Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [87]
According to Eisner, he heard more negative commentary about his work on P*S in Europe than in the States, and on those occasions when he was questioned about his involvement with the army during the unpopular war in Vietnam, he offered up a favorite memory of an incident in Korea that occurred during one of his visits to the country, an anecdote that illustrated his point about saving lives rather than taking them.
“One guy, a big guy with a dead cigar in his mouth, came up to me, poked his finger in my chest and asked, ‘Are you Will Eisner?’ I said I was, and he said, ‘You saved my ass.’ His tank had broken down in a combat situation, and he used material from one of my stories for a field fix, and it worked and he was able to drive to safety.”
The Vietnam War years presented challenges different from the ones Eisner had faced during the Korean conflict. The climate conditions, new equipment, draftee attitudes—all put a new spin on making preventive maintenance a voluntary part of a GI’s daily routine. Eisner continued to walk the line between being informative and entertaining. He’d set some of his scenes in past wars, going as far back as Caesar and moving forward, including entries involving the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and the world wars—anything to get his point across. Chariots needed to be maintained as much as tanks; uniforms changed, but the chain of command remained essentially the same.
The operations on Eisner’s end of the magazine had expanded enormously from the days when he was creating almost all the artwork himself, using a letterer as his only assistant. The many projects being undertaken by American Visuals called for expansion. Eisner hired his brother, Pete, to run the office, and over the years, a steady stream of talented artists contributed to P*S and other American Visuals projects. Ted Cabarga was hired as the magazine’s art director. Artists Chuck Kramer and Dan Zolne were brought on board for their ability to do technical illustrations. Murphy Anderson and Mike Ploog became steady contributors. The staff expanded to fifteen, making the shop the largest Eisner had had since his Tudor City studio days.
“We had other people running a Photostat machine and making film negatives, making color separations, things like that,” Eisner said.
One type of person we didn’t have on staff was a writer—the writers were effectively the Army people who sent us manuscripts, usually from Fort Knox. Then I would translate their writing into the comics script that would be used.
We ended up using 3,000 square feet of space on Park Avenue South, so it really turned into quite a big operation. We were turning out about three magazines at any given time: one was just beginning, one was in production and one was being finished. You can’t imagine how much work this type of operation is until you get into it.
The required travel for the magazine differed significantly from Eisner’s previous experiences. He’d made his earlier trips without worries about any danger involved. He would be shuffled by helicopter from site to site, and he never saw a combat situation. The Korean conflict was all but over when he made his first visit to the country. When he journeyed to Vietnam for the first time in 1967, there was serious fighting—or the potential for it—almost everywhere. Americans had endorsed the war in Korea; when Eisner traveled to Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson was under increasing pressure to stop the fighting and evacuate the country.
“The differences were like night and day,” Eisner recalled. “In Korea, we were all John Waynes. In Vietnam, there was a