Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [50]
Private Joe Dope, the most inept soldier ever to pass through the United States Army, rose out of this line of thinking. Although Joe Dope and Eisner’s earlier Otis Dogtag were virtually the same character, Dogtag’s domain had been a single army base; Joe Dope would belong to everyone in the army, regardless of where he was stationed. Joe Dope would become a sort of brand name, seen on posters and in other instructional materials, as well as in Army Motors. For Joe Dope to work as designed, a GI had to take one look at the character and understand that this was a soldier bound for a disaster that could have been easily prevented—if, that is, he hadn’t been such a dope.
“What arguments do you use in the quest for voluntary cooperation?” Eisner asked rhetorically when trying to explain how he developed Joe Dope to fit the army’s new preventive maintenance program. “Well, you use the threat of death. Death or physical harm. You say to a guy, ‘If you don’t put air in your tires, one of these days you’ll be in combat and you’ll get a flat tire and you won’t be able to escape—and it’ll be your ass, buddy!’ That was the first step. Then, if you carry it on, you can create another image that people don’t want to face, another threat, and that is looking like a fool among their peers. That is how Joe Dope was created, on those grounds.”
Eisner concocted other characters to complement Joe Dope in the strip and in other sections of the magazine: Sergeant Half-Mast, a mechanic nearly as inept as Joe Dope, who also had an advice column; Private Fosgnoff, Dope’s closest buddy; and Connie Rodd, a shapely, irresistible mechanic who had her own column, “Connie’s Bulletin Board,” devoted to keeping readers informed on equipment changes and upgrades. The characters, although clever and serving specific functions, had to walk a tight line between being entertaining and informative. The army frowned upon material that made it look as if it couldn’t train its personnel, and it strictly forbade anything that ridiculed its policies or officers. The characters’ foibles had to be individual flaws that even the army, at its very best, couldn’t overcome.
Readers responded favorably to Eisner’s early efforts in Army Motors, and Eisner had barely settled in at Holabird before he was on the move again, this time to Washington D.C., to work under General Levin H. Campbell, the army’s chief of ordnance. Eisner had clearly impressed the army’s top brass: he was headed to the Pentagon.
The popularity of comic books reached an all-time high during the war years. They no longer appealed only to the adenoidal cretins of Kansas City; they also belonged to those kids’ older brothers or cousins or uncles, the ones donning uniforms and trying to win a war that, by the beginning of 1943, had no end in sight. GIs came from all over the United States, from different backgrounds and educational levels, and they loved comics—so much so that by the end of 1942, three out of every ten pieces of mail shipped overseas to soldiers were comics. Eisner guessed correctly when he predicted, during his discussions with his editors at Army Motors, that servicemen would connect to comics.
The producers of comics, on the lookout for new readers, adapted to this new, more mature readership. Bundles of superhero comics still rolled off the presses every month, but new comic books featuring solders, detectives, and, more popular yet, sexy, barely clothed women appeared almost overnight, hitting readers on a more visceral level. Competition among publishers was greater than ever. Genre comics featuring tales from outer space, shoot-outs in the Old West, accounts of gangsters and the men who hunted them—the direct descendants of the pulp magazines, now aimed at young people flooding the movie theaters and