^But Nick Fury or whomever is still just a fictional character. He's a figment of the imagination. So he can be reinvented any time you reboot the series, like when you film a new movie version.
Nothing is set in stone.
If I want to write a story in which Fury is a giant, orange-skinned woman and I can talk Marvel into authorizing it . . . voila, he's a giant, orange-skinned woman!
616 Nick Fury would be very problematic as a black character. Unless we want to ignore his World War II history and the fact that SHIELD was formed in the 1950s, which would suck because that stuff is awesome and Fury's like one of only like three major remaining links to the Marvel Golden Age (although I can't remember if he was actually there). Alternatively, we could just ignore the realities of race relations at the time, but that would suck even harder because that would be insulting.
Ultimate Nick Fury didn't possess the same backstory, perhaps to his deteriment, but it made the character's race pretty unimportant, even by implication. Although, apropos of nothing, I've become somewhat retroactively annoyed with Sam Jackson, and that's bled onto Ultimate Fury a bit.
Red Ranger said:
And I'll just bet you're one of the ST fans who flipped when Tim Russ was cast as a -- gasp -- black Vulcan!
Open ended discussion question: is it important, when casting aliens with actors from obviously different population groups, to consider the evolutionary mechanics of how such analogues would have arisen on said alien planet? I.e., "Given that Vulcans have had planetary transportation, no racial strife, and a unified government for more than a millennium, how come identifiable ethnicities continue to persist despite all the hot pon farr action?", which can also be phrased "Do Vulcans, like humans, tend to be racist in their mate choice?", or alternatively "Voyager writers would not have considered or even understood any of this crap because it approaches actual science, would they?" which is more of a statement really.
Also, is it annoyingly safe that they cast a black woman as Tuvok's wife (holodeck masturbation fantasy wife, but whatever), or of no consequence, or a good thing, because afaik there had been no black female Vulcans prior to that?
