Bruce Campbell Says Sgt. Rock Could Team Up With Other DC Characters In Future Issues Of His New Comic [Exclusive]
You may not be familiar with the lesser-known DC Comics character Sgt. Rock, but if you're a horror comic fan, you soon will be. The character of Sgt. Rock was created back in 1959 by Robert Kanigher and artist Joe Kubert. His last solo series was in 1988. Sgt. Rock is a WWII soldier who fought with his East Company, and while it's possible that you don't know him, he knows a friend of yours and mine: Superman.
/Film's Cass Clarke recently chatted with someone else you might know, Bruce Campbell. He was most recently seen doing yet another cameo for his buddy, director Sam Raimi in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," as Pizza Poppa, a street vendor selling round pizza balls in another universe. He's most well-known for starring in the "Evil Dead" films as the lead character Ash, who fights the Deadites, as well as producing most of the franchise.
"Evil Dead" is still going strong, with the latest video game "Evil Dead: The Game" out, but that's not the only place you're going to see some undead madness. So, how do Sgt. Rock and Bruce Campbell know each other? Campbell just wrote a six-issue miniseries of comics for DC called, "Sgt. Rock vs. The Army of the Dead." If this one does well, which it is very likely to, considering the author, we may see Sgt. Rock hanging out with some other DC characters.
In this miniseries, Sgt. Rock, who is the very best of soldiers, will be battling Nazi zombies. Campbell based this on the fact that Hitler used amphetamines on his troops, keeping them up for three days at a time, making them harder to kill. "They're not demons. They're not possessed. They're reanimated dead people," Campbell said of his zombies, comparing war and horror, and saying they're not far apart.
My friend? Maybe you've heard of him — his name is Superman
Campbell told /Film that though this incarnation of Sgt. Rock will likely be "pretty pure," in the sense that we're not looking at a bunch of DC Comics cameos, it's something that we could see in the future. He said:
If it's a success, you'll send Sgt. Rock to New York City and you have to keep coming up with the new stories. So I think if we play our cards right, and this is well-received, then there's a lot of other adventures Rock can go on. And yeah, I'd be happy to have some winged-creatures come in and help out — especially if things get dicey, because once you start encountering the supernatural, you may actually want a DC character that can deal with that crap. Sgt. Rock's a ham-and-egger. He's not a shaman. So you may need help from a witch doctor-type character, or one of the weird characters that DC has.
I have never heard the term "a ham-and-egger," but I like it. I like the idea of characters who don't have superpowers (other than a pretty good sense of what the enemy is about to do) tackling things from horror stories. In the comics, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company have worked with Superman, but also Batman and the Suicide Squad. For now though, it's probably going to be refreshing to watch someone who isn't superpowered in a comic for a bit.
"Sgt. Rock vs. The Army of the Dead" #1 debuts in September 2022 from DC Comics.