Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [83]
Eisner gritted his teeth and complied. Fosgnoff was immediately written out of the scripts, and a short time later, Joe Dope suffered serious facial injuries as the result of his ineptitude, and during cosmetic surgery, his buckteeth were straightened out. Eisner wasn’t through with Joe Dope, though. Years later, after his term with P*S had ended, he tried to obtain legal rights to Joe Dope. Ironically, he had no claim to either the characters or the artwork, which the army destroyed almost immediately after it was used in P*S. In a legal action, Eisner tried to wrestle the rights to Joe Dope from the army, with no luck. He claimed to have no bitterness about it, but his words said otherwise.
“Some bureaucrat in the Department of Defense with too much time on his hands saw the notice and decided that they should own the character, not me,” he said. “So I got into a legal battle with them, and the courts ultimately ruled that since I’d originally created Joe Dope during World War II, when I was in the full employ of the armed services, I didn’t own the character. It was a work-for-hire type of thing, as it turned out.”
Connie Rodd, a holdover from the Army Motors publication, was another point of contention, though for entirely different reasons. P*S might have been circulating among young men thousands of miles from home, caught in combat zones, and far removed from their wives and girlfriends, but the magazine’s overseers, safe in warm, dry offices, constantly objected to material they judged to be too racy for soldiers. There was no question that Connie was intended to be a sexy, even provocative, character—a bit of eye candy even if she was a cartoon figure—but Eisner was continually skirting the border between what was good clean fun, delivered with a wink, and what the army considered to be inappropriate. The army nixed one cover for a Christmas issue that depicted Connie, discreetly covered with a man’s shirt but wearing only underwear, changing into a Santa Claus outfit. Any cover depicting Connie in a bathing suit, single or two-piece, was also subject to discussion. Eisner had no alternative but to comply, though he ridiculed his bosses in private, not only for their Victorian attitudes, but also for their moral judgments, delivered from the comfort of the Pentagon.
Eisner experienced some of those conditions firsthand. As part of his job, to ensure that he understood the equipment he was illustrating, he was required to travel to military posts overseas—an interesting irony given the fact that he never left the States during his active duty in the service. Beginning with his first trip to Seoul, South Korea, in 1954, Eisner found his Korean experiences to be unusual—and educational. An armistice had been established between North Korea and the United Nations a year earlier, on July 27, 1953, but the truce was uneasy, especially around the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, and troops were to be combat-ready at all times.
“When I went to Korea, I visited the repair shops, mostly,” he recalled of the trips that usually lasted four to six weeks at a time. “I never saw direct combat; I wasn’t there to study that. I would take notes, make sketches, take photos. I would talk to the guys. I was always accompanied by an editor who was more of a reporter than I was, and he would take notes as well. We would talk to the GIs and discover any ‘field fixes’ they had worked out for emergency purposes, because they can be quite important.”
Eisner would joke that his ignorance of machinery acted as a positive influence on his drawings of machines, as well as his directions on how to maintain them; he was simply passing along what he himself was learning. What he did understand intuitively was human nature. He realized that in P*S he could go only so far in his depictions of army life, but what he saw and sketched on these trips benefited him greatly later in his career, when he was working on a series of graphic narratives published as Last Day in Vietnam. “Hard Duty,