What It Takes To Kill The Fury

[mrosa]

Alan Moore and Alan Davis' Captain Britain run from the early '80s is one of my favourite superhero stories. It's a legendary story for the way it was so novel for the time. Not enough have read it, although it's influenced Marvel and the character in many ways. You may have heard of the godlike Mad Jim Jaspers and his reality-warping powers; of how he created an artificial super-being, The Fury, which could evolve and adapt to any superhero's powers; how The Fury killed Captain Britain; how Merlin brought him back to life, improved; how The Fury sweeped the floor with his body several more times; how in the end Jaspers and The Fury had an epic creation-killing-the-creator battle. But in the end, it wasn't Captain Britain who took down The Fury; he almost died again, if it weren't for this:











And this is how you write a gripping, exciting fight!

Comments

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

What exactly is your defination of 'standing around'?

Because we see Brian tear off a limb and smash up Fury real good before it pins him. And judging from the damage in the first couple of scans, Brian looks like he was mauled by the Fury before this fight too.

He didn't finish it, but Brian did his fair share of work.

[korvar]

True enough. I just found it interesting - usually the person with their name on the book does the final deed, you know? I mean, would you expect the big bad in a Superman book to be dealt with by anyone other than Superman?

It wasn't really a criticism, just something I noted cropped up a couple of times in Moore's work.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

I kinda like it. It fleshes out the supporting characters, gives them more identity as their own people as opposed to just foils for the main characters.

I see no reason why the main character should be leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of his cast. Inching them out every now and then is fine.

[korvar]

One could argue that, if they're not leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the cast, why is their name on the book? :)

[mrph.livejournal.com]

True enough. With Captain Britain, I think it's very much that Brian is out of his depth here - and also that Moore rarely resolves a plot by having the hero punch it into oblivion.

One of the things I liked about the story is that none of our heroes are capable of beating the Fury in a straight-out fight - there's no 'villain decay' and it keeps its menace to the final seconds...

This is also the payback for an extended storyline in which Captain UK has been traumatised by the Fury killing her world's superheroes - including her husband and everyone else she knew. In the Fury's previous appearance, before it upgraded itself, she wasn't able to face it at all. Only the Special Executive's intervention kept the cast alive.

There's also the question of whether the fight would have gone differently if Captain Britain hadn't attacked it first - this was effectively a Captain Britain / Captain UK tag team finishing it off after the fight with Jaspers left it weakened.

(On a tangent - from vague memory, didn't Chris Claremont pretty much use the Fury as the basis for Nimrod...?)

[icon_uk]

(On a tangent - from vague memory, didn't Chris Claremont pretty much use the Fury as the basis for Nimrod...?)

Sort of, inasmuch as the Fury was always a sort of ultra-Sentinel, designed to destroy any and all superbeings.

Of course, when Claremont finally did get to use the Fury, he missed the point of it completely and the story was a complete mess.

[korvar]

If I recall correctly, he was planning to use Jaspers (who turned up as the prosecution in a United Nations trial against Magneto), the Fury, and other things from the Moore/Davis run on Captain Britain, until the copyright situation was explained (I can't remember why or how, but original stories produced at Marvel UK had the copyright retained by the authors, instead of everything being work for hire). And so he had to invent a Fury-a-like, which became Nimrod.

Although the Fury did appear again, with the X-Men pulling out all the stops to take it down. I think they created a singularity and dropped it in it...

[mrosa]

Although the Fury did appear again, with the X-Men pulling out all the stops to take it down. I think they created a singularity and dropped it in it...

Since when does that stop The Fury?

[korvar]

"When" would be that one comic :)

[mrph.livejournal.com]

I was always amused that Moore used the name again for 1963's not-quite-Spider-Man character. Complete with the tagline that "No One Escapes... The Fury" :)

[halloweenjack]

There's the scene earlier in the arc where someone mentions that Captain UK is wet after a big fight; Brian snaps something about how they'd all been sweating, and the other person (Opal Luna Saturnyne, maybe?) conveys (without coming right out and saying it) that Captain UK had been so scared that she'd pissed her uniform, and tops it off with "Grow up, Captain."

[halloweenjack]

That's part of how Alan Moore made his bones in the comics biz. Plenty of other people can write stories about big bruisers who save the day, even against absurdly overpowered villains, because they just! won't! give! up! It's teamwork where the team actually makes a difference, instead of just the team tank.