Miss Fury has returned to comics and there's a slight twist. Rather than simply tell new stories set in the past or try to update the character to fit into modern times, we're actually seeing a bit of both. Rob Williams has taken the seductive character and pulled her out of the past and placed her in the future. Part of the story will seeing how and why this happened along with how Miss Fury will deal with it all.
The first two issues are now on sale and Dynamite Entertainment has given us Rob's writer's commentary on both issues. Keep in mind this is a mature comic.
THE PULP HEROINE RETURNS! When Miss Fury foils a wartime plot by Nazi secret agents, she is catapulted through time... or so it seems. Is she really careening from past to future and back, or has she lost her mind? And if her sanity remains intact, can one lone heroine possibly hope to end World War II by herself, a conflict still waged into the year 2013? As witness to generations of bloodshed and violence, Miss Fury has lots of righteous rage... and anger is her fearsome power!
PAGE 1
"Everyone is doing themselves a weak and cowardly disservice if they don’t ask themselves this question… What are YOU angry about?” Start a storyline with the controlling idea front and centre. It's on the nose, yes, but it's effective. And this was the key question for Miss Fury when I approached the book. She's called 'fury' yet she’s a super rich Manhattan socialite who’s incredibly good looking. What’s she got to be angry about? Over the course of the first arc – that’s the core question. And we open in 1943. The world’s at war. America’s at war. Millions dying and suffering. Yet Marla Drake’s life is all roses. She hasn’t found herself yet.
“Anger is an energy,” was something I wrote in the pitch, stealing from John Lydon.
And that telegram in panel 3 is a flashback, by the way. To a key moment in her journey towards her own anger. We’ll find out more as we go.
PAGE 2
My first draft of the script I started things further on with some character-setting dialogue, but then I decided this was an issue one, we probably needed some action straight out of the blocks.
More punching. And kicking. This is a superhero book.
We’re establishing here that a) Miss Fury is a fearsome, superhumanly quick fighter (she twists an assailant around in time to get his body to take the bullets meant for her – that’s quick). And b) she’s not a squeaky clean, morally black and white figure. She’s slashing and drawing blood here.
Also: Jack Herbert, our seriously impressive artist, is establishing that he can draw an action sequence really, REALLY well.
PAGE 3
She catches a knife in mid-air and returns it at the thrower, getting him right between the eyes!
You know, for kids!
When I saw these pages in B&W I was delighted. I hadn’t worked with Jack before but there’s a real fluidity to the action here, and Miss Fury looks terrific in panel 4. Lots of swagger there. The colours are wonderful too. Ivan Nunes did a killer job on the book. Really talented colourist.
Love the ‘Thunk!’ sound effect there too. Nice job by Simon Bowland, our letterer, throughout.
PAGE 6
The idea here was, on a kind of suggestive level, that Miss Fury doesn’t just fall through the skylight into the Nazi’s time machine, but the time machine rather pulls her through. It wants her. None of this is established in text, and to have her saying “It almost feels like it… wants me,” would’ve been plain bad writing. A bit of ambiguity here and there isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I think. Let readers fill in the blanks as long as the narrative us clear. Even if no one gets what the intention was, she still falls into the time machine so the plot is serviced.
The whole idea of Miss Fury’s time travel in the arc is so personal to her. It’s meant to be ambiguous to an extent. Is she really travelling through time or is she still in 1943 and insane?
PAGE 9
Jack drew this to be a real highlight of the issue. And it’s completely different from the script and what I imagined. But who cares when it looks this amazing.
The script called for a side-on shot of an art deco bath, which sits in the middle of a huge room in Miss Fury’s Manhattan apartment. The idea being that this room is enormous but she’s kind of so emotionally empty that there’s nothing in it, just a luxury bath. Jack changed the angle, the sense of this huge room with just a small bath in it. But she’s still wearing the gloves in the bath (that’s not for 'cool and sexy' aesthetic reasons, we’ll reveal why later). She’s reading the ’43 newspaper, and the contradiction of the salubrious image and the dialogue “there’s a war on, you know. It’s a terrible business” is still there. I don’t mind an artist changing what I’ve asked for as long as the narrative point is served. It is here.
And it looks fantastic. So shut up Mr. Writer.
PAGE 13
Miss Fury’s new origin. Her voice is more than a little tongue-in-cheek here. “The implicit local hallucinogenic…” “he may have just been trying it on.” The humour hopefully lifts this scene beyond being the typical superhero origin. And I liked the fact that she isn’t 100% sure if she has superpowers. It’s, again, a little ambiguous.
PAGE 14
Sex Panther! It stings the nostrils.
Is the panther real? She doesn’t know.
Although, she is covered in blood during sex in the final panel, so there’s a hint. She’s a dark one, eh? I wanted to show her as being in control here. She drives the action. Titillating? Yes. But true to her character. These are all little snapshots of Marla Drake. The entire initial arc is something of a jigsaw puzzle for her and, hopefully, by the end of the first storyline, you have something of a three-dimensional woman.
And who among us can say that we haven’t had sex with a Masai tribesman while under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen and covered in the blood of a MASSIVE jungle cat that we’ve just killed in hand-to-paw combat? I know I have.
PAGE 18
Who’s this bloke then? Badly burnt face? He’s a super-villain, surely.
This is Captain Chandler. Who’ll make a big difference in Marla Drake’s life. A key figure in her journey.
Great faces in the crowd scene behind Captain Chandler. Jack does great faces..
And there’s that telegram again in panel three. If it repeats like this, it’s a key moment.
PAGE 21
And suddenly we’re in a scene from Modern Warfare. Tanks, guns, jet fighters, a street scene where Manhattan’s been turned into Chechnya. Romance is very much over and Miss Fury’s suddenly thrust into war. Her war.
And something big overhead is blocking out the sun. That can’t be good.
The script, by the way, asked for her to be carrying a ‘Sienkiewicz rifle’, as in Bill. I used the same phrase in an issue of Daken: Dark Wolverine and it’s become shorthand for an impossibly large and deadly weapon. The language of comics… I’m going to keep using it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
MISS FURY #2
Transported through time to 2013, the original pulp heroine is tasked with hunting down cloaked Nazi secret agents in modern-day Washington. But as she suffers ever worsening mental flashes back to the 1940s and to a war-ravaged future, Miss Fury is forced to question her own sanity. Is any of this real? What are the giant triangular craft hovering over future Manhattan? And is the man she's supposed to assassinate really a Nazi agent, or is this just murder?
PAGE 1
We open with a sense of Miss Fury's fractured sanity and a play on her penchant for self-harm. The figures flit between different characters in our cast. The old Nazi scientist she saw on the rooftop before falling into the time machine in #1. Captain Chandler, her lover, Harmon, the OSS agent she encountered on the rooftop. Who is friend or foe. She has no idea. Can she trust any of these people? Are they real? And through it all the key question of her journey. Good or evil. Which way will she turn by our story's end? And Marla Drake, Miss Fury's true identity, exists in the 1940s at the time of a great world war. Everyone has a choice to make - either you fight against evil, or you fight for it.
PAGE 5
My guilty pleasure in comics is plane-crashing sequences. I've written a few over the years. They're just so cinematic. This is nicely drawn by Jack Herbert. Miss Fury shoots the lead pilot of the Messerschmitt 262 through the head with her 'Sienkiewicz ' Sniper Rifle(tm), but as he dies his plane crashes into his colleagues' and the two of them form a mass of flame and explosion that is suddenly rolling right down this future Manhattan street right towards Miss Fury.
PAGE 7
Again, I love how comics allow you to break down this sort of action sequence. Miss Fury escapes the ball of flame by using the ejector seat of another crashed fighter jet. It shoots her up into the sky but she's not strapped in and is hanging on for her dear life. But her shoulder dislocates with the force and she falls from a huge height, seemingly to her death... only to land on the roof of a nearby building. This is Die Hard-type stuff. Out of the frying pan into the fire, then into another fire. Its what I wanted Miss Fury to be: on the one hand a (hopefully) sophisticated character piece about a troubled woman doubting her sanity, and on the other hand a big gonzo Hollywood action movie with big set-pieces.
PAGE 9
Really like this page. Jack draws some very good talking head scenes. His character reference work is obviously very strong. Miss Fury’s body position here from the middle of the page on shows she’s not just going to sit there and be passive. Her final panel (which is great) shows the anger and attitude and a degree of insanity. I like the way he’s drawn Harmon’s strong finger in panel five too. ‘I’m in charge. Sit the hell down.’ There’s some strong visual storytelling here on a ‘dialogue’ page.
PAGE 10
Such is her strength she can kick a table through a reinforced false-mirror wall. And then the ghost of the Old Nazi Scientist is standing there. But is she the only one who sees him. “You sent me through time, you Nazi bastard!” That’s a fun spot of dialogue.
PAGE 12
Jack draws a nice ass, you can’t deny. I was really pleased with how this scene turned out. It’s a bit of a tantalising misdirect. We start out with the nude shot. The largely amoral Miss Fury in bed with her lover, Captain Chandler. But instead of this going to a soft-porn place, their conversation turns towards how Chandler got so badly burnt, and then he gets to the heart of her. Strips through the attitude. He tells her she’s a good person and she’ll find something she cares about enough to fight for. No one has ever said these things to her before.
PAGE 16
Again, a cool page by Jack. When we started this project I suggested The Newsroom’s Olivia Munn as the basis for Marla Drake/Miss Fury ‘if it were a movie’. You can see that here in panel one. The final panel, with Miss Fury pulling her mask down, is great too. Going to work. Going to a murderous place. Even if she’s not 100% sure if her target really is a time-travelling Nazi, shape-shifting agent.
PAGE 18
Flashing between different eras here. Pivotal moments. Miss Fury with the Sienkiewicz Rifle ™ in the broken future where the Nazis have won World War 2 and conquered America, the recurring image of the key telegram that brings Miss Fury some pivotal news, and then the old Nazi scientist, and the words he spoke to her before she fell into the time machine. “Ask yourself this, Who exactly are you REALLY being asked to kill? And by whom?” Cryptic, isn’t it?
PAGE 20
RELIEF! The guy she just shot was actually a time-travelling Nazi, shape-shifting agent. On the minus side, she’s now being chased by time-travelling Nazi, shape-shifting agents. Big, terrifying, armoured ones. Ah well, you win some, you lose some.
Both issues are still on sale. Pick them up to see the complete story. MISS FURY #3 is on sale June 5, 2013.