Sure Shot
1915- Louis Kiyahani is born on the Sioux reservation in South Dakota, his mother a survivor of the Ghost Dance War.
1927 - 12-year-old Louis, raised as a Sioux warrior, begins training as a master tracker and sharpshooter.
1934 - 19-year-old Louis earns the highest honor of a Sioux warrior, the Eagle Feather, by the council of war chiefs.
1939 - 24-year-old Louis falls in love with Emmylou Hartley, and is arrested & sent to prison for sleeping with a white woman.
1941 - 26-year-old Kiyahani is released on a work program to fight in WWII after Pearl Harbor, becoming a tracker & sniper in Easy Company. They ship out to England to prepare to fight.
1942 - 27-year-old Kiyahani & Easy Company are sent into the fight.
1945 - 30-year-old Kiyahani & 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.
Sure Shot's StorySo, the character in question here is actually 'Little Sure Shot', and it's probably important to point out that several members of Easy Company had cutesy nicknames, so his is not actually particularly problematic. He debuted in Our Army at War #127 in 1963, not really featured in a story, just introduced as a member of Easy Company, but very visibly Native American and wearing feathers on his helmet. Notably, while he wore his ethnicity proudly, I haven't found any stories where his status as a Native American was ever anything other than just a personal detail, and that's kind of awesome. Admittedly, I have not read every single issue of this series so I can't say that he NEVER starred in his own story, but generally he is just a trustworthy, capable part of Easy Company.
In our story, we took the 'Little' out of his name... the character in the comic is specifically depicted as short, so it does make some sense there. Our depiction however, like the rest of our take on Easy Company, will be based on a specific template of characters, and the obvious parallel for Sure Shot is anything but 'Little". He is, just like Louis, a tracker and sniper, but he is also an absolute tower of a human being, and we definitely like that better. |