Sergeant Rock
1909 - Frank Rock is born the son of a Pennsylvania steel worker.
1917- 8-year-old Frank's father fights in WWI & dies in France.
1925 - 16-year-old Frank goes to work in the same steel mill as his father.
1941 - 32-year-old Frank goes to fight in WWII after Pearl Harbor, joining Easy Company.
1942 - 33-year-old Frank & Easy Company fight at Three Stripe Hill.
1945 - 36-year-old Frank & the rest of Easy Company are killed to the man in the last battle of WWII.
The early years of the Silver Age of comics sits very much astride the transition between the fifties and sixties. You can, if you keep your eyes open, see the national identity shift from one of childish optimism to something that seems eager to question SOMETHING, even if it doesn't really know what yet. War comics were very popular in those early years, but as art styles evolved, so to did the messages they were trying to be send.
Sergeant Rock is very likely the single greatest wartime comic ever produced. It has contemporaries, most notably Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos over at Marvel, but as a work of pure audacity, you simply can't beat Sergeant Rock. The book was violent in a way that bordered on shocking, and the stories were intense morality puzzles, never really answering any of the questions they posed, ruminating on the horror of wartime heroism. Rock and the men of Easy Company were heroes, that was understood, but the damage they were doing to themselves in their heroism was likely never going to be undone. Rock has appeared in DC's continuity after the war, most notably serving as a General and President Luthor's Chief of Staff but also in the pages of Suicide Squad. This is all well and good, but he's ALSO been depicted as having been killed in the very last days of the war. Which version is correct? According to Wikipedia, the character's creator Robert Kanigher actually said in the Sgt. Rock letter column that "It is inevitable and wholly in character that neither Rock nor Easy survived the closing days of the war", and then later in what are clearly fighting words; "As far as I'm concerned ROCK is the only authentic World War II Soldier. For obvious reasons. He and Easy Company live only , and will eventually die, to the last man, in World War II." You can't really get much more black and white than that. |