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.
1926 - 17-year-old Frank becomes a local boxer with not much of a record but a legendary reputation for never going down.
1935 - 26-year-old Frank enlists in the army when his sweetheart leaves him. He is first assigned to Easy Company stateside.
1941 - 32-year-old Frank and Easy Company ship out to England to prepare to fight after Pearl Harbor.
1942 - 33-year-old Frank & Easy Company are 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. He becomes his second in command.
1944 - 35-year-old Frank has a passionate affair with French resistance fighter Marie Guillot.
1945 - 36-year-old Frank & the rest of Easy Company are killed to the man in the last battle of WWII.
We all know that in the decline in popularity of superheroes after World War II, the comics market was driven more by horror, romance, and war comics. Well, at least one of those war comics managed to stick around right on through the return to prominence of Superheroes in the Silver Age and beyond, thriving as one of DC's most prominent non-superhero characters all the way to the Crisis of Infinite Earths. There really is no other war comic that managed to maintain publication for so long, and the result is a really iconic character. Of course, the tendency is to try to keep that character around, but that's exactly what you SHOULDN'T do...
Sergeant Rock's Comic HistorySergeant Rock started out as a single story by legendary writer & editor Robert Kanigher in issue #68 of the war anthology book G.I. Combat in 1959. He's very much a prototype, just a character called "the Rock", an amateur boxer who doesn't know how to stay down bringing that same tenacity to the war.
The character would show up again over in another series, Our Army At War #81 that same year, in a story written by another legend, Bob Haney, in a book edited by Kanigher. We now get Rocks rank, and the character seems more fully formed. He would go on to appear in every issue of Our Army at War, clearly a favorite creation of Kanigher who would write the bulk of his appearance and even give the character his own dog-tag number. Most the his appearances were drawn by ANOTHER legend, Joe Kubert. By 1965, even though the book was still Our Army at War, the cover would prominently feature Rock's name, and by 1977 the book was renamed Sgt Rock with issue 302, and continue to publish until issue #422 in 1988. Of course, any character that was this prolific would go on to make regular appearances in other comics, and for the most part this was fine. because Rock was really only appearing in other anthology series that also depicted his wartime exploits. Eventually, however, there were appearances outside of World War II, like the adventures of an unexplained ADAM Rock, not Frank, in the Vietnam War that appeared in the pages of Swamp Thing. In 2001, an elderly Rock was named as part of president Lex Luther's cabinet, and would also lead the new 2001 version of the Suicide Squad. |
Our Segeant Rock StoryWe actually have to change precious little with Sergeant Rock. He's absolutely a character archetype, someone whole genres of fiction have built up trying to emulate. Before we ever had the Punisher, we had Sergeant Rock. We're not going to try to build an entire history of Easy Company into our timeline, as part of the point of the original stories is you never really knew where in the European theater they were going to land next. We just need to hit a few key points, and the character sort of writes himself.
As for our framing device for Easy Company, Rock is clearly the leader archetype, but in this case it's almost not important that we really get him right, because Rock is so iconic all by himself. One thing we do definitely want to make clear, though? Rock, and the rest of Easy Company, died in the final battle of World War II, and Rock himself is killed by the very last bullet fired in the war. This might be disputed by some writers, but it's maintained as the intention of the character's creator, Robert Kanigher, who responded to post war stories in the Sgt Rock letter column: "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." |