Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [48]
His reputation and abilities scotched his chances of shipping overseas, however. He hadn’t been at Aberdeen for long before he was visited by two editors of the Flaming Bomb, the base newspaper. The paper needed a cartoonist, and the job was Eisner’s if he wanted it. Beginning on July 4, 1942, Eisner produced a weekly strip, Private Dogtag, a jokey throwaway bit that followed the exploits of Otis Dogtag, a dim-witted, bucktoothed private incapable of doing much of anything correctly. Set in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Private Dogtag included characters based on real soldiers, including Eisner himself and his editor, Sergeant Bob Lamar, with references to actual events in the camp. In addition to the weekly strip, Eisner illustrated column headings and advertisements and contributed occasional single-panel editorial cartoons, all at a time when he was still hanging on to his chores with The Spirit.
Rather than send Eisner overseas during World War II, the army had him working on such publications as the Flaming Bomb. (Will Eisner Collection, the Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)
Other opportunities rolled in. The base was developing a “preventive maintenance” program, which was really nothing more than trying to convince the GIs to take care of their weapons and equipment. Maintaining equipment prevented unnecessary breakdowns, malfunctions, and waste. It was that simple. The trick was to persuade the men to do it voluntarily. The U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, looking for an artist to design posters promoting the practice, hosted a contest and Eisner won the job.
After talking to his newspaper editors over the months and seeing the way things were handled (or mishandled) by the army, Eisner had become convinced that comics could be used as an educational tool for his fellow soldiers. Part of his reasoning involved literacy, part a natural reluctance to learn something new: maintenance manuals were written in such technical language that less educated soldiers couldn’t understand them; and even if they did, they needed a reason to follow the directions they were given. Comics could be informal, entertaining, and easy to follow while still being educational. They could also speak the language of the soldier.
Eisner explained this line of thinking to his commanding officer, a lieutenant colonel who also oversaw the production of the Flaming Bomb. The lieutenant colonel liked the idea enough that, unbeknownst to Eisner, he pitched it at a meeting of higher-ups. They too responded enthusiastically, and before he knew what was happening, Eisner was being transferred to Holabird Ordnance Motor Base in Baltimore, where he was expected to develop his idea for the maintenance engineering unit.
Juggling his duties in the army and his work on The Spirit turned out to be a much more daunting task than Eisner had anticipated. He was still able to come up with new stories each week, but, as he’d concede later, they weren’t up to the standards he’d set back when he was working at Tudor City. As a character, the Spirit was too complex to entrust to just anyone. Eisner’s style of illustration could be imitated by several of the shop’s artists, most notably Lou Fine, but his stories were another matter. Eisner hung on to the scriptwriting and breakdowns for as long as he could, entrusting the penciling and other duties to Fine, but by November 1942, the weekly grind of writing scripts and sneaking them off to the post office had become too much. He had no alternative but to relinquish his involvement and watch Fine and the Quality Comics staff take over.
The daily Spirit was in even worse shape, which is difficult to imagine, given the talents working on