Legendary DC Comics artist Joe Kubert has passed away at the age of 85.
Although Kubert's work was featured in the full range of DC titles, including suspense and superhero books, he is best known and best remembered for his work on DC's line of WWII comics where he worked on such titles as Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank.
Particularly when working from the strong scripts of longtime collaborator Robert Kanigher, Kubert was able with his stark, spare style of illustration, to transcend the limitations of the Comics Code Authority's censorship restrictions and produce war stories of considerable dramatic power without lapsing into the wa-hoo wannabeistry of Marvel's competing titles such as Sgt. Fury.
Based around the stories of an infantry company, Easy, in what was meant to be Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry, Rock was a steelworker who wound up in the army. His normal sentiments eschewed jingoistic pretense, but were those of a man determined to do a necessary job and go home, and keep as many of his men alive as he could in the process.
Officers seldom intruded into Easy Company's corner of the war; the men seldom had any idea of the war at large beyond the next village they had to take and their last friend who had died. The heroics of daily survival were presented as feats of desperate human exertion and not cartoonish acrobatics.
Off the drawing board, Kubert's greatest achievement was the founding of the Kubert School in 1976 to train new comics artists, an institution that has turned out many working professionals since.
