NICK FURY - AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D.

I started working on a Nick Fury action figure after I found this interesting figure on Old Joe Infirmary that had a very Nick Fury–like face, right down to the cigar in his mouth. It seemed like a relatively easy costume to create, and I always had a soft-spot for the old soldier in the futuristic paramilitary organization. I guess I also have a fondness for him because he got me through a rather harrowing night as a child.

I knew from as far back as I could remember that my father had a drinking problem. Until I was eight years old, however, the concept was completely abstract, like saying the neighbor down the street is a water skier. His behavior when drunk did not affect me as a very small child, except when my parents would fight, which was as confusing as it was disturbing. Then, one Saturday afternoon in the fall of ’72, I finally understood the seriousness of my father’s alcoholism. My mom had been a stay-at-home mom most of the time that I was little, but with inflation rearing its ugly head, she decided to take a part-time job at a catalog clearance center to make extra money during the holiday shopping season. This meant that she had to work some Saturdays, and my dad had to watch my brother and me. My dad pretended that his pride was hurt by my mom going to work and showing the world that he was not a big enough bread winner to support his family, and he chose to take it out on her (and, unthinkingly, on my brother and I as well) by getting rip-roaring drunk during the day that he was supposed to be watching us. Of course, I later realized that any excuse, like the sky was blue for example, was a good enough excuse if my dad chose to get drunk. But this was my first, full-blown awareness of my dad being drunk.

He seemed fine in the morning, and was quite happy to give me a few bucks to go off to a kids movie festival at my elementary school. My friend Linda and I spent the afternoon eating candy and watching cartoons and poorly dubbed children’s movies from Sweden or someplace, all spooling through a crappy 16-millimeter projector that would periodically eat the film and have to be re-threaded. Anyway, Linda and I had a reasonably fun time, and we wandered back to my house shortly before dinner time. As soon as I walked in the door, there was a palpable tension in the air. I can’t explain it, but I would feel it for the rest of my childhood, every time I walked into the house when my father was drinking. I recall my dad and my brother were doing some project out in the back yard, and my dad looked crazed. His fiery red hair was sticking up on end, and his normally ruddy face was completely red. He looked like the Heat Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus, although that cultural reference was not available to me in 1972. My brother, six years older and more aware, just looked frustrated and a bit scared.

My dad came into the house ranting and raving to no one in particular, but with a gravelly, slurring voice which made it feel personal. I told Linda to go home and tried to make myself scarce until my mom returned from work. Maybe she could deal with the demon that had possessed my father. Of course, her arrival only made matters worse as he unleashed his full venom on her and this wicked job that was keeping her away from her true duty of watching the kids. Somehow, Mom kept her cool as my father kept up his non-stop rant for the entire evening. She made us dinner, washed the dishes, ran a bath for me, and put me into my pajamas while the entire time my dad spewed forth his nonsensical verbal venom. Being that this was the first time I connected the drinking with my father’s yelling, I truly tried to follow what exactly his grievances were. No matter how closely I listened, however, nothing really made sense. Sometimes he wouldn’t even finish sentences, but start a completely new line of thought just as irrational as the last. This was my first survival lesson for living with an alcoholic: they make no sense, so it’s best to not pay any attention to what they are saying, lest you lose your own sanity trying to understand them.

I’m not sure where my brother was in all of this, but my mom most likely told him to go to a friend’s house. By about 9:30, my father had completely exhausted himself and passed out on the bed. A little while later, he grumbled to my mom to go to the store and get him some cigarettes (that’s back when smoking was good for you). Willing to do anything to keep him quiet, my mom put some pants and shoes on me and we drove to the 7-11 store. Given what we had been through, I guess Mom felt I deserved a comic book and an ice cream. I quickly scanned the spinner rack of comics to settle on a choice (I didn’t need to aggravate my mom with indecisiveness). I stumbled onto something called Nick Fury and his Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (for you comic fans, this was the first reprint issue featuring old stories from Strange Tales). Now I had read Sgt. Fury comics before, but this was something new. It definitely was set in present day and not World War II, and this Nick Fury looked a little different from the Howling Commando Leader. I was confused, but the fancy gadgets and spy-movie feel sucked me in. I grabbed it.

When we got home, I eagerly started reading my new comic. Then the haunted, slurring voice called from upstairs, “Neal!” Cautiously, l pulled myself up the stairs and walked into the darkened bedroom. My dad remained prone on the bed. From the faint light in the hallway, I could only see my father’s eyes, and they appeared to glow.

“Where’d you and your mother go?” he croaked out, suspicion hanging on each syllable.

“We went to the 7-11 to get you cigarettes,” I replied, incredulous that he would even ask.

“Are you sure?” he groaned, like some ambulance-chasing lawyer.

I nodded, feeling guilty for no apparent reason.

“No place else?” my father added, accusingly.

“Yes, just to the 7-11,” I said, feeling more and more creeped out by the minute.

I don’t know exactly how long this interrogation went on, but he eventually let me go. Some years later, I realized that my father, in his twisted, alcoholic haze, was setting a trap for my mom. Thinking that she was having an affair, he gave her an excuse to leave the house so she could meet with the non-existent boyfriend. I guess I was supposed to tattle on her transgression, which only occurred in his sick, clouded head. Truly mindbending!

Once back downstairs, I continued to read about the adventures of Nick Fury. So intent was I to leave my current time and space that I poured myself into those pages. I was right alongside Nick Fury on whatever escapade he was having. I welcomed the challenge, for no villain could be any scarier than my own father at that point.

The next morning, I read through the comic again. I was thrilled to discover that this was, in fact, the same Nick Fury from WW II, only a little older and with cooler weapons. My dad eventually came downstairs, hung over and full of self-reproach. My parents’ whispers in the kitchen barely contained the seething tension underneath, eventually ebbing to a simmer of conciliatory repartee. I tried to block it out, focusing only on Nick Fury. It was the second survival technique I learned in so many days.

DICK TRACY PART ONE

As someone born in the 1960s, I often feel like I lived the first half of my 40-odd years in one era and the other half in a different era. The pivot point, in my mind, was the proliferation of the personal computer in the 1980s. Just as Henry Ford’s Tin Lizzy fundamentally changed the way Americans (and much of the world) conducted their daily lives, PCs and Macs have dramatically changed both our personal and professional routines beyond all recognition. For young adults who were born in the 80s, I don’t think they can fully appreciate how different things used to be, just as I could hardly imagine my parent's world before television.

One of the major changes since the 1980s is the eroding influence of newspapers. Of course, newspapers still exist, but there are far fewer than when I was a kid, and virtually all newspaper organizations now have a strong Internet presence which I would wager gets far more attention than their printed version. Cable and satellite news channels have also become the go-to outlets for instant news and information, relegating newspapers to a portable information product used when accessing a computer, Blackberry, cellphone with web access, or a television is not feasible. Information rushes at us from so many different sources, I don’t believe anyone seeks out one primary source any longer.

During my childhood, when the Internet was unheard of and television news was squeezed in between afternoon cartoons and the prime-time line-up, newspapers represented the main source of in-depth information and analysis, and most major cities had at least two newspapers fighting for your daily attention. Since the news was pretty much the same in both papers, they had to lure you with unique features. One such competitive feature was the comic strip page. Believe it or not, many people chose their source of news based on which paper had the best collection of comic strips. As a result, a popular comic strip was extremely important to newspapers and could be quite lucrative for both the syndication outfit and the comic strip producer.

A handful of these popular strips have gone on to become cultural icons, like Dick Tracy. This gumshoe with the squared-off nose was a comic strip titan, drawing millions of readers every day for decades. Long before I came along, Dick Tracy’s popularity in newspapers spawned media spin-offs including movies, television shows, toys, comic books, and Big Little Books. The hard-boiled crime fighter, born in an era when G-Men were rounding up Depression-era gangsters, served as a cathartic outlet for those who felt anxious and helpless in an uncertain world. Once raised to the top of the entertainment heap, Dick Tracy retained his popular status into the 60s, before his creator Chester Gould made some inexplicable changes to the strip and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Given the strong interest in the space program, Chester Gould decided to give Dick Tracy a sci-fi angle with the introduction of the Space Coup. Soon, Tracy was taking frequent trips into space and hooking up with people on the Moon. Of course, by 1969 we landed on the Moon and confirmed that no one lived there, killing a vital element to the 1960s Dick Tracy world. Also, Tracy was known for his violent methods in dealing with criminals. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, people were beginning to re-think our prurient fascination with violent entertainment. Dick Tracy was becoming a sad anachronism just as I reached reading age. This didn’t stop me from loving the strip, though.

In my hometown, Dick Tracy appeared in The Baltimore Evening Sun. Again, no CNN or all-day Internet access, so many newspapers ran morning and evening editions. The other Baltimore paper, The News American, ran once a day in the afternoon. My parents subscribed to The News American because it had all the Hearst syndicate features. However, my Dad would usually pick up a Sunday edition of The Sun Papers when he went to the convenience store for smokes on Saturday night. The Sunday edition featured two separate comic sections in full color. That’s where I discovered Dick Tracy.

In the 1970s, Dick Tracy was returning to his more gritty, police procedural formula, although he still had some futuristic gadgets like his two-way wrist t.v. and the hovering air cars in which the detective could zip around the city. At first, I didn’t realize that the strip ran daily, so I was confused why I couldn’t follow the plots simply by reading the Sunday edition. Once I figured out that we needed to receive the Evening Sun every day, I begged and pleaded with my parents to switch papers, but to no avail. Actually, I wanted them to receive both papers so I could continue to read Steve Canyon and The Phantom in The News American, but I digress.

The day before I got my Sunday comics fix, I would watch Archie’s Famous Funnies, where popular comic strip characters were presented in short cartoon segments. Dick Tracy had a regular segment on the show, but it was entirely too short to develop any real plot. All it did was tease me with the desire for a full half-hour devoted only to Tracy and the gang. Weekday afternoons, the local stations would run an old Dick Tracy cartoon series from the 60s, but this series was played for laughs with Tracy sending out a goofy array of bumbling assistants to do the actual crime fighting. Pretty unsatisfying offerings, but I took what I could get.

Slightly more interesting was a Big Little Book I got at the time called Dick Tracy Encounters Facey. I loved Big Little Books and this one dealt with a villain who could mold his face to look like other people including Tracy himself. I was so inspired by the book, I stapled together strips of paper about the same size as the Big Little Book and wrote my own adventure story in the same format. You remember: text on each left-hand page and an illustration on each right-hand page. I don’t recall the exact story, but the hero and heroine were named Rudy and Roxanne. Give me a break; I was eight years old.

What really cemented my interest in the super cop was when my Dad brought home a big coffee-table type hardcover from the library which compiled all the daily and Sunday Tracy strips from the beginning in 1931 all the way into the 1940s.This was the detective in his prime and, after spending hours pouring over this huge collection, I felt like I really understood what Dick Tracy was all about. The wild, grotesque villains, the sadistic torture tests Tracy was regularly subjected to, and the violent retribution Tracy would exact from these devious thugs. Many would die tragically by their own hand, showing how a life of crime in itself would lead to one's own downfall. Probably a little over the top for today’s audiences, but wonderfully moving for a child.

I continued to follow Tracy’s adventures throughout the 70s, reading the color strip every Sunday, then befriending kids in the neighborhood who received The Evening Sun and scanning the comic page in between playing with our G.I. Joes. Then on December 25, 1977, creator Chester Gould drew his final Dick Tracy strip. Just a silly gag strip for the holiday, I paid little attention to it and had no idea at the time that this would be Gould’s farewell. The strip continued the very next day, but the artwork looked slightly different now that Gould’s inker Rick Fletcher took over. The stories themselves actually improved as mystery writer Max Allen Collins helmed the writing, but somehow I didn’t enjoy it anymore. I felt a bond with Chester Gould’s quirky style, and this more mature Dick Tracy wasn’t working for me. I lost complete interest when Dick Locher assumed the drawing duties, as his style was far too cartoonish for me.

When the Dick Tracy movie came out in the summer of 1990, I decided to check back with my old detective friend. The News American had folded a few years prior, and The Sunpapers only published one edition in the morning. Dick Tracy had survived the comic strip layoffs and was appearing in the new morning edition. Art reflecting life, the story line during that summer dealt with Hollywood making a movie based on Dick Tracy’s life. I thought the whole thing pretty lame and stopped reading before the arc was completed. I imagine many other readers felt the same way, because The Sunpapers dropped Tracy’s strip shortly afterward. The Dick Tracy strip still continues solely under Dick Locher’s guidance, but now I would have to read it on the Internet. From the looks of it, I can’t really see the point.