Santa's elves go on strike! (Yet Another Comics Blog)

Santa's elves go on strike on Will Eisner's cover to P.S. Magazine: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly #157 (1965).

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FitzWorldUS: New blog on Will Eisner and PS Magazine!

During its nearly six decades of publication, PS Magazine has survived numerous close-calls in confrontations involving art style, characterization, and reflections of military life that were considered by some authorities to be "to the prejudice of good order and discipline." Most of these dustups occurred in the magazine's first 21 years, the period when Will Eisner held the contract for providing creative art and pre-press production services. Some were resolved with abject capitulation, compromises were reached in others, and in many the solutions came from Eisner's artistic nimbleness and fancy footwork. The most effective and on-going solution was a strategic retreat into a time-warp or the worlds of literature, entertainment, and folk-lore...

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Free Comics!: Will Eisner’s Complete Run of PS Magazine (Comix 411)

You’re probably familiar with Will Eisner‘s work on The Spirit, and maybe you’ve read The Contract With God trilogy, but are you familiar with his WWII panels for “Joe’s Dope Sheet”? Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth University, 254 complete issues of Eisner’s work for PS magazine are available for viewing here. (Posted by Kris Madden, Comix 411)

Book captures spirit of magazine cartoonist (Redstone Rocket)

Legendary Will Eisner
illustrated PS Magazine

by Kelley Lane Sivley

Staff writer
kelleylanesivley@att.net

August 12, 2009 11:30 AM

As the Army's PS Magazine celebrates its 58th year in publication, a book about its history is hot off the presses.

The author, Paul Fitzgerald, tells the history of celebrated graphic novelist and artist Will Eisner, who spent 21 years bringing the material in PS Magazine to life.

"PS, the Preventive Maintenance Monthly has been in existence for over 58 years. In any organization that's been around that long, you run the risk of losing the institutional memories, the earliest anecdotes and stories, and the actual truth involved with your organization's origin," Stuart Henderson, production manager at PS Magazine, said. "None of our current staff members were with PS during those early years. I know of only four living people who were, and one of them is Paul Fitzgerald."

Fitzgerald served in the Army at the close of World War II. After his uniformed days were over, he went to West Virginia University and graduated in journalism. When one of his former professors took over editorship with PS Magazine, then located at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., he offered a newly created position to Fitzgerald.

"I was the managing editor of a weekly newspaper in Elkton, Md., which is about 20 miles north of Aberdeen Proving Ground," Fitzgerald said. "He reached out and recruited me as his managing editor. I was the first managing editor of PS Magazine."

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Order Paul Fitzgerald's book only by clicking HERE!

Artist Eddie Campbell on Will Eisner and PS Magazine (The Fate of an Artist)

Sunday, 30 August 2009

The usual summary of comic book artist Will Eisner’s career follows the formula that he drew the Spirit all through the 1940s except for the war years and a bunch of ‘graphic novels’ from 1978 till the end of his life in 2005. There’s a long missing period between 1951 and 1978 during which he packaged and adapted cartoon art to commercial purposes, which has not been readily available for our scrutiny or pleasure. It is sometimes summarily dismissed as being of little interest.

The last time I wrote about Will Eisner’s 'middle period,' was in defence of the artist in a letter to the Comics Journal (#270) following publisher Gary Groth’s piece in their big Eisner obituary issue (#267) which could only be explained as spiteful. I though it was unnecessary, not because it was an inappropriate time, but because it was… unnecessary. Not wanting to allow my comments to stand isolated, Gary hemmed them in with another batch of his own (much as I am doing here in return), from which I quote:

“I’ve seen the litany of banal explanations for Eisner’s abandoning of the art form for the world of business… I acknowledge that it’s eminently possible that we have reached the point where a training manual for the pentagon or an informational educational story arguing against national health care is indistinguishable from an artist’s exploration of the human condition, and refraining from lamenting this state of affairs is not so much uncivilized as a bourgeois evasion.”

I cannot see, as I get further and further from my eleven-year-old self who first read Eisner in 1966, how the cranking out of a weekly comic book for twelve years about a mask-wearing hero can be art of a sort but turning the same techniques to an instructional magazine about equipment maintenance for living, working soldiers, cannot be. I’m sure Eisner and most reasonable beings saw and see them both as commercial enterprises.

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Eisner's P*S Girl (The Pictorial Arts)

By Thomas Haller Buchanan

In 1951, as Eisner was leaving the Spirit behind him, he created Connie Rodd, a sex kitten serious about Army equipment. It was her job to keep soldiers on the beam for maintenance of army issue. She (and Eisner) stayed with it throughout the Vietnam War, in a publication called P*S, delivered primarily to motor pool GIs. I picked up a number of the magazines when I was in the army, and the art was very effective in teaching such dry subjects.

Eisner did some of the artwork, but it was mostly produced by a staff of eight artists and writers, including 3 technical illustrators. Some of the artists over the years were Klaus Nordling, Dan Zolnerowich (of Sheena fame), Mike Ploog, Chuck Kramer, and Murphy Anderson. Anderson took over direction of the magazine after Eisner left in 1972.

Somewhere in my stuff I have a really nice cover that Eisner executed solo for an M-16 rifle manual. I actually used that publication when I learned to clean and assemble my weapon. When I find that cover, I'll post it.

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