Every Saturday, we will be examining comic book stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically "overturned" by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent). Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of The Abandoned An' Forsaked. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today we look at the hilarious "death" of Nick Fury.

Enjoy!

So during the mid-1990s, Marvel split their comics into four or five groups. The problem was that they had a few titles that really did not fit into ANY group. Hulk, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Punisher - they were not Avengers, they were not X-Men, they were not Spider-Man characters (the New Warriors, for instance, became a Spider-Man related title so that they could fit into that group). So Marvel just gave them their own group - Marvel Edge. And then they had a crossover between these characters that really have nothing in common. The crossover dealt with the Punisher being convinced that Nick Fury killed his family (Punisher was mind-altered and controlled by some folks who were trying to get Fury out of the way so that they could take over SHIELD).

In the final part of the story, Punisher learns of the existence of Fury's Life Model Decoys...







He then destroys all of Fury's Life Model Decoys...









And then kills Fury at the end of the issue...



In the Incredible Hulk, Peter David has some fun with the death of Nick Fury...





Before highlighting that Fury was, indeed, dead...







Note Iron Man's presence at the funeral. That's important.

NOW what? Go to the next page to find out!

So as I talked about last week, Sharon Carter turned out to be alive, only left for dead by SHIELD while on a secret mission (for which SHIELD faked her death). So she went to SHIELD for answers, only to learn that the man who would know, Nick Fury, was dead...



Mark Waid, too, has fun with the "yeah, I'm sure he's dead" aspect of it all...



So Sharon eventually goes to look for Nick Fury's body, which apparently was not actually buried in Arlington because the government did not want people to have access to the Infinity Formula in Nick's veins...







And here comes the explanation!

You see, even though all the LMDs had been destroyed, they were not REALLY destroyed! Tony Stark just made a very special one that no one else knew about and Stark did not think about himself even though HE WAS AT THE FUNERAL!







So Sharon goes to look for the real Nick Fury, while moaning to herself about what he did to her...



Note that Fury did not actually show Cap Sharon's death.

So anyhow, she finds him trapped in time. He explains his disappearance...





(Angel, by the way, died soon after they landed in the past. So the big bad guy was basically a MacGuffin).

While stuck in the past with Sharon, he explains that he thought that she WAS dead...





So all was cool once again between Sharon and Nick (and Sharon eventually became the head of SHIELD for a time while Fury took off for a bit).

So yeah, Nick Fury died and it turned out to really be a Life Model Decoy. Hard to think of a less inspired explanation than that, huh? Although I guess the simplest solutions are often the best ones...