Fury Max: My War Gone By

I bought this comic because I enjoyed Garth Ennis' work on the punisher. I found this book excellent and actually enjoyed it even more than the Punisher series. This is one of my favorite comic book.

Great book, great shipping!

Excellent window on the shadow world of the CIA in the 1950s and the 1980s. From Vietnam to the disaster of the bay of pigs in 1961 to Vietnam in 1970. Max sees it all and does it all. I'm a history teacher and this book is a great way to explain to students this period in history.

excellent story and art

Fantastic book .First class delivery by Amazon

Garth Ennis has never been a man averse to ultraviolence, but as often as not, he’s playing it for laughs. Sections of, say, Preacher or The Boys are so ghoulishly violent that they’re hard to take seriously, which is fine, because often you’re not meant to. There’s none of that levity here though. My war gone by is one of the bleakest comics he has ever written, ably assisted by Goran Parlov’s knack for Horrifying imagery.Nick Fury in this book isn’t the Grizzled, yet wholesome character Jim Steranko imagined all those years ago. He’s a grim combat junkie, a man who – in his own words – “laps up war like sugar”. We go with him through events in Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua. Right from the off, there’s a theme of betrayed idealism; boyish naiveté about the righteousness of America and what the stars and stripes is meant to mean to the world slamming into a wall of history’s exhumed corpses. Ennis pulls no punches on US foreign policy – he’s a history buff with a flair for grotesquery, so when he goes in on what a mess Vietnam was, by god does he go in. Fury is a cynic, a man aware that the land of the free isn’t quite as warm and benevolent as it likes to put on, but even he winds up being disgusted by the appalling callousness bubbling below the surface of superficially well-meaning politicians. There’s a mirthless satisfaction to watching it dawn on him just how horrendous the things he’s part of really are. He’s never what you could call a sympathetic character, but between his bone-dry humour, stoicism and sheer proficiency at kicking butt I did wind up liking him somehow or other, which is a testament to Ennis’ writing that he makes you root for an anti-heroic atrocity vendor. He sits in his room, surrounded by empty booze bottles and exhausted prostitutes narrating his life story into a tape recorder, and between each chapter, the art slowly depicts him as getting older and older, as if recounting what he has done is taxing enough to physically age him. The other characters fare well too. There’s Hatherly, a man who accompanies Fury from time to time. He’s the aforementioned Idealist, a man who thinks the US is a force for good, and inch by inch has the hope flayed from him. He’s a good man in a way Fury isn’t, happy to fight for a cause and mortified to discover how rotten to the core the cause has become. I really like his character, and he provides a welcome and relatable face through the book. Or Shirley, the love interest in the book and subject of numerous amorous flings with Fury. She’s a firebrand who shacks up with an odious little lump of the stuff you squeeze out of blackheads because he can provide a good lifestyle for her. The story is no kinder for her. In case you’re not getting the picture here, there’s not a lot of light at the end of this particular tunnel; the plot is as pitch black as they come. But, if you’ve read that many comics, you’ll know that a story being dark and depressive does not equate to it being good. So, how is the plot then?I’d say it’s great. As you’ve no doubt gathered, the plot is a fictional narrative woven through real events. To an extent then, if you know much about the events themselves, then you’re going to have an idea how things are going to go on a broad level. Fury Navigates his way through assisting the French in Vietnam, attempting to murder Fidel castro, attempting the same with a Vietnamese general and finally investigating claims of drug trafficking in Latin America. I don’t consider it a spoiler to say that in each case things go disastrously wrong, because again, it’s not like these events are particularly obscure. The cold war context of all these sordid little forays into conflict really allows Ennis to stick the spade into America’s moral high ground; the repercussions of these notionally just wars will stick with us long after everyone who might read this is dead. The slaughter of literal mountains of innocents? Check. Funding wars with Narcotics trading? Check. Assassination of parties not technically at war with the US? Check. Leaving allies to be scythed down having promised them support? Check. Skulls grin at the US from all over the world. In a lot of ways Fury’s traipsing through these events acts more as an expose of them, and the resultant effects they have on people. Fury lives for war, but what does that make of him when the war is unjust? it simply would not be as effective if the story was not using real world conflicts. Fighting communism sure was used to justify the unjustifiable. If I had to pick my favourite parts – which is an odd term to use in reference to a work as traumatizing as this – it’d actually be the quieter moments where things are at their most introspective. Ennis writes some superlative dialogue and the closing pages of this book are heartbreaking because of it. Parlov draws some amazing action scenes to be sure, but they’re played so intensely straight faced that’s it’s hard to take them as just that – action scenes. It feels more like watching a horror film on fast forward, just this ceaseless barrage of fresh hells every other panel. It almost aches watching all these people slide into a slow realisation of how horrible the thing they’re a part of is. It’s a little slow to start with though, so stick with it – it will pay dividends. It moves at a very deliberate pace, in tune with the theme of Fury drunkenly baring his soul to microphone, dressed in a fuzzy bathrobe, surrounded by hookers.So, what do I dislike about Fury? Well, there’s not a lot per se that I would consider flaws, but there’s an ocean of things that might disqualify this from someone else’s interest. For example: do you have a weak stomach? If so, you’ll want to cordon off the entire area of your comics shop this this book occupies and burn it to the ground, this is a hideously gory book at times. How do you feel about profanity? I only ask because Half the characters in here are on the verge of weaponising f-bombs. Sex, how are you with raunchy stuff? There’s nudity a plenty and debauchery wherever your eyes alight within these pages. In other words, if you disliked anything about Ennis’ tendency to take things to extreme places, this book won’t be your cup of congealing bodily fluids at all. The book also reads better if you’re at least passing familiar with some of the context around it; I can’t imagine too many people haven’t heard of the Vietnam war, but if you never knew the French were there you might raise the odd quizzical eyebrow when you bump into the foreign legion in one of the earlier parts of the book, for example. Along a similar vein, if you’ve not read into the bay of pigs fiasco, you might potentially be left wondering exactly why Fury was in cuba to begin with. In general it could be said that a little smattering of knowledge about the cold war era could be of benefit if you want to get the most out of this book. There’s one bit of characterisation within the book that I have issue with – not a friendship, but a sort of…mutual respect that occurs between Fury and a Vietnamese general. It allows for some great dialogue so there’s only so much flak it’s due, but I found this particular general to be extremely charitable given the circumstances. Overall though I’m reaching. I’d need to go over this with the finest of fine tooth combs to locate anything more substantial than a nitpick. My war gone by is an unsettling experience that will stick with you once it’s over. The dialogue and imagery are memorable through how stark they are, and the unnerving brutality of the whole affair, whilst certainly gratuitous, is gradually ratcheted up so that you never become fully inured to it. It savages the high-minded moral absolutism of the west during the cold war with a voracity I’ve not seen in a fair few other works set within a similar timeframe, so if you have the stomach for it, this grisly masterpiece has earned a spot on your shelf.

The stories running through issues #1-13 of Marvel Max’s Fury Max comic-book are collected here. They were originally collected as  Fury Max: My War Gone By Vol. 1  and  Fury Max: My War Gone By Volume 2 . Volume one collected two three-issue storylines, the first set in French Indo-China in 1954, and the second set in 1961 during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; the second collected two three-part stories, and a single-issue finale, tying up loose ends, as it were.Being a Max series, this may not be the Nick Fury of Shield and the superhero universe, though he could easily be the Nick Fury of the recent Punisher Max series. Most issues have a little framing/opening shot of an aged Nick Fury recording his story on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder in a hotel room full of naked women and empty bottles. He does remind you somewhat of the Comedian at the start of the Watchmen film. This is a Garth Ennis story, so it is excellently written, excellently illustrated, and dripping with blood and guts. There is a little bit of sex, but not enough to distract you from the violence. If you are a fan of Garth Ennis’s stories then, as the saying goes, you’re going to like this.THE SPOILER ZONEIssues #1-3 see Fury attached to the US embassy in French Indochina. He meets a French officer who invites him to visit his little outpost. Fury’s new assistant takes a dislike to a Foreign Legion sergeant who was formerly an SS guard at the outpost; Fury meets a US Congressman who is on a fact-finding tour, and gets involved with his secretary; the assistant sneaks off to the outpost to call out the sergeant, Fury goes to retrieve him, just as the Vietnamese launch their final offensive…Issues 4-6 sees Fury recruited for a ‘black op’ to assassinate Castro during the Bay of Pigs. He doesn’t succeed. He is also annoyed about losing his assistant. The Congressman from the previous adventure, now married to his secretary, is involved with the Cuban exiles in Florida, and with the CIA. The Cubans in Florida are not happy with the outcome either… I suppose a grassy knoll is on the horizon, but who will be standing on it…?Issues #7-9 sees Fury back in Vietnam in 1970, on a mission with Frank Castle to assassinate General Giap in Laos. Expect the unexpected, as Giap has a plan to end the war in Vietnam by revealing the drug trade being carried on out of there by Americans in high places that would bring an immediate cease-fire. He had not counted on Fury and Castle though, who are there to fight a war, not end one!Issues #10-12 sees Fury in Nicaragua in 1984, investigating a training camp run by our old friend from the Punisher’s series, the Barracuda! It’s the drugs trade again, of course, and this time Fury’s had enough - of the politicking that is, not the drugs! Err... that didn’t come out quite right…Issue #13 closes everything down, as we come to 1999, and the end of Fury’s dictating of his memoirs, and the deaths of many of the supporting cast, mostly at the hands of jilted wives… and Fury meets an old long-forgotten opponent at the Vietnam Memorial, and both find that politicians have corrupted everything they fought for…