Sgt.

Rock: Past and Present

by Edward Carey

November 2008

DC’s eponymous war hero Sgt. Rock has endured for more than half a century in the
annals of DC war comics. Artists from Sgt. Rock past and present were brought together
in a discussion panel at Big Apple Comic Con last weekend.

Mark Evanier [“Kirby: King of Comics”] moderated the

panel that featured artists from the original run of Sgt.
Rock, Russ Heath and Dick Ayers, as well as the creative
team of DC’s new Sgt. Rock mini-series, Billy Tucci and
Mark Sparacio [Sgt. Rock: The Lost Battalion].

Heath and Ayers began their long comic book careers in

the 40s after coming home from World War II. They were
both asked how they got started in comics.

After returning from the Air Force, Heath went to work for
various ad agencies, but didn’t make enough to support his
new family. While others were on their lunch break, Heath
went looking for work and ended up at the offices of
Timely Comics (predecessor to Marvel), where editor Stan
Lee offered him a job where he’d make “three times what I
Sgt Rock: The Lost Battalion #1 was making.”
Cover by Tucci & Sparacio
Ayers worked for Marvel Comics during the 60s, inking
over Jack Kirby’s pencils on Sgt. Fury and his Howling
Commandos, another World War II-era comic, but would later work on Sgt. Rock in the
70s.

“I just came out of the Army and wasn’t too keen on

doing all this stuff . . . and along came Sgt. Fury, which
I didn’t think much of. Here were guys who didn’t
shave and wore a derby hat and all kinds of crazy stuff,
so I did a couple of issues and dropped out of it. And
Stan [Lee] kept after me. It wasn’t until I started
drawing them in combat that I remembered what I had
worn when I was in Normandy. I would wear whatever
I could get that was different, whether it was a scarf, a
shoulder holster, whatever made me look different from
the other guys,” said Ayers.

When asked about his Army experiences, Ayers talked

about joining the Air Corp. While at basic training in

Sgt Fury and his Howling

Commandos #1; art by Kirby and
Ayers
Miami Beach, he decided to be a radio mechanic, so they sent him to school in Madison,
Wisconsin.

He went to basic training during October and November and upon arriving in Wisconsin
was greeted with snow and ice. While there, he got a job drawing a comic strip for the
camp newspaper, so he was drawing comics during the day and going to school at night.
He even got a private room to bring in his drawing board.

Upon leaving the school, he returned to his public relations officer to get his next script,
but the officer told him that as a radio mechanic, he was now classified. During his time
in the army, he spent it inside a construct surrounded by barbed wire and manned with
machine guns.
After returning to Florida, he was assigned to a squadron of B-26s. While fighting the
war in England, he was on guard duty when attacked by the German “Buzz bombers.” He
was standing next to a plane with a 2000-pound bomb attached to it and knew he would
be a goner if one of those bombs hit close by. So, he laid down underneath that enormous
bomb, but luckily the bombers veered off.

Following this, he became ill with dysentery, “the scourge of WWI,” and was laid up for
a month and became separated from his squadron, which had moved on. He wrote a letter
to his Colonel and the next thing he knew, they flew him to Paris where he stayed at the
Chateau Rothschild, until he could be reunited with his squadron.

Evanier said that when he started writing war comics, he

felt “intimidated by the fact that there were guys like this
around,” and asked Tucci if he felt the same.

“All the books I bought as a kid were war books. I never

bought superhero books. For those of you who don’t
know, I guess I’m known for drawing women [Shi]. And
there was a lot of, rolling of the eyes and all, but this was
truly a passion project for me. I love the WWII
generation, I’m a student of WWII, and I was in the
Army myself. When I went to do research for the book, I
went to Normandy . . . and I went to the Vosges
Mountains of Eastern France, which is about 30 miles
from the Rhine and that’s where the book takes place.
It’s called Sgt. Rock and The Lost Battalion and it’s
about the events of October 1944 where 275 men of the
Sgt Rock: The Lost Battalion #2 Texas Regiment, 36th division, were cut off and
Cover by Tucci surrounded by 7,000 German troops and for 6 days and
nights they really enact one of the last great stands in
history. But, somebody had to go and get them and the
ones that were charged to do it, after all else failed were the Japanese American soldiers
of the 442nd regimental combat team. Again, one of the most valorous actions of the war
and of the 1600 men who entered the Vosges Forest, Japanese Americans, 800 were able
to walk out,” said Tucci.

Evanier returned to the discussion of Nick Fury and the fights that Stan Lee and Jack
Kirby had over the book.

“It was a book they had been the most contentious about, because Jack [Kirby] having
endured his war experiences, was very passionate about the way the war would be
depicted and he was worried that Stan was trying to turn it into a superhero comic,” said
Evanier.

He then asked Tucci if there was any “powerful draw or incentive” he had to fight in
today’s marketplace “to gear it toward the superhero audience with a comic like this.”

Tucci referred to a review on Comic Book Resources which found problems with the
narration of war correspondent Joseph Kilroy, a character he created as “a combination of
these gentlemen and Bill Mauldin.”
“He had a problem with the flourishing tone I had of [Kilroy] describing the Normandy
invasion,” said Tucci.

Noting that the war correspondents of the time were “overly dramatic” and “more like
cheerleaders in a sense,” he even based Kilroy’s description on a Life magazine article
from July of 1944. As the story progresses, he said, “you see [how] Kilroy’s writing starts
to betray what’s on the page and at the end he really gets into censorship.”

Evanier said, he had read posts online complimenting Tucci on doing “a more realistic
Sgt. Rock than is usually done by the people who were in World War II” and that the
research he put into it gave it a feeling of authenticity which perhaps wasn’t there before.

“I can’t compete with these two gentlemen or Joe Kubert. There’s no way to do that, so I
had to try something completely different, so I wouldn’t be compared to them. And that’s
why I went with the more realistic stuff,” said Tucci.

When talking about “the look” of the characters, he

patterned them after friends of his and his sergeants in
the Army, because though they were “solidly-built,” they
did not walk around with “50-caliber ammo belts around
their shoulders.”

“Maybe I wasn’t over-the-top with a lot of the details and

stuff, but I was also doing the book for a lot of the
veterans, who I had become friends with over the years
and for guys who don’t normally read comic books . . .
for people who maybe haven’t read a comic book in
years, and they’re into history and things like that,” said
Tucci.

Sgt Rock: The Lost Battalion #3

Cover by Tucci & Sparacio
Mark Sparacio has worked with Tucci for a few years, doing covers together for Shi and
Heroes for Hire. He painted the Sgt. Rock covers over Tucci’s pencils, because Tucci
had specific ideas about what he wanted the cover to look like. For the cover to issue #1,
Sgt. Rock “didn’t have enough scruff” in the original drawing, so Sparacio went back to
“dirty him up a bit more, and give him some more grit and determination.”

Tucci used plenty of reference for even the smallest details in the book, including the
uniforms of the soldiers.

“As far as the uniforms, the ones the Americans wore in June of 1944 weren’t the same
ones they wore in the Vosges Mountains in October, 4 months later. If you look at the
first cover, before I became a total reference fanatic, the helmet Rock is wearing is a
Vietnam-era helmet. That actually bothered the hell out of me, so when we got to the first
cover I blended it a little bit. The wet gear looks leather and it was actually a canvas type.
So, when we got to the second issue and swung things around, we started getting the right
colors and things like that, the various types of uniforms,” said Tucci.

Evanier spoke of Heath’s artwork on war comics with reverence, given the precision of
the drawings, whether it was tanks or hardware, so he asked Heath about what references
he used.

“In the beginning, it was very hard to get any reference. It was almost ten years after the
war that they started opening up some of the archival things in London and Germany.
The first stuff I did was probably quite inaccurate . . . Here are all these guys who were in
the war and if I don’t make it right, they’re gonna say this guy was never in the war. So, I
tried extra hard to get it right and make everything believable, so you look like you know
what you’re drawing about,” said Heath.

When Tucci commented on the startling accuracy of all his helmets, he asked Heath if he
had bought a German helmet or used any photos.

“I stole mine out of the service,” said Heath, to raucous laughter and applause.

Heath is still active after all these years, even working on

recent issues of The Immortal Iron Fist (Marvel), but
Evanier complimented him on his “wonderful cover re-
creations.” Fans will commission Heath to do cover re-
creations of his old war comics and Evanier said, he will
ask them if they want an exact reproduction or “if he
could fix things.”

“He keeps drawing better and better, and one of the ways
that you know you’re getting better is that you see the
mistakes in your old work. One of the other things is he’s
removing the mistakes of the DC production department.

Immortal Iron Fist #19

cover by Travel Foreman
There’s a precision there, not just in the hardware and the jeeps and stuff, but in the way
things are drawn, so clean and precise and just amazing,” said Evanier.

Evanier said that Robert Kanigher was so intense about the character, which he wrote and
then edited for many years, that when DC did a Brave and the Bold story in the 70s
where a present-day Sgt. Rock meets Batman, Kanigher was furious because “he had
Rock’s life mapped out in his brain.”

“He felt Rock had not survived World War II and had planned to someday write the last
Rock story. I got this long letter from Kanigher once, where he said he was always afraid
to write this story for fear that it would be the last story he would ever be able to write.
Russ, you worked with him on Rock for awhile, was he that intense with you about the
character and the way he was depicted?” asked Evanier.

“In many instances, he had certain gimmicks he liked to use, like the grenade down the
tank muzzle. I don’t know if that would do anything to the muzzle. Various things that he
kept putting in different stories over and over again; they were like little fillers or
something. So, when I wanted more space to make better pictures or needed the room, I
would just cross it out and go without it, but by then, he trusted me so he didn’t look at
‘em and wouldn’t know,” said Heath.

Evanier said that Kanigher shared an office with Julius Schwartz at DC for years, though
they hated each other.

“Julie Schwartz was meticulous about plotting every story and he would sit down with a
writer and talk through every detail of the plot and Kanigher would be sitting on the other
side of the room, who loathed this as a way of writing. He wanted to write
spontaneously,” said Evanier.

Heath added, “He wrote a lot of those when we went to lunch. He’d be done when we got
back.”

Evanier then asked Heath if any stories “stood out” from his body of work and Heath
mentioned the first “Tiger Tank” story and all the unusual things he added to the Tank,
like “a blow-up rubber ring around the turret that could be inflated and it had a snorkel
that would stick up and could go totally underwater to get across a stream or a river.”

He wanted to draw the “definitive” Tiger Tank, so no one would bother trying to do it
better.

“You have a seven-day drawing and you have to get it done in a week and I spent about a
week and a half on that tank. The writer Marv Wolfman was in the office in New York
when they came in the mail and he opened it up and went running down the hall to show
the other guys, which made me feel great when he later told me,” said Heath.
After going down a list of some of the war comic artists of the time, they took questions
from the audience. Some of the names mentioned were Joe Kubert, John Severin, Jack
Davis, Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Dan Spiegle and even Harvey Kurtzman.

Someone asked about Heath’s time at Warren

Publishing and working on Blazing Combat
magazine. Evanier said he drew “an amazing story
about these G.I.’s finding a storehouse of rare wines
behind enemy lines,” which Archie Goodwin wrote
and edited.

“I heard about all of these artists that were gonna be

in this issue . . . Wally Wood, Al Williamson, all the
top-notch EC men [EC Comics] and I thought, I’m
gonna have to do something to keep my place in such
high-level artwork, so I wanted to make a collector’s
item. Instead of doing one story a week, I took a
month and a half, and didn’t even put pencil to paper
for weeks,” said Heath.

Another question concerned drawings in war comics

Blazing Combat #4; cover by Frank
of “Germans manning the tri-pod machine gun.” Frazetta, includes story by Heath

Tucci suggested that the artist didn’t use any

reference, but Evanier told a story of an artist who drew a DC war comic with a German
holding an American machine gun, provoking an angry fan letter.

“They yelled at him and he showed them the photo reference and sure enough, it was a
German soldier holding an American rifle. Some place there’s probably some photo of
Germans using a tri-pod machine gun. It depends on what kind of reference you use, and
then it got perpetuated, because like I said, these guys happened to steal from each other,”
said Evanier.

Sparacio was asked about “the intense colors” on his covers and what he used. He said, it
was all done by hand with Japanese watercolors, “no computer-generated stuff,” and that
he liked intense colors himself. Evanier asked him if he was happy with the DC
reproduction.

“Actually, I am. I got the cover this week and I was thrilled. Billy and I were both very
happy about it. It’s a lot of fun and we have a great working relationship and I think it
shows in the work we do. If you haven’t picked up “Sgt. Rock” #1 yet, you really
should,” said Sparacio.