The last time Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson worked on Nick Fury, the result was the Max imprint's Fury miniseries.  For a lot of people, it wasn't exactly what they were looking for from a Nick Fury miniseries.  It was also about a subtle as a brick in the face.

Peacemaker is a very different story.  We're in the relatively calm waters of the Marvel Knights imprint, and this is an origin story.  The idea is perfectly simple: it's Fury as an inexperienced sergeant.  That means it's World War II, and Garth Ennis gets to do a war comic.  It's always been one of his favourite genres - soldiers are one of his pet themes - and he does them very well.

It's February 1943 and the US Army is making its way into Tunisia.  Nobody's got any real combat experience, and so nobody really has much of a clue what they're doing.  But hey, they've read all the manuals.  Besides, they've got tons of military equipment and they had no trouble with the Vichy French.  What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, the answer is obvious - the Germans may be behind on paper, but they've been at this for a good few years now and they know what they're doing.  And the Americans don't.  So we have here an issue of Nick Fury stuck in a unit where everyone around him is either complacent or petrified.  Rather than make Fury himself into a loser, Ennis plays it more subtly.  He's the sole competent soldier, but he's not yet a leader.  Evidently, we're heading for a story which takes Fury from a good soldier to a great leader.  

It's a nicely constructed story, cutting between the Americans' miserably overconfident briefing about their own power and the reality of them getting blown to bits.  Robertson is always a great artist and this is some of his best work, ensuring that even the minor extras come across as people rather than props.

That said, Ennis has been over this ground many times before and it's hard to avoid acknowledging that he's done it better in the past.  Some of his past war stories have been truly exceptional and shown genuinely convincing characters.  While he isn't trashing the Nick Fury character in the way he did in Fury, Ennis seems to struggle to fit him into this style of story, and ends up writing him as a bit of a cypher.  Played straight, there just aren't enough dimensions in Nick Fury to sustain Ennis' best war stories, and Fury himself may turn out to be the fundamental defect with this series.

Overall, though, a very good first issue.  Ennis has done better, certainly, but only because his best is exceptional.

Rating: A-

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