Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [73]
Eisner liked the idea. A long-running government contract could provide a solid annual base income for American Visuals, plus it would give him the opportunity to further extend his interests in educational comics.
“It was a very, very important adjunct to my business,” Eisner said, “because it made it possible to accumulate a fairly large staff of people, plus the fact that it allowed me to expand the operation into other areas of using comics as a teaching tool. [It] actually helped me build an enterprise, which is the way it often happens with companies that get military contracts … We began doing comics-related work at a rapidly growing rate.”
Eisner took charge of the project’s development as soon as he heard from Colton. He worked up a dummy copy of his proposed magazine, which brought back some of the popular characters from the old Army Motors. Remembering his previous problems with the adjutant general, who felt that Army Motors undermined the work in other instructional publications, Eisner named his magazine P*S: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, intending it to be a postscript to existing army publications.
The army field-tested the dummy magazine that Eisner submitted, and it received positive feedback. Eisner’s first P*S contract called for six issues, after which there might or might not be a renewal. The arrangement might have had more to do with the army’s feelings about the Korean War than its confidence in the magazine: at the onset of the war, the military minds believed that it was going to be a brief conflict, perhaps measured in weeks or months. The United States would show its might, North Korea would capitulate, and that would be that. If that was the case, there would be no further need for P*S.
Paul E. Fitzgerald, who became the magazine’s first managing editor in 1953, attested to the urgent need for the publication in his book Will Eisner and PS Magazine:
Army personnel from privates to generals described the equipment used in the Korean War as “either too old or too new.” Anything left over from World War II was at least five years old, perhaps marginally maintained in the intervening years, and frequently outdated by advancing technology. When development and production schedules were accelerated in response to combat needs, the resulting products often were not totally de-bugged and sometimes arrived without normal accompanying items—manuals, special tools, and stocks of replacement parts.
From his experiences with Army Motors, Eisner knew something of the difficulties of working for the military, where the individual agenda sometimes overshadowed that of the whole; where interoffice bickering, all conducted in overly formal military lingo, could make an editor or artist feel as if he were trapped in an inescapable crossfire; where every higher-up seemed to demand a voice in the magazine’s content and the direction it was taking. During the war, Eisner had no choice but to deal as well as he could with the insanity. He was in the service, and even though he was a celebrity to some of the officers around him, he couldn’t have walked away from Army Motors if he’d been inclined to do so. It was different for Eisner the civilian. He was trying to follow his standards for art and commerce while dealing with people who had little regard for either. As Eisner later told Fitzgerald, “He felt as if he were in a cage, with his hands tied, surrounded by hungry tigers and suicidal maniacs.”
Eisner might have anticipated some of the problems. Once again, he found himself at the mercy of the Adjutant General’s Office, which controlled all publications issued by the army and was definitely not a member of the Will Eisner Admiration Society. The office’s opinion on using comics