MAGAZINE
THE BEST OF THE PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE MONTHLY
Introduction by General Peter J. Schoomaker, USA (RET.) Preface by Ann Eisner Selected and with commentary by Eddie Campbell
Abrams ComicArts, New York
W
ill eisner was a cartoonist with a drawing style that is difficult to emulate, and I speak as one who has been called upon to attempt it on a couple of occasions. Eisner mastered a system of exaggerated anatomy, of extremely articulated figures, and within those, extremely articulated individual faces, hands, eyes, and feet, too. Everything appeared to move independently. And among all this, especially in the earlier part of his career, Eisner would integrate the busy multiple-source lighting of the cinema of the period, effects we associate with film noir. And it would all be achieved with a few deft flicks of an ink-loaded brush. As to his subjects, Eisner’s female characters, when they were not spoiled brats or overbearing wives, were sexier (and more aggressively so) than any other artist’s sexy girls, until the fad for “good girl art” in the late forties gave us a whole wave of specialists in that department. Eisner’s heroes were manly, but with an endearing sense of humor (he always said that Cary Grant would be the ideal actor to portray his comic book character the Spirit and, in a later era, James Garner would have been his choice). Eisner’s comical characters had a grotesqueness that was once thought essential to humor but was out of fashion in mid-century American culture.
RIGHT: Will Eisner, 1943 OPPOSITE: Eisner at target
practice, most likely at Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1942
10
Will Eisner was also an entrepreneur among cartoonists. If he’d been a musician, he’d have been not just a virtuoso soloist but a big band leader as well. Before he was even twenty, Eisner put into action his idea of running a studio to supply the multifarious upstart comic book publishers of the late 1930s with material for their magazines, and was around early enough in this capacity to reject Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman when those young hopefuls walked into his office. It was, you may observe, an unpredictable business. Shortly after, in 1940, Eisner was the one to package a comic book insert that at its height appeared in twenty newspapers, and for which he audaciously retained the copyright (unheard of for its time). The Spirit ran weekly from June 2, 1940, until
October 5, 1952, and remains a benchmark for sequential art. The comic book business shrank in the mid-1950s, and a huge number of the artists who had filled the four-color newsprint monthlies found their way into other fields, many of them working anonymously as assistants on long-running daily newspaper strips, or getting out of the drawing line altogether. Most of the characters disappeared too, as did the publishers who conveyed them to us on a monthly and often weekly basis. There are very few threads of continuous connection between the so-called Golden Age of comic books and their Silver Age revival in the late fifties and early sixties. Eisner was absent from this, offstage, having anticipated the changes. Much later we find him packaging and drawing facile joke books such as Incredible Facts, Amazing Statistics, Monumental Trivia (1974) and How to Avoid Death & Taxes . . . and Live Forever (1975). In 1978, Eisner’s A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories was published. This longer, personal comics narrative appeared virtually from out of nowhere and took the community of comics aficionados quite by surprise. It effectively launched Eisner’s second career as a graphic novelist, with more than twenty new books appearing over the next twenty-seven years. (All of these graphic novels are still in print, in both hard- and softcover.) Eisner differentiated his two careers by having this part of his oeuvre published by a book publisher, as opposed to a comics publisher. Eisner had literary ambitions, which demanded, using his own metaphor, that he raise comics out of their cultural ghetto. Between these two periods of acclaim— The Spirit and his later graphic novels—lies a stretch of twenty years in which Eisner’s work was not readily available to the
public, and it remains obscure. In 1948, Eisner founded a company, American Visuals, that had become very busy by the time The Spirit concluded in 1952. The specialty of American Visuals was the application of comic book art to commercial purposes, and the single largest product of the company was PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, a digest-size magazine produced for the U.S. Army. Eisner delivered 227 issues of PS from June 1951 to October 1971. The concept of the magazine didn’t arrive whole, and in fact the parts came together a few years earlier, just after the United States entered World War II and Eisner was drafted in May 1942. Always 11
1951-53
44
no. 6, 1951
45
118
no. 34, 1955
119
122
no. 40, 1956
no. 37, 1955
123
146
no. 48, 1956
147