There’s still time to bid – but the clock’s ticking! – on the original art by the late Carlos Ezquerra for British Marvel’s short-lived FURY comic, over at Heritage Auctions.
On offer is Carlos Ezquerra‘s cover for Fury #21, featuring “Howling Commando” Sgt. Fury barreling into a bayonet duel.
As we’ve previously noted, while Dave Gibbons drew the cover for Issue One, it was Judge Dredd co-creator Carlos Ezquerra who drew almost all of the stunning covers for the title, which took its name from the Sergeant Fury character and strip it reprinted as its lead.
Created under the watch of then Editor in Chief Neil Tennant (before he found wider fame in the Pet Shop Boys), Fury is perhaps an odd title for British Marvel. It was their first attempt at publishing a war comic, the company clearly aware of the sales success of rival titles Battle and Warlord at the time. The title even spawned its own “Fury’s Commando Club“, which you could join for the princely sum of 30p.
“Allegedly Neil Tennant felt that Marvel UK needed a war comic to compete in this area,” Lew Stringer noted on his blog back in 2014, pointing out how closely the comic’s masthead echoed its rivals. “The result was Fury.”
The title lasted just 25 issues before merging with The Mighty World of Marvel, the merger issue (No. 258), trailed in a full page house ad in Fury 25, featuring a pretty unwieldy masthead that also promoted The Incredible Hulk.
The choice of reprint material for Fury – which included “Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos” and “Captain Savage and the Leatherneck Raiders” failed to grab readers more used to Battle‘s grittier stories and I recall being unimpressed by the first issue, the strip choice failing to appeal. Some of the shorter strips were reprints of 1950s war stories, which looked dated even to my then young eyes.
Flicking through the short-lived comic now, perhaps the liveliest item in the title is the Letters Page, several readers becoming regular correspondents. There was the occasional stab at feature material, and Adrian D. Beeton provided a marvellous poster for #2, and a tie-in with Airfix to utilise some glorious box art as a poster in one issue, but these items seem, in the main, a tad half-hearted, compared with the energy of rivals like Battle-Action.
Indeed, it’s only the striking covers by Carlos Ezquerra that really make the title stand out – so it’s little wonder the original art for the cover of Issue 11 sold earlier this year through Heritage for $750, although that’s still a snip compared with the final bids on some of Carlos’ Judge Dredd-related originals.
Just last year, Excalibur Auctions sold the Carlos Ezquerra’s cover art for Fury #22 featuring an “Exploding Train” for £950, and, separately, a copy of Fury #11 comic and final printers proof for Fury issue #11. The vendor, Marvel UK’s Art Director, would study the proofs and mark anything that needed correction and send them back to the printer.
“Despite its totally misleading but wonderful cover paintings … once you cracked the covers and saw the mishmash of content – including creaky 1950s reprints – [Fury] just didn’t look very British,” noted Dez Skinn, who was brought on board at the company in 1979 and went on to transform its output and also notes how quickly the British weekly format burned through potential reprint material. “One UK weekly would alone eat through over 1,600 pages a year of material,” he notes. Thus, even a successful title might come an untimely end, because there was no desire on the part of the New York parent to allow much origination and keep a comic afloat.
More than anything, this is another early British Marvel title that reflects how much the company needed to be publishing material specifically created for a British audience – something not that far off, with Dez brought on board and immediately setting about giving the company’s titles a revamp, as well as bringing us Doctor Who Weekly and Hulk Comic, both titles I devoured avidly at the time.
Marvel did have a bash at a war weekly-styled title himself. Forces in Combat, published in 1980-81, had conflict of all kinds as its theme (its fluid reprint line-up included “Rom Spaceknight”, “Master of Kung Fu” and “Wulf the Briton”) but it had a war weekly look. The title ran for 35 issues before merging with Future Tense.
• Check out the cover art for Fury #21 on Heritage Auctions here
UPDATE, Thursday 21st August 2025: The art sold for $906.25
Fury Cover Gallery
Clicking on an image should expand it
Head downthetubes for…
• downthetubes: British Marvel‘s short-lived war comic “Fury” recalled
• 2000AD “Dan Dare” art comes to auction, and the mystery of Adrian D. Beeton
Richard Sheaf has documented this short-lived title’s covers and free gift giveaways
• Starlogged: Forces in Combat feature and cover gallery
This article was updated on Thursday 21st August 2025 to add the hammer price for the Issue 21 cover art. We also removed a credit for Dez Skinn,who, among other things, rebranded Marvel’s British operations as “Marvel UK”, as being the instigator of Forces in Combat, which was incorrect. Our apologies.
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
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