The Sgt. Rock School of Management Studies

When I was a boy my mum took me to get my hair cut at a barbershop run by two Italian brothers and their cousins in the Cedar Heights Plaza. Six or seven chairs, maybe eight, I can't exactly recall. Shotgun layout with a small waiting area upfront and mirrors paneling both side walls so you could contemplate infinity while getting your hair cut.

My first trip there was legend. Up until then my mum cut my hair by the tried-and-true bowl method: place bowl on head, trim around edge. My father held me down during the procedure. But, there came a day when no bowl in the house would accommodate my growing noggin, so hair trimming became a job for professionals. For some unknown reason, I considered going to the barber on par with being taken to the gaols. One day when my hair was approaching nascent hippie lengths, my mum dragged me there kicking and screaming. And since she didn't drive, we walked there for all to see and hear my indignity. When we finally got there, I displayed some cunning, and when she had to momentary release her death grip on my wrist to open the barber shop door, I ran for it. She ran after me, dragged me back, and unceremoniously tossed me inside the barbershop. The barbers were laughing themselves silly. No waiting. A board was placed across the arms of the nearest chair to boost me to the required height and the cutting began. And so did the wailing. Let's just say my mum was not amused, and neither was my father when the tale was recounted to him later that day.

I got over the trauma and was eventually trusted to walk myself there. A change had come over me. A sneaky change.

In those days I was allowed to buy a comic book or two. My father read them after I was done. Superheroes, mystery, horror, Archie, no problem. But, there was one big no-no: no war comics. Never. This is almost an exact quote, "If I see any war comics there will be trouble", and I never doubted that. I never bought any. My father believed that war, and those Nazis, weren't to be stylized or trivialized in anyway. Hogan's Heroes was off limits too. Nazis weren't buffoons. They were evil and smart and deadly and needed to be eliminated, and I wasn't ever to forget that. I never have.

But I was curious: what was in those war comics?

I was soon to be initiated. The barber brothers always had a stack of comics in the waiting area, and one day Sgt. Rock turned up. I eagerly took my mum's fifty-cents, and as gently as a lamb walked myself over there to get a hair cut when the time came. I don't remember anything about what I read other than I was very happy in partaking of the forbidden fruit, even if it was for only five or ten minutes while I awaited the scissors and infinity.

A few years back I discovered that DC was reprinting black-and-white, cheap omnibus editions of their classic comics. Sgt. Rock was one, so I indulged and sprung for it. 

Sgt. Rock is indeed full of action and cartoony violence that boys of a certain age enjoy. However, whether it was appropriate for those boys is another question. My father was probably right that it wasn’t. On the other hand, for the most part, the drawings are great. But, I guess the most surprising thing to me is that Sgt. Rock has a lot to say about things like leading, managing, self-knowledge, hierarchy, loyalty, and inspiring people to accomplish something. Of course all that’s pitched at a fairly low level, but those themes still would have been lost on me back then.

Well, this lead to a war comics binge. I bought fat, pulpy, black-and-white reprints of what DC had to offer: The Losers, Weird War Tales, Enemy Ace, and the even weirdest, The Haunted Tank. I was vaguely aware of Enemy Ace, The Losers and Weird War Tales, but The Haunted Tank was news to me. It recounts the WWII adventures of an M3 Stuart tank that is haunted by the ghost of a Confederate general named J.E.B. Stuart, and is commanded by a man named Jeb Stuart– that’s a lot of Stuart coincidences! For page after page I saw that little Stuart tank defy the odds and succeed in battle, so when quite by chance I saw a 1/35 Tamiya Stuart kit on the hobby shop resale table I bought it.

I’d never built a military kit before – they were banned too – but I thought I’d at least paint up this one and glue it together. Now, tank modelling is a very sophisticated endeavour. It’s almost an engineering discipline in its own right, so my model is laughably substandard, but I enjoy glancing at from time-to-time. It’s a plastic memento for reliving my little juvenile subterfuge in the barbershop battle for comics reading freedom :-)