Neil Tennant's FURY

Back in 1977, before the Pet Shop Boys hit the music charts, Neil Tennant was Editor-in-Chief at Marvel UK. The company was putting out a various number of weekly comics at the time, reprinting Marvel strips from the USA, and basically trying to flood the market to rival IPC and DC Thomson. 

However, several reprint titles had failed or at least not had the longevity expected of them, and so something different was required. DC Thomson had made a success out of their all-war weekly Warlord, and IPC had followed suit with Battle Picture Weekly, which became another hit. Allegedly Neil Tennant felt that Marvel UK needed a war comic to compete in this area. The result was Fury. 

Marvel's war weekly was modelled so closely on Warlord and Battle that even the logo was obviously inspired by those of its rivals...

The covers of Fury were also similar to the ones Battle had been running. Powerful images with a punchy message. None punchier than the brilliant one shown at the top of this post by Carlos Ezquerra. The artist had produced many similarly strong images for Battle's covers so it was quite a coup for Marvel UK to commission him for Fury. Unfortunately, the company were not given a budget by their American owners to produce British strips so although Fury looked like a traditional UK war comic on the outside, the interiors were a different matter.

With no option but to use American reprint material, Tennant chose to serialise Sgt.Fury and His Howling Commandos as the main strip, with each 20 page story spread across two or three weekly instalments. Art by Dick Ayers...

The same applied to Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders, which had been a short-lived Marvel strip from the late sixties with art by John Severin...

The rest of the 32 page weekly was taken up with five-page complete war stories from Marvel comics of the 1950s. Some of which were looking quite dated by 1977. The Jap Trap is from 1959, art by Jay Scott Pike...

Despite its American content, Fury tried hard to be as close to a traditional British weekly as possible, such as running a letters page 'hosted' by Sgt.Fury himself...

...and following in the footsteps of Bullet's Fireball Club, Fury encouraged its readers to send in 30p for items such as a club badge, Identity Card, and Secret Codes...

Sadly, Fury failed to attract as many readers as its rivals, probably because the content just wasn't traditional enough. Had Neil Tennant been given free reign to develop a truly British war comic then perhaps it would have lasted longer. As it was, Fury ended after just 25 weeks, merging into The Mighty World of Marvel. Tennant left comics to work for Smash Hits, and a few years later became a huge success in the music industry.

*******************************

Incidentally, the cover to Fury No.1 was by Dave Gibbons and there's currently a copy for sale from Silver-Acre on eBay if you're quick! Click here!