Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [82]
“It would reach a point where Kidd or I would have to say to Will, ‘You’re right, and we know you’re right, and you know that we know, but we can’t do it that way,’” Paul Fitzgerald recalled. “Quite frequently, that would provoke him into coming up with a third alternative.”
Dating back to his Army Motors days, Eisner could really find himself at loggerheads with others when they failed to understand or appreciate his original vision of approaching his readers on their level, in their language, in ways that would make the material easy to remember. The military, which devoted so much time and effort to shaping a GI’s thought processes, wasn’t interested in the informal or humorous. Joe Dope and his sidekick, Pvt. Fosgnoff, were perennial points of contention—and, in essence, prime examples of the never-to-be-resolved differences between Eisner and the army. Eisner believed—and correctly, if one could judge by the reader response to P*S—that these two misfits exemplified, through their failures, how something should not be done. Army officials felt otherwise. Joe Dope, they countered, invited ridicule of the training process and, by extension, the army itself. Soldiers might be amused by his foibles, but they were enjoying themselves at the expense of the officers who trained them. In addition, preventive maintenance was a difficult concept to address to begin with, since the military didn’t want it even implied that its equipment was anything but top-notch.
Eisner’s contributions to P*S magazine convinced him that comics could be used as an educational tool. (© Will Eisner Studios, Inc., courtesy of Denis Kitchen)
“I was fighting something much more deadly than not being allowed to make fun of an officer,” Eisner told Tom Heintjes in 1990. “I was fighting the huge internal bureaucracy of the military, which wanted to suppress information that would make them look bad. They would blame the soldiers for equipment failures, when in fact it was manufacturing flaws. That’s one of the great villainies of the military, I’ve always thought.”
To back his claim, Eisner mentioned a tank that was designed in such a manner that when a shell was fired, the gun’s recoil would smash the breech into the gunner’s chest, killing him instantly. “When I learned this, I told them the tank was poorly constructed, that it was costing lives because of some stupid engineer. They said, ‘No, you’ve got to train the gunners to sit sideways in the tank,’ even though the seat was designed to look forward! I was furious, but I was powerless.”
The Joe Dope debate crested in 1955, when a memorandum of record laid down the law:
1. Effective immediately the separation from the service of Private Fosgnoff at the convenience of the government and in the best interests of the service;
2. A replacement having a good military bearing and appearance will be developed;
3. The use of, or reference to, the word “dope” as a last name for the character “Joe” will be discontinued and the heading of the continuity will be changed to read “Joe’s Dope”;
4. The appearance of Joe will be altered, including removal of his previously protruding teeth;
5. The appearance of incidental soldier-characters used for humorous and illustrative purposes will be prepared so that humor, where such is called for, will be connoted through the use of expression and attitude,