Featuring: The Fury
Release: May 26, 1955
Cover: September 1955
10 cents
5 pages
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|---|---|---|
| Venus #5 | PRELUDE | |
| Daredevil #9 | Reading order | Journey Into Mystery Annual 1 |
The GCD attributes the art to Werner Roth.
We’re reading this 1950s Marvel tale because we’re looking for the early Marvel appearances of Zeus. This is the earliest appearance I could find. We’ve seen some earlier appearances of Jupiter, who is perhaps the same person.
Zeus has a brief appearance, as the story is really about a Fury, one of the Erinyes, those powerful forces of cosmic justice.
When Gerard Kram escapes punishment for a murder he committed, Zeus dispatches a Fury to restore balance. She makes a mistake and finds Gerald Kramm instead.
She constantly annoys Gerald. Nobody else sees or hears her, until she passes by Gerard, and he hears her accusations, assumes they are directed at him, and confesses.
The Fury doesn’t read newspapers, so remains unaware she has the wrong man. Gerald’s first attempts to deal with her are to drown her out with noise, but eventually he just makes a dummy version of himself, and lets her harass that.
She comes off as pretty stupid for an all-powerful karmic force.
I was excited going into this story, because I appreciate a good meditation on justice. But you don’t really get that.
Instead, the Fury just kind of seems like an idiot, chasing the wrong man, and then ending with seeking justice against a dummy.
The issue contains four other weird tales, as well as a text story. The first tells the story of Brutus, cursed to immortality for his betrayal of Caesar.
I think that will do for the moment. I wanted to review the early appearances of Hercules and Zeus (or Jupiter) in Marvel to prepare for our next story. Zeus has a brief appearance in Journey Into Mystery #74, as part of a flashback in Pandora’s story. That issue came out just weeks after Fantastic Four #1, so doesn’t meet my standards for a PRELUDE story. I could make a retroactive INTERLUDE story out of it, but it doesn’t seem worth it. Zeus is really only mentioned in passing. We did already read one Zeus story I’ve classified as an INTERLUDE, from Amazing Adult Fantasy #13. Feel free to review that post.
But without further ado, it’s time to see Hercules and Zeus enter the Marvel Universe proper in Journey Into Mystery Annual 1.
This was all very well-timed, as we get to first see Russell Crowe as Zeus tonight in cinemas in the new film, Thor: Love and Thunder.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆, 39/100
Characters:
- Gerard Kram
- Zeus
- Fury
- Gerald Kramm
| Previous | Next | |
|---|---|---|
| Venus #5 | PRELUDE | |
| Daredevil #9 | Reading order | Journey Into Mystery Annual 1 |
I’m waiting for her cameo in the MCU – still nagging that dummy 70 years later!