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Sgt. Fury’s Family Affair

Originally published in North Carolina Veterans’ News

This article is about Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, heroes of a couple of hundred comic books back in the 1960s and ’70s.

If you haven’t already turned the page in disgust, stay with me for a moment. I am not a fan of Sgt. Fury. I’m not a fan of war comics in general, although I do read them sometimes.

However, I recently acquired, cheap, a stack of Sgt. Fury, all in very nice condition. I think I originally intended to sell ’em at a profit, or maybe I just bought them because I can’t resist cheap stuff, but as a matter of policy I read them, all in one sitting. I read every comic I acquire, no matter how stupid it may appear, in hopes of turning up unsuspected gems. That’s how I came to read eighteen issues of Sgt. Fury all at once, which brought me to a realization.

These are not war comics at all.

Marvel always advertised them as being “the war comic for people who hate war comics”, and they meant it. Despite the presence of hordes of Nazis and the occasional Italian Fascist or Imperial Japanese, these are not stories about World War II.

What are they about, then? They’re about the Howling Commandos. And no, I’m not just playing with words. Some of the Sgt. Fury annuals were set in other times and places. It didn’t matter if the Howlers were in occupied France, South Korea, Vietnam, or outer space—all that changed were the backgrounds and the enemy uniforms. The stories are not about the war, but about the camaraderie among the men who fought. Doesn’t matter where they fought; you could do the same stories about Roman Legionnaires. The Nazis aren’t characters, for the most part, but just part of the background, the constant threat that the Howlers face. Not much of a threat, either. As people who did like war comics pointed out, Sgt. Fury’s adventures never bore any resemblance to reality whatsoever; they were pure macho fantasy. Any one of the Howling Commandos could easily fight his way home through anywhere up to three German divisions—two, if he’s sick, and just one if he’s seriously wounded and slowly bleeding to death. The German army is never any real danger except by pure dumb luck. Howlers are too stubborn to die.

(One did get killed very early in the series, but that was before things had settled down to a pattern. Besides, it gave the others something to feel guilty about, and an excuse to hate the enemy.)

In ordinary war stories, the basic conflict is between Our Guys and The Enemy, and people do get killed, or at least hurt. Sure, we all know Sgt. Rock is going to pull through, but his men do get killed, innocent civilians do get killed. The suspense is dependent upon the fear of death for one or more characters. In Sgt. Fury the Howlers are totally indestructible—they can be damaged, but not destroyed. Germans die right and left, civilians do occasionally get killed (usually with a heart-wrenching dramatic played-to-the-hilt martyr scene), but nobody ever believes for a minute that Fury or Dum Dum or Dino or Reb or Izzy or Pinky or Gabe or even Erik, the anti-Nazi German, is going to be killed. Heck, the specials showed them all alive twenty years later!

Then where is there any suspense? If you haven’t got conflict and suspense you haven’t got a story. Disbelief can only be suspended so far. If these guys can’t be killed, if their lives can’t be threatened believably, what can be threatened?

Their relationship to each other, that’s what. And that’s what Sgt. Fury is really all about—camaraderie, friendship, loyalty, male bonding, call it what you will. Interpersonal dynamics. Group interaction. Peer acceptance. All that stuff they talk about in pop psych books.

Really, the essence of the whole series is that these seven or eight guys live together, work together, and are a big happy family. They banter with each other, but never, ever in any of these eighteen issues I have here, or any of the others I’ve read through the years, is there actually any sort of tension or disagreement within the group. It’s all idealized to the point where that’s unthinkable. Real threats don’t come from the Germans, usually, but from the outside world as a whole, threatening to alter the status quo.

For example, in an issue numbered in the 30s (I don’t happen to have it here) Dino Manelli, the Hollywood star of the group, is wounded and shipped stateside, relegated to making training films. This leads into #38, “This One’s For Dino”, wherein the Howlers steal a plane (intentionally left unguarded by father-figure Captain “Happy Sam” Sawyer), fly it to an island somewhere, break into a prison camp, and rescue one particular prisoner. Who, you ask? Why? Why, it’s the only man in the world who can get Dino back into fit condition for combat, a doctor who happens to specialize in just the sort of wound Dino got. If they get this doctor back to the States Dino may be able to rejoin them.

If this were “M*A*S*H”, of course—or real life—the guys would probably be glad to see Dino sent safely home, where nobody’s shooting at him, and Dino would be glad to go, but in Sgt. Fury it doesn’t work that way. The family group has been broken! That isn’t acceptable, ever, under any circumstances; they need to get him back, by any means possible. So they do, using methods that would get real commandomen killed about three times over, and would get any survivors court-martialed upon their return and probably jailed for the duration.

It’s the same in almost any issue. In #32, “A Traitor in Our Midst”, it appears that somebody’s been feeding information to the Nazis—a threat to the group’s self-image of being all gung-ho All-Americans. Turns out that Izzy was drugged and hypnotized using new Nazi methods, so of course he’s forgiven and all is again right with the world. In #40 the main conflict has nothing to do with their mission to rescue a French resistance fighter, but with the fact that the beautiful French girl who helps them can’t forgive Erik Koenig for being a German—it’s a matter of his acceptance into the group. In #42 the Howlers go AWOL to rescue Erik’s sister, putting their personal interests above those of the Allied Armies—one of their own needs them, so to hell with orders and rules. In #48 the Howlers battle the Blitzkrieg Squad, a group of Germans created specifically to match the Howlers at their own game and beat them—a threat to the group’s uniqueness and self-image of being the very best.

Skipping ahead a bit faster, let’s look at #60. Here Dum Dum is being court-martialed for insubordination, charges having been brought by Captain Sawyer. He’s guilty, as it turns out, but let’s not worry about that—the real conflict here is that Happy Sam Sawyer, the beloved father figure, has betrayed one of his boys. Dum Dum can’t believe it. Fury can’t believe it. And of course, he hasn’t. The real Sam Sawyer’s missing, having been replaced by a German double for the sole purpose of messing up the Howlers.

Naturally, once this is demonstrated to the court Dum Dum is off the hook—even though he did disobey orders without having any idea that the orders came from an enemy spy rather than his commanding officer. Reality simply has nothing to do with the Howling Commandos. They’re about togetherness. The entire Second World War is just an excuse to keep these guys working and living together, something to provide background against which they can play out their little interpersonal dramas. I mean, let’s face it, if these guys were border police in the 1970s, patrolling the Rio Grande every day instead of shooting up German headquarters, nobody would have bought the mag long enough to discover its real appeal. World War II is the hook to bring the reader in.

Probably the writers didn’t think of it that way; most of the people who worked on Sgt. Fury were wartime veterans, and probably they drew upon their own memories of wartime companionship in creating this warm and happy group. Wars and armies do create camaraderie by throwing randomly-chosen people together in horrendous conditions for extended periods of time, under conditions that allow little or no privacy and with constant danger tending to break down social reserve. Old army buddies are always special as a result—or old boarding school buddies, or buddies acquired in any similar high-pressure situation.

Sgt. Fury takes this natural camaraderie and exaggerates it to absurd proportions, justifying this by having the Howlers lead absurdly dangerous (impossibly dangerous, really) lives. The visible plotline may deal with Nazi plots and dangerous missions, but that’s not what’s important, any more than a punch-out between Spider-Man and the Kangaroo is actually as important as what’s happening to Spidey’s Aunt May or his girlfriend, Mary Jane.

The ongoing subplots in Sgt. Fury, in keeping with this togetherness theme, are always something to do with separation or acceptance. Dino’s wounded, Izzy’s captured by the Japanese for a few issues, Gabe is captured by the Germans briefly—separations, all of them. Bull McGiveney doesn’t accept a medic as a real soldier (i.e., a real man) because he doesn’t carry a gun; Jim Morita isn’t accepted by the soldiers at the base because he’s Nisei; Erik isn’t accepted by the French Resistance because he’s German; a black American woman in Paris sides with the Nazis because she was never accepted by white America—all acceptance problems. Erik’s gradual transition from temporary fill-in to full-time permanent Howler lasted several issues and resulted in such amazing things as a thought-balloon in #38 reading, “He bellows at me as loudly as at the Howlers! That must mean he accepts me…”

I think this explains why Sgt. Fury lasted as long as it did; the reader could identify with the Howlers and have that warm sense of belonging as a result. The war was just background noise; the group was the important thing, just as it is in many of the most popular superhero team comic books now. As an example, Tales of the Teen Titans #50 dealt entirely with the characters and their interrelationships, without a single fight scene or supervillain interfering; it’s the group dynamics that interest readers. Sgt. Fury took a different approach from the Teen Titans—much simpler, in that everything within the group was harmony, but at the same time subtler, in that it’s not immediately obvious, upon reading just one or two issues, that it’s the interaction that’s important. I suspect it appealed to a younger audience, and in a simpler time, when the idea of a powerful father-figure like Sam Sawyer and an all-male bunch of heroes was still acceptable.

This is not to say that the slam-bang action was just filler; it’s got a certain charm and does add superficial excitement. Besides, it gives the Howlers a chance to show off their macho wit and their individual traits. The wit isn’t much, usually, but there’s a steady supply of it, mostly in the form of insulting descriptions—Fury, for example, regularly refers to Germans as “lager-slurpers”, an appellation I cannot imagine anyone else ever using. The individual traits are really just stereotypes, trademarks to make it easier to tell the characters apart—Dino’s a handsome Italian actor obsessed with women (the Latin lover), Izzy’s a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, Gabe’s a big strong black musician/athlete, Reb’s a good ol’ boy from Kentucky who inexplicably speaks with a Georgia accent (presumably because nobody at New-York-based Marvel Comics knew the difference), Pinky is a really offensive parody of an effete Englishman. Dum Dum and Fury are actually almost human, rather than being ethnic stereotypes—Dum Dum the big strong well-meaning Irish guy who’s not as dumb as he looks, and Fury the all-American tough guy.

Oh, yes, and there’s Erik, stiff and formal and Prussian, fighting against the monsters who have taken over his country.

And all these varied characters work together in perfect harmony.

I wonder—any Sgt. Fury fans out there who may be reading this, I have a little test I’d like to try. What stories do you remember? I’d be willing to bet that you remember the ones that dealt with threats to the integrity of the group, that you remember Dino’s wound and Izzy’s imprisonment and Dum Dum’s court-martial—but do you remember a single one of the missions that the Howlers went on?

I don’t, and I just read eighteen of them.