It's a trait he shares, IMO, with Ben Grimm - their characters, traits, voices, etc., are so well-defined that they're really hard to screw up. Oh, sure, there have been many crappy Spidey or Thing stories over the years, but the majority of them are crappy for some reason *other* than being written way out-of-character.

And in the Silver Age, remember that Blackhawk was a *contemporary* feature, never a WWII "period piece." So having Rock meet Blackhawk was about as likely as him meeting, say, Aquaman.

Did Rock ever meet Blackhawk, in the comics? I don't remember if they saw each on the Justice League cartoon. I tried it myself here, and I remember Rock's cameo in the Garth Ennis Enemy Ace, but I'm drawing a blank.

In any case, I don't think Rock necessarily has to die as per Kanigher, but it *is* totally wrongheaded to have him running a secret black ops organization or being a general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (which is just wrong, wrong, wrong, on about six different levels.)

In my mind, the big difference between Fury and Rock is that Nick Fury is a fighter. The kind of guy who, when there's *not* a fight going on, he goes out to find one or start one, because that's what he *is*.

I always saw Frank Rock, though, as the epitome of the "citizen soldier." Someone who did his duty, and was incredibly good at it, but had no desire to be a career soldier or an officer. After the war, he went back home to Western Pennsylvania and did construction work, eventually started his own business, married, had a family. Retired comfortably in Florida, where he recently passed away.

And he never, *ever*, talked about what he did in the war, except in the vaguest terms. This year, as his kids and grandchildren went through his stuff, they discovered an old footlocker full of evidence of his amazing wartime exploits. They had no idea until then.

Since Kanigher never wrote an actual death story, though, I think that you'd have to assume, from a continuity standpoint, that the "last bullet" story is apocryphal and that post-war appearances of the Sarge are what they seem to be.

Kanigher's point, though, was that all of the appearances of Rock after WWII are non-canonical in his book. As far as he was concerned, Rock didn't survive the war.

See, I still don’t buy that “last bullet fired in World War II” death for Rock. If the last bullet fired killed Rock, then what killed the guy that killed Rock? Did Bulldozer have to choke him to death or something? (If Rock was killed by accident or friendly fire, that would kill all joy.)

Unless it was something like the John Wayne sniper bullet at the end of The Sands of Iwo Jima...

In fact, creator Bob Kanigher claimed at one point that Rock was killed by the last bullet fired in World War II.

Except for his B&B Universe self, who stayed around to team up with Batman!