Issue Review: Miss Fury 2

Miss Fury stands in bombed-out Manhattan facing down a pair of Nazi jet airplanes with a sniper rifle.  She fires, taking out one of the pilots, who crashes into the other one. She leaps into the cockpit of another, previously-downed plane and pulls the ejection seat to get out, landing unconscious on a roof.  Then we switch timelines and she is being interrogated by Harmon, in 2013, now working for the CIA, not the OSS, and claiming never to have met her (or lived during World War II).  She tries to break out of the interrogation room, but is tasered.  Next she's back in 1942, having a romantic interlude with Chandler, a wounded solder, and is clearly falling in love with him.  Back in 2013, she is sent to assassinate a Congressman whom she is told is secretly a Nazi. She kills him,  but the people surrounding him turn out to be Nazi robots and turn to attack her.


This is another time-traveling story focusing on key points in the 1940s and 2013 life of Miss Fury.  She's still not sure what's happening to her, although she does realize that she's time traveling.  Based on what Harmon says, she's not just having flashes of memory about the past while in the future... she is actually going back in time and re-experiencing some of these moments, and her body is fading out and back in again as she does.  This trick allows writer Rob Williams to fill in Miss Fury's backstory with flashback-like events that are a little different from the usual.

As with the first issue, Williams dances a fine line, walking the tightrope between demonstrating the time travel and confusing the main character, and chopping up the story so much that the reader can't follow it.  He doesn't do quite as good a job this issue as last, although he mostly succeeds.  I got most of what was going on during the first read-through, although I confess that even having gotten through issue 5, and having read this one twice, I'm not exactly sure what the first page, which shows several different people cutting their own arms including Miss Fury, is all about.  I know that she is a cutter (she admits it in a later issue), but I'm  not sure why the other men in the picture are cutting themselves.  Are they all really just her, and her memory is messed up? Or is something else going on?  That part confuses me.  The rest of the story, however, flows pretty well.

Once again the art in this issue is outstanding. Herbert does an excellent job with both action and quiet scenes.  His rendition of Marla makes her look glamorous and beautiful, again just like a 1940s movie-star.  I keep thinking "Rita Hayworth" whenever I see Marla in her civilian clothes.

  He also does a great job on backgrounds and on special effects like rain, explosions, and the like.  Herbert seems like he's able to draw just about anything with equal (high) skill. This book has great artwork.

Overall, this is another solid outing for the creative team, and definitely an above-average comic-book.  There is, once again, the gratuitous sex and partial nudity, including close-ups of Marla's bare derriere, which are not at all necessary to the story.  But as they don't really harm the book, I can't complain too much. I just wish the creative team would have enough confidence in themselves to realize that they do not need to show a few panels of Marla naked or having sex in every issue just to sell this book. It's solid enough without that; it should sell fine on its own. And honestly if it's not selling, I don't think a couple of pages of R-rated sex scenes per issue are going to do the trick.  Besides that, however, this is a darn good comic.

My score: 8/10