Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #2
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeNick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #2 (July 1968) marks the debut of Centurius (Dr. Noah Black), who holds the distinction of being Marvel's first Black supervillain — a historically charged milestone in the publisher's Silver Age roster. The issue is equally notable for formally bringing Jimmy Woo into S.H.I.E.L.D., transitioning the character out of the FBI and into the spy-agency framework that would define his role for decades. Produced entirely by Jim Steranko — writer, penciler, and cover artist — it also became one of the earliest flash-points in the ongoing creative battle between Steranko's boundary-pushing aesthetics and the Comics Code Authority, whose intervention required John Romita Sr. to redraw two panels on page five; with biting irony, the replacement imagery was widely judged more suggestive than the original. That censorship episode is now regarded as one of the more illuminating examples of how the Code both constrained and inadvertently shaped late-1960s Marvel storytelling.
In "So Shall Ye Reap... Death!", Nick Fury and Jimmy Woo crash-land on a mysterious volcanic island that’s become a twisted Eden and a secret lab run by the reclusive scientist Centurius, a man vanished since the 1930s. With Centurius preparing to unleash a firestorm to reset the planet, Fury and Woo must outwit his bizarre creations—aided by a movie crew and their robot gorilla prop—before it’s too late. Jim Steranko’s groundbreaking art and storytelling, from pencils to inks to color, make this a standout early entry in the series, with his distinctive cover adding to the eerie, otherworldly tone.
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When Strange Tales was canceled in 1968, Nick Fury spun out of the anthology into his own solo title, re-launched at a new #1 under editor Stan Lee. Steranko — who had taken over both writing and art on the Strange Tales feature beginning around issue #155 — carried his full creative control into the new series, but the expanded page count of a standalone book put pressure on his notoriously deliberate production pace; he would ultimately write and draw only issues #1–3 and #5 of the series before departing. Issue #2 was inked by Frank Giacoia, with an uncredited Joe Giella assist, and the page-five controversy — in which panels depicting the budding romance between Fury and Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine were redrawn by Romita before coloring — is documented as an early and significant friction point that contributed to Steranko's eventual exit from Marvel altogether.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Centurius (Dr. Noah Black), Marvel's first Black supervillain, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who has evolved new life-forms on a remote volcanic island he calls Valhalla and plans to cleanse the Earth with forty days of radiation.
- Jimmy Woo formally leaves the FBI and joins S.H.I.E.L.D. in this issue, a character-status change that persists through his many subsequent appearances.
- Written, penciled, and cover-drawn entirely by Jim Steranko; inked by Frank Giacoia with Joe Giella assisting; lettered by Sam Rosen; edited by Stan Lee. Published July 10, 1968.
- Page 5, panels 9 and 11 were redrawn by John Romita Sr. before publication to satisfy Comics Code Authority concerns over the intimate scene between Fury and Contessa Valentina — an edit documented by the Grand Comics Database and CBR's Comic Book Legends Revealed; the altered panels are widely considered more suggestive than Steranko's originals.
- The story, titled 'So Shall Ye Reap… Death!', features a double-page spread and three splash pages, with Fury and Woo stranded on Centurius's island and ultimately defeating him with the help of a film crew's robotic King Kong prop.
- Centurius later reappeared as a recurring Marvel villain, joining the Hood's crime syndicate (New Avengers era) and serving as a member of the Thunderbolts beginning with issue #157.
- The issue has been reprinted multiple times: in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (1983 series) #1; the Nick Fury: Who Is Scorpio? reprint series (2000–2001); Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Vol. 2 (December 2009); S.H.I.E.L.D. by Steranko: The Complete Collection (2013); S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Complete Collection Omnibus (2015); and Steranko Is… Revolutionary (2020).
- The original Steranko panel (pre-CCA alteration) was restored in the 2000 reprint, allowing readers to see the sequence as Steranko intended for the first time in over thirty years.
Cast · 23 characters
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Reprints
Reprinted in Astounding Stories #60 (1970), L'Incredibile Devil #77 (1973), L'Incredibile Devil #78 (1973), Astounding Stories #120 (1976), Astounding Stories #152 (1980), Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD #1 (1983), Nick Fury: Who Is Scorpio? #[nn] (2000), Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Who Is Scorpio? #[nn] (2001), Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #2 (2009), S.H.I.E.L.D. by Steranko: The Complete Collection #[nn] (2013), S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Complete Collection Omnibus #[nn] (2015), Die offizielle Marvel-Comic-Sammlung #9 (2016), Marvel. Официальная коллекция комиксов #126 (2018), Steranko Is... Revolutionary #[nn] (2020), Agente Internacional #36, Marvel Série I #15
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