us all from Communist tyranny. Conformity was seen as one’s patriotic duty. And most kids read comic books—those stacks at Dunham’s turned over pretty quickly, and every kid I knew had a few comics at home, even if they were just Archie or Richie Rich titles.
A comic book where the heroes were mutant weirdos did not suit the temper of the times, to say the least. Remembering those days, I think most kids probably found the X-Men to be pretty creepy. I didn’t, I loved them—but I was an oddball, a suspected mutant.
There were enough oddballs like me to keep the book going, but not enough to make it a success.
But then the phenomenon known as “the Sixties” happened. The counter-culture began setting its own standards, with Zap Comix existing alongside the mainstream fare like “Gilligan’s Island.” Long-haired kids took pride in being called “freaks.”
And except for a temporary surge during the “camp” craze triggered by the “Batman” TV show, comic book sales plummeted. When I started reading comics in 1959, every kid read them; by the time X-Men sales peaked in the 1980s, if I mentioned that I collected comics I would sometimes be asked, “Are they still publishing those?”
Comics went from being a mass medium to being a specialized taste; by 1975 reading comics marked a kid as something of an oddball.
And the natural audience for the X-Men was always oddballs and misfits.
Furthermore, the counter-culture had spread the idea that conformity was a trap; the Vietnam War had destroyed faith in authority. More people were admitting their differences, rather than trying to suppress them. People who were different from the norm were no longer automatically seen as creepy and threatening.
That comic book I fell in love with in 1963 had just been a dozen years ahead of its time. The world caught up with it eventually, but X-Men was there first.
I’m glad it was, because when I was eight going on nine, reading about the Beast and the Angel and Iceman and Cyclops and Marvel Girl, I took great comfort in its existence—in knowing, because this comic book was being published, that I wasn’t the only kid in America who felt as if he were growing up mutant.
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,