by Jessica Greenlee
Staff Writer
Miss Fury is trapped in 1943 in a timeline that is not her own—a time that has another Marla Drake happily going about her business. Watching herself work, Marla has to wonder about herself and her own nature. She also, more practically, has to wonder about where and how to live. As she begins to sort out possibilities for herself in this new time and place, more trouble shows up.
As he has from the beginning of this arc, Rob Williams is trusting his readers, throwing them into a convoluted time-travel travel plot full of multiple versions of the same people (some of them dead, but why let that stop anyone?), and crazy fights with Nazis. Miss Fury begins with a whirlwind recap of previous events before launching Marla into an encounter with herself and throwing her, and the readers into the new 1943, complete with further time-travel complications and the absence of any real support. It’s a crazy plot, but it works. At the center is Marla Drake, who is more than a little crazy (even if time travel is real) and who also loves a little wordplay: How can one not like a heroine who not only uses the word “unbeknownst” multiple times but muses that “unbeknownst is a really cool word”? Her drive to sort out her past, save the future, and, above all, to find the man she loves, holds the story together.
Now that there are two Marlas, it is going to be interesting seeing how Herbert and Nunes choose to deal with separating them visually. Up until the point where “real” Marla cuts her hair, the expressions and body language of the two have been nearly identical; Miss Fury may say her alt-self is more insane than she, but that grin she gives when fighting? They both have it—so who’s the reliable one of the two?
Otherwise, Herbert and Nunes choose to reflect the convoluted nature of the plot with crazed angles on buildings and bright, slantwise lines focusing on the time-travelers. Perhaps because the story itself covers so much territory, Herbert has opted for a fairly traditional panel arrangement and approach.
In any case, the story is off again, at full tilt, with another perhaps-dead, perhaps-not, Nazi coming in to keep both Marla Drakes plenty occupied, and the readers turning pages.
