Easy Company
1935 - Frank Rock enlists in the army when his sweetheart leaves him. He is first assigned to Easy Company stateside. Membership: 32-year-old Frank Rock.
1941 - Easy Company ships out to England to prepare to fight after Pearl Harbor. Shane Hawkins serves as radio operator, Harold Shapiro as explosives expert, Louis Kiyahani, as tracker & sniper. Membership: 32-year-old Frank Rock, 26-year-old Louis Kiyahani, 33-year-old Harold Shapiro & 27-year-old Shane Hawkins
1942 - Easy Company is sent into the fight. Horace Canfield transfers in and strives to lead the company, but quickly discovers that they are the perfect fighting unit under Frank Rock. He becomes his second in command. Jackie Johnson is the sole survivor of his unit, and is transferred into Easy.
Membership: 33-year-old Frank Rock, 27-year-old Louis Kiyahani, 34-year-old Harold Shapiro, 28-year-old Shane Hawkins, 25-year-old Jackie Johnson & 26-year-old Horace Canfield
Membership: 33-year-old Frank Rock, 27-year-old Louis Kiyahani, 34-year-old Harold Shapiro, 28-year-old Shane Hawkins, 25-year-old Jackie Johnson & 26-year-old Horace Canfield
1945 - Easy Company is killed to the man in the last battle of WII. Membership: 36-year-old Frank Rock, 30-year-old Louis Kiyahani, 37-year-old Harold Shapiro, 31-year-old Shane Hawkins, 28-year-old Jackie Johnson & 29-year-old Horace Canfield
It's easy for modern comic readers to forget, but for a very long time war comics were a huge part of all comic publisher's production. Superheroes might be the main draw TODAY, but for a long time audiences who might not otherwise have been interested in comics at all were regular readers of war comics. One discord member pointed out that there are lots of readers of a certain age who might actually consider war comics the standard of the medium, while superheroes are just a silly tangent. He made the comparison to modern day video games and the draw of Call of Duty to huge audiences that might not care about gaming at all otherwise. From that perspective, it's very hard to overstate the huge impact of DC's Sgt. Rock, one of the longest running publications in it's whole history.
Easy Company's Comic HistoryThe early years of the Silver Age of comics sit 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, and his unit, Easy Company, began appearing in comics in 1959 in the pages of GI Combat and Our Army at War, and remained in steady publication right through the 80s. How did it weather those transitional years? With one particular trick: by being very likely the single greatest war comic ever produced. It has contemporaries of course, 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. |
Our Easy Company StoryThe timeline of Sergeant Rock and Easy Company is actually a pretty easy one to put together; their specific adventures were deliberately serialized, often told with Frank himself narrating like a sardonic, devil-weary parable. We don't need to specify where they were at any given time, just know that they were SOMEWHERE.
But who are our Easy Company actually going to be? They appeared for decades in the pages of the comics, but there isn't really a strong sense of any of them as individuals exactly, just a group of nicknames and character quirks... So we've done something here that might seem a little overly clever to some of you, but that we think really gives this group a very particular structure, and outlines a role for each character we're going to include. We are going to take another iconic group of soldiers, a group I will guarantee you was created with the original Easy Company in mind, and use them as the archetypes we'll follow. Just for fun, see if you can guess what we were aiming for before you see who we mean. |