Dec 9th 2020 Advent Calendar
An old man looks grief-stricken as he cradles the lifeless body of a blond-haired child--
A machine-gun's nozzle belches out smoke as it hangs limply at the soldier's side--
The soldier himself, a sergeant with a pair of bullet-belts draped over his shoulders, bows his head in shame.
For today's Advent Calendar blog I am taking a quick look at the cover of OUR ARMY AT WAR #228, illustrated by Joe Kubert and dated Feb 1971 but on sale in December 1970. Sergeant Rock is completely crestfallen in this picture, the artist choosing to draw him turning shamefacedly away from the reader. The hollow eyes of the old man carrying the child-soldier give him a haunted, unearthly appearance, almost as if he is not alive himself, and yet seem to be focused wholly on Rock himself.
The story itself- IT'S A DIRTY WAR! -does not feature an old man acting like this, Kubert using the cover -as he often does- to make a looser interpretation of his own narrative. It's as if he wants us to see the old man as Rock's guilty conscience rather than a physical character in his own right. And this isn't the only discrepancy-- the cover is set in a bombed out town peopled with other soldiers. The story itself takes place in a deserted wood. And the smoking tommy gun on the cover is in fact a Luger pistol in the story snatched from the child-soldier's own hand during a struggle.
IT'S A DIRTY WAR! is a story of guilt, in which Rock seeks to atone for the senseless killing of the boy as well as ruminating on the recent wounding and slaughter of his own men. And in the story it's the boy's own dead blue eyes which stare accusingly at the Sarge.
In yesterday's Advent Calendar blog entry I looked at comic covers which use the image of a hero carrying a dead companion -usually a woman- in the same way as depicted on the cover of this issue. The principal difference between those and the cover of OUR ARMY AT WAR is that here the dead figure is a child, the storyteller using the innocence of childhood to heighten the sense of waste caused by war. While this visual motif is less commonly seen than versions where the dead body is an adult, there are some notable examples from other comics- perhaps most notably this one from DC's drug awareness comic--
Interestingly OUR ARMY AT WAR #228 is not the first example of Kubert employing the idea, having already produced the following cover for #167 several years earlier. As with the later cover Rock is emotionally affected by a child's death that he is personally responsible for, although this is a more traditional version of the image, the Sarge himself carrying the dead child.
Kubert uses children a number of times throughout the title's run, for instance as a means of showing how war brutalises the innocent such as this example from #239 in which Rock behaves in a self-sacrificing way himself, an attempt to prevent the child becoming tainted himself with violence--
Or there's the cover of #208 in which the juxtaposition of the solitary child amidst the carnage of battle is especially powerful. For me it brings to mind a broadly similar idea employed decades later by Steven Spielberg in SCHINDLER'S LIST--
And #249 has a particularly chilling use of a baby to reinforce the notion of children as innocent victims of adults' aggression as well as the cruel ironies of war--
My final example is this curious cover from #215. Here a swastika-clad soldier is compared with the Pied Piper. His juvenile followers appear to be armed to the teeth with clubs, pipes and other makeshift weapons and glare menacingly at the Sarge who is told they are "doomed!" Clearly these children are acting as the German's personal improvised army, the suggestion being that young minds can be indoctrinated into brutality by someone sufficiently cunning and wilful enough as the devious looking Nazi.
Returning to OUR ARMY AT WAR #228, kubert's decision to represent this moment so differently to the cover of #167 could of course just have been made for reasons of variety, and I'm sure that was partly the case. But the fact that Rock himself is not carrying the child might also be prompted by another wish. The Sarge wants to move on from the guilty thoughts consuming him, but the old man won't allow that-- and it appears as if he is handing the corpse - and the responsibility - back to Rock. The old man is in effect compelling Rock to journey to his victim's home, carrying the dead boy all the way there with him. Physically Rock can't do that, but appropriately he does the next best thing and takes a letter he finds amongst the boy's personal effects back to his family - where he at last finds redemption.
For yesterday's Advent Calendar click here--
Sgt Rock fan? Click the images below for more of my thoughts on the Sarge and Easy Company--
Comments
Post a Comment