User blog:Nausiated/Project 11/61 - Wartime Fury

The past few months I have been working on an expanded history page for the original Nick Fury. As some people who have been following my work know, currently I've been going through each issue of Fantastic Four and updating the profiles of whichever characters happen to appear in each issue. For characters with long running histories (Nick Fury being one of them) I decided to do a cut off point, only doing the character's appearances in that decade of publication. So for example, every member of the Fantastic Four I stopped their expanded pages covering all their appearances from November 1961 to December 1969. It allows me to take a break from a character and move on to others to break up the obvious monotony that comes from writing about one character for too long. Of course with all the various flashbacks and retcons, I also needed to cover all those stories as well. This has made Nick Fury one of the longer entries I've been working on since I started Project 11/61. Because Nick Fury has history in the modern age and also during World War II.

Back during my "Golden Age" project, when I was doing characters like Captain America and Bucky I was doing things year by year and after reading all their appearances in say -- 1941 -- I researched what flashback stories and such also went back to that period. Since they actually appeared in comics in the 1940s, going back and adding more to those pages is going to be much easier for me. Fury however has proven to be a little more time consuming. Because not only did he have his modern era tales as part of SHIELD but also World War II adventures with the Howling Commandos. Which created problems of it's own.

Right now I'm done Fury's days in World War II, so I decided to take a break and write about that particular part of Fury's life. Here's what I observed:


 * You couldn't always trust the dates that are listed in each issue. Many of the stories in Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos Vol 1 thankfully do not have dates, but often times the chronology is a screwed up when they actually bothered to it. This is something I found with later stories that were published after the initial run of Fury and his Howling Commandos. They didn't really research the chronology of the war and the chronology of the characters very well. Also when it came to some of the earlier stories, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby went all over the map. Especially in the Sgt. Fury Annuals. One of the things that created these problems was changes in the Howling Commando roster. Particularly with the brief departures and joinings of Dino Manelli and Eric Koenig. There are too many to mention here, but if you take a look at the footnotes on my Fury Expanded History page they are all explained there.


 * Reading the stories it was clear that Stan Lee -- who was enlisted into the military and saw no combat -- didn't really know his wartime history very well either, the Howler stories were more generic until writer Garry Friedrich took over the series. Often times, as the Marvel Bullpin would do, Stan Lee would write himself into various stories. At one point he had himself written in as a Captain bossing around artist Dick Ayers. I found this kind of insulting to soldiers who actually fought in the war given Lee having not fought combat. He was primarily stationed with the Signal Corps, and later the Training Films Division. Versus somebody like Jack Kirby who actually *fought* in World War II, but was modest enough not to Mary Sue himself into his own stories. (A harsh criticism of ol' Stan the Man? Perhaps.)


 * The Holocaust was not specifically mentioned until about 90 issues into the series. From our standpoint in the era we live in, this might come as a bit of a shock. But honestly, World War II comics didn't really talk about the Holocaust until the late 1960s the early 70s. Up until that point heroes in war comics fought the Nazis because they were bad guys who took over Europe. I'm not much of a historian, but I would probably chalk up the downplaying of the Holocaust based on three factors: What was known about the atrocities, people's ignorance, the slow spread of news in that era, and the Comic Book Authority Code. I think that up until the mid-to-late sixties people's knowledge of the atrocities happening in the war were either misunderstood, unknown or people just chose to be ignorant of it. America was too busy patting it's heroes on the back for beating Hitler to focus on things like massive graves and genocide. I would also suspect that when the Comic Code Authority came in the late 50s and basically neutered the comic industry that specific reference to the Holocaust were downplayed until creative teams started bending the rules and pushing the Code to lessen its restrictions.


 * As an aside to all this, they also heavily implied that Howler Izzy Cohen was Jewish early on in the series. It wasn't outright said until later on in the series, also around the 90 issue mark, right around when they started making specific reference to the Holocaust. On the same token it was also implied early on in the series that African-American Howler Gabe Jones was discriminated against in the military due to his ethnicity. Heavily implied, but unlike Izzy's being Jewish never mentioned again. The only time that Gabe experienced racism was from the Nazis. In the late 60s when the Civil Rights movement with in full swing they tried to do a story about Gabe trying to convince an African-American woman to not side with the Nazis (???!?) because Americans were racist towards her. It was kind of a dud.


 * Other than a single guest appearance of Captain America and the Red Skull in one issue or another, Sgt. Fury was purely a war comic. There was not a single super-hero featured in it. Fury's war time interactions with super-humans and some of the more bizarre tales all were a product of Marvel ever expanding their universe. A lot of these retcons of have happened in the last decade or so.