Home Portfolio Unpublished Nick Fury

Notes:
· Summer 2001
Below is an excerpt from Brian Saner Lamken's interview with Brian Michael Bendis, which was published in Comicology:

BMB: Here's the untold story: David Mack had made Joe Quesada a little aware of my work - Dave was having a really good time over there [writing a Daredevil arc for Marvel Knights]. And I'd started working for Todd [McFarlane] on Sam and Twitch, and the book was doing all right. So Joe had read Torso and Jinx and whatever I was working on at the time, and he had called because he saw the potential [of me working for Marvel Knights]. Little did he know what a Marvel geek I was when I was a kid, y'know? He asked me what I would want to do, and I said, "There's a couple of characters that I really, really want to do, and one of them is Nick Fury." And he said, "What about David does design, you write the script, and Bill Sienkiewicz paints it?" And I went, "Yeah, okay." [Laughs]

BSL: This was for a Nick Fury project?

BMB: For a Nick Fury project for Marvel Knights. Me and David were so, y'know, dizzy with excitement over it, and David had a relationship with Steranko, that we made the mistake, really, of trying to involve Steranko in it. And he just turned it into such a complicated mess that it was just... I don't even really know what happened, beyond a certain point. We probably shouldn't have done that, in retrospect, but we just respected Steranko so much and [sighs] thought that it'd be cool for him to do covers and maybe, like, a wraparound story...

We had this whole thing, because we knew that he didn't want to collaborate. Maybe we'd have, like, a framing sequence by Steranko, and the main story with Sienkiewicz. We just had this whole thing in our heads, and I don't know what happened, but it was delaying things, and at the same time Daredevil was sort-of spiraling out of control [schedule-wise]. And this is how cool Joe was: Instead of saying, "Doesn't look like Nick Fury's gonna happen," he just said, "You wanna do Daredevil for a while? 'Cause we need to get it together, and that'd really be helping us out." And [Daredevil] was already a hit book, so that was sort-of like a promotion [from the Nick Fury project] instead of "Tough noogies. Better luck next time." And so I handed in my Daredevil, and then it became me and Dave doing Daredevil [Wake Up] together - which was quite nice, because both of us were still trying to wash the disgusting taste of Flaxen out of our mouths.