Sgt. Rock's Combat Tales, Vol. 1

If you’re a guy of a certain age, just reading the title of this new digest-sized collection of vintage comic book yarns ought to bring a smile to your face. SGT. ROCK’S COMBAT TALES . . . that really brings back good memories of reading OUR ARMY AT WAR, G.I. COMBAT, and other assorted DC war comics during the Fifties and Sixties.

There are some classic stories in this collection, too, including “The Rock” and “The DI and the Sand Fleas”, which are considered forerunners of the Sgt. Rock character whose stories ran for a couple of decades. Neither of the protagonists in those stories is exactly who Sgt. Rock turned out to be, but they were steps in that direction. Then there are several stories that actually feature Rock and Easy Company (although the regular supporting characters who would be featured later don’t appear in these stories), as well as several stand-alone tales of World War II combat.

The scripts are all by Robert Kanigher, and as usual with Kanigher’s scripts, there’s a certain sameness to them. They pack a lot of emotional punch anyway. On about half of the stories, the art is by Joe Kubert, and those are the best ones as far as I’m concerned. Kubert and Kanigher were a really potent combination, and when you read the Easy Company stories with art by Jerry Grandinetti, you realize how much weaker they are without Kubert. (Grandinetti’s a fine artist, by the way, and I like a lot of his other work, I just have a hard time accepting Sgt. Rock stories drawn by anyone except Kubert.) A couple of the stand-alone stories have art by Russ Heath and Irv Novick, both of whom I like.

The stories in this collection all originally appeared in 1959 and 1960, which is before the Kanigher-Kubert team really hit its stride, but they’re well worth reading. I hope this series of reprints continues and showcases some of the even better stories that came along a few years later.