Pop Quiz: Essential Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos, v. 1

I’ve just read the Essential Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, v. 1, and boy, did it raise some questions. Lucky you: I’m going to share some of them, and I’ll even add a few of my best guesses for each. But I don’t know which is right. For the answers, visit your local Army recruitment office, which will be glad to educate you on all manner of topics related to national service. (You may have to sign some paperwork before they give you the answers. Please do so without annoying the nice recruiters by reading it.)

1. When during World War II do these issues take place?

a) 1942. The missions in North Africa means everything must happen before the Afrika Korps surrendered in May 1943 and more probably before the climactic battle of El Alamein in fall 1942.
b) Late 1943 or the first half of 1944. Many mentions of the future D-Day landing are made, and planning for that operation took place between late 1943 and the invasion date of June 6, 1944.
c) Yes.
d) The Silver Age of World War II. Excelsior, True Believers!

2. The Howling Commandos go on at least one suicide mission per issue, but after the 23 issues in Essential Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos, v. 1, the seven-member squad loses only one man. Why can’t the Germans (and occasionally the Japanese) kill the verdamnt Howlers?
a) For dramatic purposes — if the book were more realistic, the series would have been a miniseries, and everyone would have been dead at the end of it.
b) No one dared tell Stan Lee that “suicide mission” didn’t mean what he thought it meant.
c) The German soldiers were actually time-lost clones of Jango Fett, which is why they have to share six names (Otto, Fritz, Siegfried, Ernst, Ludwig, and Baron).
d) Well, judging from the art, the Japanese suffered from some unfortunate eye condition that probably hampered their aim. The Germans were probably too busy learning English to practice their marksmanship.

3. Hmm … Well, why don’t the Germans speak German?
a) Comic book conventions for foreign languages, such as brackets and footnotes, were not common at the time.
b) They were so poor they had only this outrageous accent!
c) The German language was taken by the Allies after World War I as part of reparations.
d) German and Japanese didn’t exist as languages before the end of World War II. They were inflicted upon the defeated Axis powers by the Allies as their cruelest punishment.*

4. This is World War II. Where are all the dead bodies?
a) These particular battles were fought under the GI Joe / Hardy Boys rules. Deaths are for exceptional, dramatic reasons only, and injuries can’t actually cause anything more than general weakness, holes in clothing, and mild blood stains. Soldiers being knocked unconscious and / or suffering head wounds (especially if bullets “graze the temple”) are acceptable.
b) These particular battles were fought under the video game rules. Dead bodies disappear a few seconds after they collapse, leaving occasional power ups such as health packs and grenades.
c) The dead bodies are immediately swept under the Comics Code of America symbol.
d) People died in World War II? Oh my God! Why didn’t anyone tell me?

5. What is Baron Strucker doing in this panel?
a) Spoken-word performance art titled “For the World Is Hollow, and I Have Committed Genocide against the Lesser Races.”
b) Breakdancing to a funky groove being laid down by DJ Nazi Jeff.
c) The latest dance craze to sweep the Fatherland — either the Hitler Stomp or the Nazi Hop.
d) Waiting for his turn to dance with Mary Jane Watson down at the Coffee Bean. She’ll dance with anyone … and I think you know what I mean by “dance.”**

6. In #17, why are the Howling Commandos, who have just finished a mission in the Sahara Desert, said to be only “a few miles” from a jungle?
a) Because the lush, tropical rainforest is right next to the arid, sandy desert. Duh. That happens. It’s like asking why someone would say you’re only “a few miles” from New York if you’re in Weehawken, N.J.
b) Nazi super science.
c) As every American knows, it’s only about 100 miles or so from Cape Town to Cairo. How far from one another can things in Africa be?
d) Because Stan Lee — that’s why.

7. What does the narrative box mean when it says Dum-Dum Dugan took care of the German guards “Commando style”?
a) He slit their throats, dispatching them silently.
b) He shot them both with a single bullet to the back of the head, killing them quickly and professionally.
c) He knocked them unconscious, then stole their underwear. The Allies wanted to bring freedom to all men in Europe!
d) He confused them with an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation, shot them, then made a horrible pun about “not seeing” (“Nazi-ing”) them again.

8. Fury and the Howling Commandos was published in the mid-‘60s, before the Civil Rights Movement gained traction in popular media, and it depicted an era when Americans dehumanized their war-time enemies with ethnic slurs. So just how racist is this book? (Please see #10, iii, before answering.)
a) More nationalistic than racist. Like most comic books of the time (and even up to the present day), other nationalities are reduced to quaint stereotypes. These are meant to be shorthand for “different” rather than demeaning, no matter how outdated or simplistic they are. The Howling Commandos are more ethnically diverse than most comic book teams of the time, and they were definitely more diverse than the actual US Army during World War II, which was still segregated.
b) As above, but still kinda racist.
c) Pretty racist.
d) This is a book in which Gabe Jones cows a bunch of African tribesmen with the jitterbug, crappy magic tricks, and a Masonic ring. What do you think?

9. Each combat mission, no matter how involved or difficult, takes place entirely in one issue. How many issues would each mission take to tell in a decompressed 21st-century comic?
a) Two or three issues each. These stories don’t leave much room for things like subtlety or, you know, characterization.
b) A mission could be spread over three issues, but you need downtime issues — these are soldiers; they need to, well, decompress.
c) Each Silver Age issue probably could sustain a whole storyline — one trade paperback per mission.
d) Brian Michael Bendis has just announced that Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #1 will form the basis of the first two years’ worth of stories in Ultimate Sgt. Fury and His Howling Ultimates.

10. Consider the following four statements, each of which happened in Essential Sgt. Fury I:
i. The Germans attempted to tunnel from France to Britain, secretly, as an invasion plan.
ii. A submarine fired the Howling Commandos out of torpedo tubes, which should have crushed their spines like soda cans.
iii. Izzy Cohen passed himself off as a Japanese officer with a little tape and mud.
iv. Fury led a mission (without orders) against a German bomber squadron base to get revenge for one person killed in a bombing raid.
Which of the above is the most ridiculous?
a) ii.
b) iv.
c) i and iv, tied.
d) iii and iv, because ii happens in movies and books often enough we’ve become used to the idea.
e) This book has infantrymen shooting down enough German planes — with machine guns — to qualify as aces; one squadron performing missions in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific (always returning to England); suicide missions on which no one ever dies; and missions with no logical chronological order. But you’re concerned with these four things? Really?


*As for Italy, there is no such language as Italian. It actually is heavily accented English and wild hand gestures.

** The mashed potato, perhaps, or the cool jerk.

Excalibur Visionaries: Alan Davis, v. 3

Collects: Excalibur (v. 1) #59-67 (1992-3)

Released: July 2011 (Marvel)

Format: 216 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785155430

What is this?: Writer / artist Alan Davis wraps up his run on X-Men spinoff Excalibur.

The culprits: Alan Davis, with help from writer Scott Lobdell and artist Scott Kolins

Excalibur Visionaries: Alan Davis, v. 3 wraps up Alan Davis’s work on Excalibur, a team he co-created with Chris Claremont in 1987. And when I say “wraps up,” I mean “wraps up” — Davis, as the writer and artist, isn’t making a half-hearted attempt to give closure to a few storylines. He’s trying to put an end to almost all of the storylines he worked on during his second run of Excalibur, some of which — like what exactly Widget is — started in his first run with Chris Claremont at the beginning of the series.

In other words, if you haven’t read v. 1 and v. 2, you should probably do that. If you haven’t read them for a while, you might consider reading them again, just to make sure everything’s fresh in your mind.

Davis puts an end to the stories of Widget, the Warpies, and Alistair Stuart, even tying the last two into one neat bow — a bit of craftsmanship undercut only by my complete disinterest in the Warpies. The culprit who framed Alistair’s sister, Alysdane, faces justice. Roma resets Captain Britain’s status quo so that future writers don’t have to understand what gives Brian Braddock his powers, and Davis gives a definitive direction to Brian and Meggan’s romance. Rachel confronts her place in the universe and the Phoenix; all the manipulations of her body and mind are wiped out so that she can begin again. (And be jettisoned in quick order by another writer, but that’s not Davis’s fault.) He even wraps up the Days of Future Past timeline, although I question the wisdom of doing it by having Excalibur team up with Marvel UK and Marvel’s UK characters. C’est la guerre, I suppose.

It’s always satisfying when a writer gives closure to a storyline he or she introduced. But that doesn’t necessarily make writer’s material good, and I have a hard time deciding whether the stories in v. 3 are good. I didn’t enjoy them that much, but that doesn’t mean much; I don’t care about the Warpies, all of whom might have well had “Disposable” tattooed on their backsides, and the Rachel / Phoenix relationship (and all that entails) never interested me either. That leaves Scott Lobdell’s forgettable two-part fill-in and the Days of Future Past story, and neither one hooks me either — the latter might be one that could interest me, but piling up loads of supporting characters I don’t recognize dampens the attraction.

So are they good? Yes, I think so, although I can’t know for sure. In my negative of review v. 2, I counted the haphazard whipsawing between plotters and the overall roster flux against the book. But that isn’t a problem in v. 2. The major and minor characters are given a little room to express themselves outside the needs of the plot, which steadily moves forward after Lobdell’s story. The stories put characters in genuine danger that readers of the time might have felt was genuine, and the book culminates with the deadliest X-story of all time, Days of Future Past. Yes, they’re good. But I can’t make that connection viscerally, as I didn’t enjoy the stories.

A few loose ends remain, of course, and their importance is magnified only by other writer’s unwillingness to deal with them. What will happen with Feron (disappeared three issues after Davis), Kylun (ditto), Micromax (double ditto), and Cerise (again, ditto)? They’ll be ignored, that’s what. Feron is the most glaring case, as he is a character with nowhere else to go, other than Excalibur. There are a few danglers remaining, of course, beyond the confusion of the Phoenix / Rachel interaction of v. 2 — no word on the missing / regenerating War Wolves from early issues of Excalibur, for example, but that’s not much of a loss.

Davis’s art is excellent, as always — fluid, beautiful, expressive. Reading v. 3 is a reminder of the days when, rightly or wrongly, the X-books automatically got all the best artists. Those days are gone now, but for those of us who remember those days, it’s a nice bit of nostalgia. This collection also includes the art from a few of the trading cards Davis did fearuting Excalibur characters. The reproduction does them no favors, but it’s a better page filler than most.

This is an Alan Davis volume, so I should warn you: The book should be released with a bright yellow sticker saying: “Caution: May contain traces of Scott Lobdell.” Since Lobdell’s presence hangs over most of Marvel ‘90s titles, this warning can be take the same way as those labels that warn you a product and peanuts were processed in the same plant. Lobdell was in the X-book offices throughout the ‘90s, and he had a hand — if only invisible, like with everything that crossed over into Onslaught — in almost all of them.

Lobdell’s contribution to this volume, #59-60, is a goofy (although not in a fun way) two-parter in which Shadowcat, Captain Britain, and Meggan head to Wakanda to shamelessly team up with Captain America, Iron Man (in War Machine armor), and Black Panther. Lobdell gets in some good lines, especially about the paucity of African superheroes, but the plot is much too sparse for two issues, and the heroes defeat the villain by just being annoying.

There’s something wrong with artist Scott Kolins’s cheesecake-y full-page shot of Shadowcat in a swimsuit, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. It doesn’t help, though, that it’s the first page of the collection. Otherwise, his work is fine, with a few glitches of figure placement — Meggan looking like she must be standing up to her knees in mud, another character appearing to be standing on air when he should be falling or on a branch, etc. — and his work suffers when compared to Davis.

This volume wraps up Davis’s run on the title. Excalibur readers would have to wait a couple of years before Warren Ellis returned the book to relevance with #83, although his work is much different from the gentle humor team book that Claremont, Davis, and Lobdell (who, all joking aside, contributed more than a fifth of the first 75 issues) built over the years. This material is obviously a wrap-up, meant for fans who have been following the title for years. But it’s also done pretty well.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Hellboy, v. 8: Darkness Calls

Collects: Hellboy: Darkness Calls #1-6 (2007)

Released: May 2008 (Dark Horse)

Format: 200 pages / color / $19.95 / ISBN: 978-1593078966

What is this?: England’s witches want Hellboy to be their king, but Baba Yaga wants revenge on the demoniform hero.

The culprits: Writer Mike Mignola and artist Duncan Fegredo

The second Hellboy title of the fortnight is Hellboy, v. 8: Darkness Calls — a change for the Hellboy graphic novel series, in that this is the first book in which series creator Mike Mignola provides little of the artwork.

That was what defined Darkness Calls in my mind before I started reading the book, overshadowing anything else it could offer. The first few chapters I was consumed with the question of whether losing Mignola’s artwork in favor of Duncan Fegredo’s made the series lose an essential something that made Hellboy Hellboy. It didn’t matter that Mignola remained the writer; everything about Hellboy, series and character, is laconic, and so much rides on the ability and style of the art.

Happily, Fegredo fits right in. His art for Darkness Calls is similar to Mignola’s, although scratchier and not quite as shadowy or blocky. The loss of shadows works against Fegredo, but that’s a quibble. His Hellboy is slightly different as well, less massive and square — although a quick glance might not be enough for readers to be able to detect the differences. Fegredo’s fight scenes are well choreographed, and readers will have little trouble following the action. All in all, if readers can’t have Mignola’s art, then Fegredo will serve excellently.

The continuity of Hellboy is steadily getting more difficult; soon it will a bachelor’s degree in Hellboyology to be able to follow the plots. Although Mignola makes reference to past stories, you won’t be able to get all of the tangled references between Baba Yaga, Hecate, Igor Bromhead, Rasputin, Giurescu, and Ilsa Haupstein unless you have a decent recall of volumes 2, 3, and 4 (Wake the Devil, The Chained Coffin and Others, and The Right Hand of Doom). Pretty impressive for a comic about a big red guy punching and shooting monsters; on the other hand, I found the feeling I was missing out on some of the story disconcerting. Is this how others feel when the continuity of a superhero universe piles up on them? Hmm. Perhaps.

In the main story, the Russian witch Baba Yaga seeks revenge on Hellboy for putting out her eye decades in the past; she works through proxies, not daring to face Hellboy directly. Her main weapon is Koshchei the Deathless, a warrior who is immortal because he hid his soul inside an egg inside a duck inside a rabbit inside a goat. Predictably, such silly precautions have rebounded upon him, and Baba Yaga controls the goat, while all Koschchei wants is death. This, of course, is a set up for more than three issues of a running fight between Koshchei and Hellboy.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a wide variety of creatures from mythology and folklore; there are. Mignola is never afraid to drop a minor spirit or a great god into a story just as a background character, and that’s the case here as he plunks house spirits and witchfinders and the leader of the Russian pagan gods … Yes, most of the cast is from Russian and Gaelic fairy stories, but even within a specific mythos, these background characters help flesh out the world and make it seem living, like there’s enough of a supernatural population for characters to bump into each other.

Hellboy walks through some secondary plots as well. The witches of Britain are looking for a new king, and they think Hellboy fits the bill even if he’d rather fight on the side of a witchfinder; the faerie Gruagach looks to resurrect a powerful creature to lead the creatures of darkness into prominence; and warlock Igor Bromhead steals the power of Hecate. The last has little to do with anything, it feels like, except allow Hecate a chance to give a final, foreboding speech. Which is a bit of a gyp — stealing the power of Hecate should have had more of an effect on the story. (As should the deicide in the story.) The witches of Britain end up serving as a bookend to the story, the plot that Baba Yaga’s quest for vengeance hijacks Hellboy from. Only Gruagach seems to be an interesting subplot, setting up a more powerful future adversary for Hellboy.

Still, it’s good to have a full-length Hellboy tale after two straight collections of shorter material. It gives Mignola (and Fegredo) to stretch out their legs, so to speak, and tell a story that has room for more than just the main narrative. Even if I didn’t think all of the storylines were exploited to their full potential and even if I found some of the narrative confusing, I enjoyed having a multitude of plot points to chew on as the story went on. And it’s good to see the Hellboy mythos advanced in a more organized manner.

I’m actually looking forward to the next volume, something I wasn’t after v. 7.

Rating: (3.5 of 5)

Excalibur Visionaries: Alan Davis, v. 2

Collects: Excalibur #51-8, Excalibur: XX Crossing (1992)

Released: January 2010 (Marvel)

Format: 240 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785144557

What is this?: Alan Davis continues his second run on Excalibur with a little help from the Marvel staff.

The culprits: Alan Davis, writing and drawing, along with writer Scott Lobdell, penciler Joe Madureira, and others

Excalibur was a spinoff of X-Men that launched in the late ‘80s, featuring three ex-X-Men (Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, and Phoenix II), Captain Britain, and his girlfriend, Meggan. The book was written by Chris Claremont, drawn by Alan Davis, and set in the U.K., and it had some humor and some alternate reality plots that were a legacy of earlier Captain Britain stories. Pretty straightforward, really. By the time the stories in Excalibur Visionaries: Alan Davis, v. 2, came around, however, things were a little muddled.

Plotwise, this one’s all over the place. You start out with a serviceable cross-time / alternate Earth story, then dive into the confusing backwater of Phoenix continuity, before making a sidetrek into a non-Davis (and very ’90s) story of Captain Britain and Spider-Man fighting a group of foreign-exchange students who transform into various ethnic varieties of dogs and call themselves “the Litter.” (Is there a Eurotrash joke there? I can’t be sure.) After Davis returns to do a Crazy Gang story, readers would be well served to ignore XX Crossing — a pointless story where an assassin with time powers tries to prove himself to Dr. Doom by trying to kill Excalibur in one of the most convoluted ways possible. To finish out the book, there’s two two-part stories: one, a very dark story featuring Captain Britain and Psylocke’s flesh-warping brother, and the second, in which Excalibur fights very stupid trolls, guest starring the X-Men.

Is this a humor book, as it started out? Is it a satellite X-book, which is what it becomes? Is it a waste of time? I can’t be sure. Is Davis sure?

One point the reader has to keep in mind is that there are a few non-Alan Davis issues interspersed throughout the volume — #53 and XX Crossing most prominently, but #57-8 are only plotted by Davis. That’s both a drawback and a blessing; the volume is titled Alan Davis, v. 2, after all, and presumably the book is geared more at Davis fans than Excalibur completists. But it’s also good to keep telling the story; even though #53 is missable (it’s a fill-in flashback story about how Peter Parker made Captain Britain a better hero), leaving it out would create a hole in the sequence that readers would wonder about. On the other hand, XX Crossing isn’t in the sequence, it’s not a story you ever hear about, and it’s not that good, so it could have been omitted for … well, Davis didn’t work on #59-60 at all, but at least you could get it out of the way before Alan Davis, v. 3, collects #61-7.

So, when it comes to the Davis stories, what do we have? Well, there’s the silliness of the dino-Excalibur, then comes the Phoenix exposition, the Crazy Gang, and the very serious Jamie Braddock story, in which Excalibur finally discovers that A Big Secret. Other than the dino story in #51, this book feels like Davis is using his limited schedule to wrap up plotlines. He tries to explain Phoenix as best as he can; he puts the Crazy Gang, who was one of Excalibur’s first adversaries, off the board but somewhere where they can be called in again; and he not only brings back Jamie for the first time since #27 but he also allows Excalibur to discover something that happened in #4 — that Sat-Yr-9 has killed Captain Britain’s old girlfriend and replaced her, working against Excalibur and Meggan, Captain Britain’s new girlfriend. Davis then leaves other writers and artists to tell other stories.

But it doesn’t completely work. First of all, those stories are not up to Davis’s standards. Secondly, they make the stories’ subject matter feel haphazard — yanked in one direction by Davis, another by Scott Lobdell, then back to Davis, etc. Thirdly, the revelations feel sudden; Excalibur was going through roster changes at the time, and Davis’s plot-heavy revelations don’t allow new characters such as Cerise or Feron to express themselves. The seriousness and sadness of #55-6 is moving, but Davis doesn’t have the time to follow it up and make the consequences stick or register the emotional fallout.

Fortunately, Davis’s artwork is beautiful, as always. So crisp, so elegant — it’s a pleasure to read. He provides the art for #54-6 only, though. The cover of the book — taken from the cover of #55 — is ill-chosen, I think. It’s a nice Alan Davis image, but it makes it look like this is Excalibur Visionaries: Alan Davis, v. 2, guest starring Psylocke’s legs and breasts (and all territories in between). The cover for #52, which is used on the back cover, probably would have been better.

Most of the rest of the art is provided by competent artists who come up short when put next to Davis in a volume named after Davis. Joe Madureira, however, stands out with his pencils in #57-8, although his work doesn’t show his manga influences as much as his later efforts do.

This is an up-and-down book that never seems to find its level. Having not read v. 1, I can’t say that reading v. 1 makes a difference. I suspect it doesn’t, although that book is completely written and drawn by Davis. More Davis is exactly what this book needs — the art, if nothing else. As it stands, there’s more disappointment than panels drawn by Davis.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)