As comic-book heroes turned darker and grittier in the '80s and '90s, it seemed like mere oversight that no one thought to revamp the character of Sgt. Rock. After all, Rock and the "combat-happy joes" of Easy Company had been fighting WWII since the late '50s. If that's not enough to make men brood, what is? But maybe Sgt. Rock never got an extra layer of grit because more grit wouldn't stick. As originally created by writer Robert Kanigher and drawn by Joe Kubert, Rock carried himself with a "war is hell" expression in almost every panel, narrating tales of combat heroism with a cigarette clenched between his lips. Working for DC after the implementation of the Comics Code Authority, Kanigher and Kubert didn't have the freedom of expression afforded to Harvey Kurtzman's war comics for EC in the '50s. Still, the endless grind of Kanigher's stories and Kubert's moody locales populated by sweaty, tortured faces allowed some of the horror of war to seep through anyway. The simplicity of Rock himself helped. Years later, he joined Batman for some adventures, but mostly he stayed planted in the trenches, a character created by and in service to war, a man impossible to imagine mowing a lawn or going to church on Sunday. Reviving Rock after a few years on hiatus, Between Hell And A Hard Place puts a more adult spin on the character, but it's a tribute to the strength of the original creation that that's fairly easy to do. Best known for uncompromising work on his noirish conspiracy comic 100 Bullets and a current, brutal run on Batman, writer Brian Azzarello wisely refrains from reinventing the character, but does use his story's quiet moments to get between the cracks of Easy Company's cast. For example, a new arrival stuck with an unflattering nickname gets a lesson about the value of guises, and how war changes men into people they weren't before, and will hopefully never have to be again. Azzarello has better luck with details than with the big picture, particularly when the creaky murder-mystery plot spills into a finale too reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan. Kubert's visual storytelling, on the other hand, has a sureness that compensates for the story's weaknesses. Kubert has worked on countless characters, helped invent the graphic-novel form, founded an art school, and fathered a second generation of Kuberts (Andy and Adam) in comics. In Between Hell And A Hard Place, he shows why he became a giant of the medium: He confidently employs a classic style that's as effective in dynamic action scenes as in meaningful close-ups. Kubert has lost some of the passion for detail found in his earlier work, but his art hardly suffers for it: It's as if he knows the territory so well that he doesn't feel the need to fill in all the blanks. Ultimately, neither does Between Hell And A Hard Place, which remains content to tell a good Easy Company story before sending the bedraggled hero off to fight another day.