left the Englehart-scripted tension still valid.
I’ll join the chorus celebrating Howard Chaykin’s evolving talent. This was certainly very nice to look at.
Some of the more obvious plot-holes:
A WWII doctor capable (with the medical knowledge available at the time) of developing a formula for eternal youth.
A WWII doctor capable (with a large chunk of hand-waving) of spending decades eluding the Director of the most sophisticated espionage agency within this continuity, even while taking money off him on a regular basis – but who then gets captured and killed by a… casino owner.
The unanswered question of why Doc Sternberg gave his formula to these specific men, at a time in their lives when presumably he would have had no way of knowing that they would ever become rich enough to be suitable targets for extortion.
The unanswered question of how, with Doc Sternberg dead and gone, Nick is going to obtain any more of the formula. If it was analysed and duplicated, you might expect that the Director of SHIELD would be sharing it with some respected heroes (so that their abilities continued to be available to his organisation), not just sharing it with a ‘couple of his Howling Commandos buddies’.
“A WWII doctor capable (with the medical knowledge available at the time) of developing a formula for eternal youth.” In the MU I don’t see this as a problem. He’s co-existing with the super-soldier formula, Arnim Zola, Horton creating the world’s first android …
Yeah, fair point. It just felt somehow conspicuous in this story. Adding to your list below, was it at some point suggested that the cosmic rays had kept Reed and Ben youthful, before their WW II histories were retconned away?
I heard a version of that as fan canon, can’t say I ever heard it officially — anyone else?
I remember enjoying this story, but not loving it. It’s well-executed — though I agree with Mike Breen’s points above (including that Duncan should have been Dugan) — but it doesn’t captivate me any. Good use of the Contessa though.
IIRC, the survival of Dum-Dum and Gabe alongside Nick has never been officially explained. Fan canon is that they’re LMDs and Nick just blocks out that his oldest buddies are dead. That never worked for m.
Like DC’s JSA, the question of Marvel’s WW II heroes surviving into the present leads to some awkward retcons. Except where Roy Thomas dealt with the JSA in one A-SS story, we have multiple Marvel explanations: Infinity Formula. Cap on ice. Black Widow getting IIRC a variation of the Infinity Formula (why they had to keep her childhood in WW II as canon, I don’t know). Arnim Zola’s super-science and cloned bodies. Namor surviving just because (I find the idea that he spent around 60 years as a superhuman Skid Row derelict most unsatisfying). Etc.
Black Widow shouldn’t have appeared as a child in that X-Man story considering how old it made her even back then but her slow aging at least got a lot better explanation than Black Canary at the competition.
The post-crisis explanation Dinah is a legacy hero worked much better than the “mom in her daughter’s body” or ‘Tasha’s immortality though.
I have to assume that “Duncan” was just a mispelled “Dugan” as well.
There were a few attempts at explaining the longevity of Nick’s pals – “Nick Fury Vs. SHIELD”, “Original Sins”. Let’s just say that the results were not uniformly stellar and probably could never be. Even if you build a convincing explanation for why they are effectively unaging, that ends up distancing them from their own origins, and these are character concepts that can’t go very far from the 1940s and 1960s without becoming something significantly different.
The idea of Gabe Jones having gone from Jim Crow to civil rights and beyond could be interesting. But the preference for him and Dum-Dum seems to be “Look away, look away, don’t think about it!” As you say dealing with it would change their characters significantly.
My introduction to Nick Fury came by w4ay of getting Captain America & the Falcon #153, which also happened to be the first issue of that title I purchased. I think within that general time frame of 53 years ago I also got at least a couple of issues of Sgt Fury and, a bit later, Marvel Double Feature #2, which reprinted the story wherein Cap & Nick got together for the first time in the Silver Age (and I know they’d encountered each other at least once during WWII). I did purchase this mag from the NAS Lemoore Navy Exchange 50 years ago, and I mostly enjoyed it for the art and overall story but I also couldn’t help but think of all those other characters of WWII vintage who were still around. Mike & Baden had some good points about a few problematic issues with the story. I’ll have to hold on that note as I gotta get my 60-something self to work. Fortunately, I don’t have to engage in fisticuffs with anyone in my line!
Y’know, with the anniversary of another trip around the sun approaching, I wouldn’t mind me having some of that Infinity Formula. Just sayin’
Actually, this is a comic book that’s very much stayed with me over the decades for two reasons. One that I appreciated Howard Chaykin’s art – providing a different, more stylized rendition of Nick Fury – one that worked nicely with Jim Starlin’s story. (Can I confess that I also had forgotten that he’d written this story?)
The more significant reason this one lodged more firmly into my mind was that I viewed as an attempt to resolve a growing problem for Marvel in the late 70’s. Part of their appeal up to then had been acknowledging actual time. The Fantastic Four had been bitten by cosmic rays in 1961. Peter Parker had not only gotten an “owie” from that mean spider but had aged enough to now be in college. Tony Stark had stumbled over that trip wire during the Viet Nam War in 1963. And this tough Fury guy had fought back in WWII.
All of which worked fine and dandy until the late 70’s when if that was true, then we were all following the exploits of characters now in their late 30’s and/or early 40’s. And if that was the case, how much longer were they viable as superheroes? So, what’s a major comic book publisher to do? Earth 2? Another relaunch?
If this was an attempt to solve an unsolvable problem for Nick Fury, it more or less worked. But as Marvel finally realized ignoring the age issue was the best option, that put this issue in an uncomfortable position.
But taken as a single “one and done” comic, I also offer a supportive “thumbs up.”
Thanks again, Alan! This is a great way to break up a long work week!
There are a few of ways of explaining Ben and Reed being younger than their chronological ages would imply. Ben in particular was changed into the Thing and back again several times, so who knows how that would affect his biological age (and for that matter, his strength level)?
Beyond that, the two of them (and Susan) were subject to a Skrull accelerated aging effect during the Marv Wolfman run (#206) which was later reversed and at least hinted to made them effectively younger (#214).
And, of course, there is the catch-all explanation from early 2016’s “Secret Wars #9”, which establishes that the multiverse has been destroyed and is then being recreated by Franklin Richards (it will take a couple of years before he finishes). The only _obvious_ change to Earth-616 is Miles Morales becoming a native, but there is wiggle room for plenty of biological age fine tuning – particularly to the people Franklin might most want to be at their primes.
I came “this” close to mentioning Wolfman’s de-aging of Reed, Sue and Ben in my response. But I knew someone else would bring that up as well.
In every comics universe in which characters remain about the same age for decades, we have to pretend their past selves from the earlier decades were in a different imaginary reality than the current one. Peter Parker, et al, were around in the 1960s & 1970s, but in a separate reality from that in the present or even in the 90s, etc. Eventually they’ll have to distinguish 1960s Spidey from 2060s Spidey. And only about 12 years away from Superman having been around in continous print for 100 years.
Sadly this means the Stan Lee and Co. of Earth-616 probably never did write about the Fantastic Four. If they went in for superhero comics at all, it would have been the First Line or the Blue Marvel.
This is definitely a good, quality story by Jim Starlin & Howard Chaykin. I like the more grounded, gritty feel of this tale to a lot of the more “spy-fi” type SHIELD stories.
I got this one as a back issue at some point in the 1990s. I think by that point in time Nick Fury using the Infinity Formula had been pretty well established in other stories. I agree with you, Alan, it’s an elegant solution to explain how a World War II veteran like Fury is still alive & active in the present day with the Marvel Universe’s ever-lengthening sliding time scale.
As for the other members of the Howlers who also joined SHIELD, I really have not kept up with most Marvel books over the past quarter century, but I do know it was eventually revealed that Dum Dum Dugan was at some point replaced with an LMD who believed himself to be the original, and the other Howlers still alive in the present were finally killed off.
As I mentioned in my comments on Marvel Premiere #33 last week, Chaykin has been very dismissive of his pre-American Flagg! artwork. Nevertheless, I find his art on this story to be well done. Maybe not nearly as accomplished as he would become in the early 1980s, but still good. As the saying goes, artists can be their own harshest critics.