I really like Samuel L. Jackson's characters on screen. (I'd like to say that i really like him, but i've never met the man.) I very much enjoy his Nick Fury. But - I have to wonder how Jack Kirby would have felt about Nick these days. While Mr. Jackson works quite well for the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., it wouldn't work so well for Sgt. Fury back in World War II. I know that the current trend is to racially diversify casting and pretend things were always nice and happily integrated. I even understand and appreciate the notion attempting to influence culture by example. But that doesn't always work well for me. If we forget what things were like, we invite it to happen again. And so watching Sam Jackson's Nick Fury leading the Howlers would have a constant cognitive dissonance clawing at the back of my skull throughout the movie. Not to say that only white men were heroic figures in WW2, not by a long shot. But any minority led command that ran like the Howling Commandos would have faced a firing squad or worse.
And Jack was there in the war. He had a gut connection to Sgt. Fury & the Howlers. So... I wonder sometimes how The King would have felt about some of how his old creations fare these days.
We won't discuss the horrors of their comic book fates. Much better to look back.
If you only know Nick Fury in his modern incarnation...
The first few issues of Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos had some of those pin-up pages that early Marvel comics used to feature so often. Rather than focus on the characters as most other books did, here they focused on the equipment from World War II:
Then there was that time that Sgt. Fury met Reed Richards during WW2...
It was quite the different Nick Fury back in the day. Much as i'm looking forward to seeing S. L. Jackson's Nick Fury fighting a war in Captain Marvel, it would be so cool to see a World War II adventure with Jack Kirby's Sgt. Fury and the Howlers...
all original art from Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos #s 1-5 (1963)
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