For its final issue in May of 1968, you can't say that Strange Tales didn't try to go out with a bang--the kind of bang, unfortunately, which portends the end of the world, as artist/writer Jim Steranko makes clear on the splash page of the Nick Fury portion of the issue.
Steranko and inker Joe Sinnott's impressive opening page, which entreats the reader to turn it and find out the details, receives a bit of reworking for its appearance in the letters page* of the new Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD series which premiered the following month. Steranko's original depiction, come to think of it, would have made a fitting entry in the PPC's prior post featuring the art of the letterer, though it's difficult to tell whether it was Steranko or letterer Sam Rosen who superimposed the mushroom cloud effect with the story's title. (Perhaps both men pooled their talents.)
*Entitled--what else?--"Don't Yield, Write S.H.I.E.L.D."
This final Fury story of the book--one that I've been meaning to get back to ever since it was featured as part of a brief roundup of splash pages which caught my eye--turns out to be a bit offbeat for a SHIELD story and perhaps not a tale that one would expect to find as part of a mag's final issue, yet it comes off as well-timed for regular readers since it provides a change of pace from the heated Yellow Claw conflict which had played out over several issues. As to what's on Fury's mind here, the head of SHIELD isn't actually brooding about some approaching apocalypse, but is instead dictating a message to Jimmy Woo, a former FBI agent who got his start in the 1956-57 espionage series Yellow Claw and then segued to Strange Tales in the fall of '67 where he lent a hand to SHIELD against the Claw--a partnership which Fury is interested in formalizing.
Of course, when it comes to SHIELD, duty may call at the drop of a hat, something Fury knows all too well--but the coming threat will in the end be unlike any other that he's faced.
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