Repetitive Plots in Sgt Rock

I love reading the DC war titles of the Silver Age; for the most part they have excellent art and entertaining stories. But there is one major problem with reading a bunch of them consecutively, and that is that the main features recycle plotlines consistently.



I've talked in the past about Gunner and Sarge, and how many of the stories featured the same action with Gunner acting as the decoy and the Sarge figuring out where the enemy was located by their fire at his counterpart. The Johnny Cloud stories always had some incident from his youth as a Navajo relating to his problems as an air ace in WWII. In the Haunted Tank series, the ghost of Jeb Stuart would give cryptic advice to his namesake, which inevitably proved prescient.



The Sergeant Rock series was no exception to this trend. The standard plot outline involved Rock being concerned about something that Easy Company is doing wrong that could lead to disaster. For example:







That bit about Easy Company being like a chain came up often. Sarge was as fanatical about eliminating the weakest link as Anne Robinson:



There would then follow several rapid-fire combat sequences proving Rock was right:





Or sometimes the combat-happy Joes would appear to be right for awhile:



Thus increasing the pressure on Rock to prove them wrong. In the end there was always a resolution, although I admit that Kanigher (who wrote these stories) was willing to be more creative in his denouements:







So I recommend these DC war series, but also caution that you should probably read them as they were published; with a month or two in between each issue.