by Duane Spurlock
Sgt. Rock of Easy Co. was the only war comic character I really, really liked when I was a kid in the 1960s. The Losers, another DC creation, was enjoyable, primarily because of the John Severin art. And although Jeb Stuart and the Haunted Tank had lovely artwork by Russ Heath, the tank crew’s stories never really grabbed me like those about Easy Co. The main reason, I think, was because of the combined efforts of Bob Kanigher (the writer) and Joe Kubert (the artist.) (Okay, I liked this team on Enemy Ace as well, and I preferred the WWI flying ace’s tales to those other, non-Rock stories; but when I was a kid, those Silver Surfer-like monologs and melancholies the Ace indulged in just didn’t work for me.)
Meanwhile, Marvel’s Sgt. Fury just seemed like another shade of superhero comics to me—like Captain America tales set in the WWII, but without Cap’s dynamic presence to focus the stories. Superhero comics, not war comics.
Rock and Easy Co. served as the Everyman’s Chorus as they slogged through the war and its innumerable battles -- in snow, in mud, in rain, in burning heat -- Rock’s war was dirty and ugly, but there was always the beauty of human hope and striving amid the pain and ugliness.
Kubert’s art captured all this perfectly, even if my kid sensibilities had yet no critical grid on which to hang this perception. Kubert’s everyday infantrymen were ragged, torn, and tired. A closeup of a face showed dirt, wear and tear. These guys were dirty before the Dirty Dozen ever appeared on the silver screen. Just as Jack Kirby’s art presented the cosmic landscape of the superhero, so Kubert’s art captured the Heroic of the human under fire.
The late George Evans, a veteran of the pulp magazines and EC Comics heyday, also served as artist for Sgt. Rock for a number of issues. His style was rather different from Kubert’s, but he captured Rock’s war’s ugliness just as effectively.
So, when I found out that Kubert was teaming up with Brian Azzarello (scripter of the pulpish/hard-boiled DC comic 100 Bullets) for a Sgt. Rock graphic novel, I was pretty darn excited. The result, Between Hell and a Hard Place, is very good.
The book was released under DC’s Vertigo imprint, which is appropriate, as the language is rather harsher than in those mass-market comic days of the 1960s—I don’t recall too many—if any—swear words appearing in Our Army at War (“Approved by The Comic Code Authority”). It seems to me that a few anachronisms appear in the dialog of Azzarello’s script, but nothing that really derails the story.
The one truly bothersome item among these anachronisms is Ice Cream Soldier explaining that Rock assigned his moniker because he was so “vanilla.” This understanding of the word is a late-20th Century assignment of meaning, and just doesn’t ring true to a WWII-era story. This anecdote also doesn’t follow the story previously given (in Our Army At War, and reprinted in the first volume of the Sgt. Rock Archives) for the assignment of Ice Cream Soldier’s nickname (given because the veteran members of Easy teased the new private that he would “melt under fire”). Changing character histories to fit the immediate need is a long-established tradition in the comic book industry. Even Kanigher and Bob Haney did it to fit their storytelling needs during the course of Easy Co’s original run. So Azzarello’s doing it for the purpose of his story isn’t a big deal, but his handling of it -- using vanilla in an obviously anachronistic manner -- was particularly graceless.
Kubert’s style is a bit looser for this story than in his comic book days of nearly 40 years ago. But his ability to depict the essentials with the appropriate details and with an economy of line shows that his storytelling has not diminished one whit. I thought his Fax from Sarajevo seemed a bit uneven in places, but everything rolls smoothly here. Perhaps because he’s returning to a character and situations that he worked with for decades. Or perhaps because he’s relying on Azzarello’s script rather than his own writing. At any rate, the story is as affecting and effective as any of the top Kanigher-Kubert efforts from Our Army at War.
Which isn’t to say that the story is perfect. The climax doesn’t quite live up to the build up. (There will be some spoilers here, so watch out.) And that’s because, in part, Azzarello has tried to patch a crime and mystery onto the war story: Easy Co. takes four Nazi prisoners, three of whom later turn up dead, one missing; did the missing prisoner kill his fellows, and if so, why? Or did someone in Easy kill the three and let the fourth prisoner go? Azzarello clearly means for the more intimate crime -- the murders -- to contrast with the impersonal killings that take place on the larger stage of the war, and for the doubt that grows among Rock and his soldiers to provide emotional and psychological conflict for his story.
However, Azzarello doesn’t quite handle these elements as artfully as he presents the subplot featuring Ice Cream Soldier’s civilian past conflicting with his soldiering present. The doubt that rises among the combat-happy Joes of Easy seems forced upon them, that Azzarello is pushing the storytelling too hard. And the climax focusing on Rock and the rogue Nazi officer could have been better handled by Kanigher in a single-issue story as an excellent character study about honor, duty, and narcissistic self-interest. (And perhaps Kanigher actually did so -- the setting for the climax seems somehow familiar to me, as if I’d already read it as a Sgt. Rock or Enemy Ace story years ago, but perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me.)
It’s a delight to see Sgt. Rock back in harness. I hope it won’t be the last time. And it made me hunt down the two Sgt. Rock Archives volumes that DC has so far released.
In Volume 1, the first six or so stories -- the first, in particular, about a character named Rock, the others about an infantry unit designated Easy Company -- are relatively generic war comic fare for soldier comics circa 1959. It’s with the story titled “Ice Cream Soldier” that Kanigher finally nails the Sgt. Rock and Easy Co. elements that will essentially mark the series. This is the first of the stories to feature Sgt. Rock’s first-person “voice-over” narration, which -- along with the dialog from the rest of Easy -- is a combination of Damon Runyon and Raymond Chandler.
The slangy dialog and the battlefield settings elevate these comic book stories to the level of moral fables. The nicknames of the soldiers -- Ice Cream Soldier, Bulldozer, Wild Man -- echo the character-flagging names one encounters in Morality Plays such as Everyman (with characters named Everyman, Fellowship, Knowledge, Good Deeds, and so forth) or the story Pilgrim’s Progress (with characters named Christian, Evangelist, Obstinate, Pliable, and so forth). Sgt. Rock is part Everyman, part Every Soldier -- he is the voice of Easy, its taleteller and its leader. He embodies the common soldier who follows orders, yet life-and-death decisions burden him as he delivers and well as receives orders. Every battle tears away a piece of his soul, and every victory -- each battle won; each green recruit turned into a true combat-happy Joe of Easy Co. -- replenishes him.
Kanigher’s Sgt. Rock embodies Hemingway’s principle of grace under fire -- he must remain Easy’s rock, unshaken by mortar shells or raking machine gun fire from hidden pillboxes. The conflict for more than one story in these two archive volumes hangs on Rock’s motto that actions are louder than words, that he must lead by example instead of by ordering his men into peril. These psychic battles -- for which the soldiers of Easy stand in as Greek chorus -- take a toll on Rock, evident in the excellent renderings by Kubert of the sergeant’s face, a miracle of expression that blends the weary features of actors like John Cassavetes, Richard Conte, and Ben Gazzara.
Kanigher’s tales recast the lowly Easy infantry men -- baptized by battle, tempered under fire -- as knights of the round table, with Sgt. Rock sitting at its head. Like the westerns of Frederick Faust (Max Brand), Kanigher’s stories are larger than life. The infantry lingo, the nicknames, the unceasing battlefield scenes -- all elevate these war stories into a mythic quest, in which each occupied village, each sniper-laden forest, each mined roadway is an obstacle to overcome, a test to prove one’s worthiness on the way to capturing Berlin. These are the elements of Kanigher’s storytelling that have made Sgt. Rock and Easy Co. reside in the minds of comic readers for half a century. The mythic that Kanigher and Kubert revealed in the infantrymen of World War II touched these readers and their yearning for heroes. It is not just nostalgia, but the mythic that makes these stories -- with their comic book clichés, their Comic Code Authority restrictions -- memorable.
LINKS:
Purchase Kubert and Azzarello's Sgt. Rock graphic novel Between Hell and a Hard Place at Amazon.com by clicking here. Or check Bud Plant Books by clicking here.
Check Amazon.com for the availability of Sgt. Rock Archives: Volume 1 by clicking here. Or check Bud Plant Books for the book by clicking here.
Check Amazon.com for the availability of Sgt. Rock Archives: Volume 2 by clicking here. Or check Bud Plant Books for the book by clicking here.
Posted by ds at March 1, 2005 10:19 AM
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