Dukes
1917 - Jackie Johnson is born in Texas.
1932 - 16-year-old Jackie becomes a junior boxing champion.
1934 - 18-year-old Jackie becomes the amateur boxing champ, and begins boxing professionally
1937 - 21-year-old Jackie is denied the chance to fight for the national boxing championship.
1938 - 22-year-old Jackie is married.
1941 - 25-year-old Johnson goes to fight in WWII after Pearl Harbor, joining an all-black unit. They ship out to England to prepare to fight after Pearl Harbor.
1942 - 25-year-old Johnson is the sole survivor of his unit, and is transferred into Easy Company.
1945 - 28-year-old Johnson & the rest of Easy Company are killed to the man in the last battle of WWII.
The Sergeant Rock comics were action-packed adventures, and while they definitely had a group of named characters that made up Rock's Easy Company, they for the most part didn't drive the story so much as populate it. We did learn more about them over time, just because they appeared so often, but it was pretty peripheral to the actual excitement du jour.
So we are going to do something fun. We have a specific archetype in mind; one taken from a specific story that we believe was itself taking cues from Sergeant Rock and Easy Company, and will use that as our template for these characters.
So we are going to do something fun. We have a specific archetype in mind; one taken from a specific story that we believe was itself taking cues from Sergeant Rock and Easy Company, and will use that as our template for these characters.
Jackie Johnson's StoryJackie Johnson is one of the characters from Easy Company that actually did get a few stories centered around him. He debuted in a cool story in Our Army at War #113 in 1961, when he has to operate the machine gun while unable to see, with an injured Wildman acting as his eyes. His next appearance is, I think, a particularly important issue, Our Army at War #160 from 1965, in the story "What Color Is Your Blood?". There are a lot of attempts at stories about race that happen in the mid sixties, to various degrees of success. Kanigher has often been at the forefront of trying to tell those stories, and Jackie's impromptu boxing match with a Nazi in this story is, I think, one of the best of the era. Jackie has gone on to be one of the most prolifically appearing members of Easy Company.
For our story, we zeroed in on the fact that, for some reason, Jackie is the only member of Easy Company that doesn't actually have his own nickname. We know his whole character is based on being a former boxer, and when looking at our template, there is one character in particular who is a perfect fit for Jackie, and it just so happens that the actor who plays that character has, as his last name, the perfect nickname for him. |