Reading this I can’t help but think there’s a certain something lost from comics since Frank Miller and Alan Moore accidentally set the comic book universe down a dark road. Storytelling has improved, there’s a huge range of lusciously produced art styles to please almost any eye… in terms of technique we’re in a golden age, where comics can almost be machine tooled; beautiful gift-wrapped packages. The trouble is there’s often nothing inside these packages; with darkness combined to decompressed storytelling it’s the same heroes and villaind going through the same moves in slow motion. There are clever creators who can escape these traps – the likes of Fraction, Slot and Gillen – but these are exceptions rather than the rules.

The second half of this reprint collection of Steranko’s stewardship of Nick Fury exposes what’s been lost. It’s overly wordy by modern standards, the writer’s clearly busking it month by month and, as with aging material, the prejudices of the time and relatively unsophisticated cultural understanding can be discomforting but… it’s got a verve, energy and excitement that decompressed storytelling loses. What’s important is the moment, that Nick Fury never stops moving, that there’s always a villain to foil. The last issue’s almost forgotten as soon as the cliffhanger’s resolved and there’s no situation a hero or villain can’t escape by a hitherto unsuspected and unhinted at method. Steranko’s art is equally thrilling, emphasising action and drawing in creative techniques from then contemporary art movements. There are wonderful moments where Steranko’s clearly chafing at the limits of the spy genre, particularly towards the end of the Yellow Claw story presented here, where he runs fearlessly and heedlessly into the realms of sci-fi and fantasy, stretching the creative possibilities of the series. It feels like anything’s possible, rather than narrowly prescribed by genre conventions, as so many of today’s seem to be. It’s a missive from a more innocent time, when the genre was full of possibilities. It’s fuel to the Alan Moore’s notion that it’s unhealthy for past icons to be hogging the cultural stage. Do the heroes of the past have something to say about the modern age or should we have torn down the icons long ago and created new ones for a new age? Perhaps we need to stop admiring the past respond to the times as inventively as the likes of Steranko did. ( )