This reprints Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #1-23 and Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos Annual #1. Stories are written by Stan Lee, and penciled by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers.
So let's get one thing straight: this is not a war comic. This is a super-team comic set during a war. Sgt. Fury and his Commandos fight behind enemy lines, generally with little to no support, yet achieve 100% of their goals, usually escape with nary a scratch, and commit absurd and ridiculous acts of martial prowess (Dum-Dum Dugan takes out at least two flying German fighters with hand grenades). There is little to no on-panel death (I'm not complaining--I think gore is totally overdone in today's comics), and I'm still wondering where Dugan gets the bowler with the corporal's stripes. One would like to compare this with the likes of Sgt. Rock in Our Army At War, but it's an unfair comparison. This is much more in tone with 1950's DC Blackhawk than any sort of more realistic war comic.
That being said, I wouldn't call this a bad comic, just not a great one. It's breezy and fun--true, there's zero drama (save for two notable stories), but the characterizations and snappy dialogue carries you along for the reasonably pleasant ride. There is a bit of a tonal switch in the artwork when Ayers takes over for Kirby, but it isn't jarring and you get used to it pretty quickly. The stories are best read in small chunks, as they do have a bit of sameness to them.
If you're a Silver Age historical buff, this is definitely worth the money to fill in a few gaps (for instance, when did Fury start getting promoted). It also raises some interesting questions as well--at the time, a gung-ho war comic seems to be the sort of thing that wouldn't be received well, at least by Marvel's core audience at the time (which I understand to be largely high school and college students). There are also some historical innacuracies (someone refers to fighting the Battle of the Bulge with another character before D-Day). Still, at the end of the day, I'd recommend this collection..
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I wasn't there, so I can't argue with you--or leastways, none of it would have made any sense or difference to me. But I did think that this was more mid-1960's, in which instance there might have been a Marvel fandom composed of those older than 12.
I just read the first half of this volume and enjoyed it immensely. I never read most of them and they were very good. Yes, the stories do make more sense if you pretend that Fury and the Howlers do indeed have super-powers of some sort. The first issues could be simply adults in Boy Commandos stories. But the series does evolve.
Of course, the most famous issue was #13 with Captain America and Bucky. They gave Fury an arch-enemy in Baron Strucker but I was surprised to see him fight the then Doctor Zemo.
Fury's relationship with Lady Pamela is heart-warming and bittersweet.
But to me, the highlight was #4 and the sudden death of Jonathan "Junior" Juniper. In fact, his end seemed to be tacked on the story. But the loss effected Fury greatly as the next few issues showed. In fact at the end of John Byrne's Fantastic Four run, Nick Fury appears to travel back in time to before the war and goes to kill Hitler in order to save countless lives and he mentions Junior so even forty-fifty years later, his all-too-early end haunted the SHIELD leader.
That was one of the two stories that I felt did have a little drama in the collection. I don't know if you've gotten to the other one yet. I do appreciate the difference in tone in terms of how the deaths were handled. Junior's death was a soldier's death--these things happened, you move on. The other death, Nick did not recover from so quickly, and I appreciated that as well. It brought just enough gravitas to ground the series.
Philip Portelli said:
Randy Jackson said:
That must be why I always preferred Sgt. Rock.
Well, those stories were fairly unrealistic too, I'd say. But they were more realistic than the Sgt. Fury stories.
ClarkKent_DC said:
You have to give Marvel credit that NO ONE wrote a story where Baron Strucker confronts Nick Fury in the present with Lady Pamela in suspended animation or something! ;-)
Randy Jackson said:
"Realistic"? Once I was at my grandmother's, and one of my uncles read a bunch of my Sgt. Rock comics, and said he had to stop because he started to think that Rock could walk through rainstorms and come out dry.
No, I don't prefer Sgt. Rock comics because they're more "realistic" (although they are, sort of). And "realism" in comics is overrated, anyway.