There are a few artists (Gulacy, Chaykin, Pérez e.g) for whom I’d buy a comic even if they only did a cover. Steranko too is such an artist, but that’s not why I wanted this particular issue.
I certainly didn’t buy it for the story, an Archie Goodwin/Roy Thomas yarn about a group of extradimensional exiles calling themselves the Others who with their psionic powers are drawing a planetoid unto Earth to release the energy needed to return to their home dimension. Nick Fury is no stranger to sci-fi plots but this was something you’d expect to see in Fantastic Four or Avengers. The artwork by Frank Springer is good. He has a decent eye for the sort of futuristic decor that this story needed while he’s no slouch at action scenes either. Springer’s very good at ratcheting up the tension as well, as Nick has only hours to save the Earth. The resolution is a bit obvious, but the way Goodwin and Thomas increasingly corner Fury as the story unfolds, as each of his attempts to stop the disaster is foiled, is great.
No, I couldn’t care less about the contents of this issue nor even for the fact that Steranko had drawn the cover. This was simply something I purchased for nostalgic reasons. I knew that cover, had seen and admired it long before I ever laid my hands on the issue it was used on. It was all thanks to the first, 1979 edition of John Clute and Peter Nicholl’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which unlike the second 1991 edition was illustrated. And one of these illustrations was this particular Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD cover.
I must’ve read every word of the encyclopedia after I had discovered it in my local library. I borrowed it for months at the time, just rereading it and learning about science fiction when I didn’t have the pocket money to regularly buy science fiction books myself. And every time I browsed through it, I would come across this picture and had to stop to admire it for a second. Of course then I bought the actual issue it was from the moment I spotted it at a convention. It turns out I wasn’t the only one enthralled by this cover either: it won an Ally Award in 1968 for Best Cover.
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