PS, the Army's Comic Book
PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly is a digest-sized magazine that had a mix of text articles with a strong graphic element, outright comics (with the center page “Joe‘s Dope Sheet” in full color,) and straight text that was published for the Army by Will Eisner as part of the company he founded, American Visuals Corporation.
Growing out of Army Motors that was produced during World War II, the magazine was dedicated to seeing to it that soldiers were reminded, in an entertaining manner, to maintain and perform preventive maintenance on all military gear, be it transport, electronic equipment or weapons.
The stars of PS were Pvt. Joe Dope, who originated in Army Motors, and who was a general all around bad example and equipment hog, and Sgt. Connie Rodd, a patented Eisner babe, and the good example of how to do things down to filling out all the paperwork.
At first Eisner worked on both PS and his comics work such as The Spirit, however as comics started to die out during the 50’s he devoted his time to PS and other publications from American Visuals Corporation.
Eisner worked on PS for 20 years from 1951 to 1971, seeing Joe and Connie go from Korea to Viet Nam.
In the 70's however the comics content became less and less until it was gone with the different characters now as illistration, after Eisner many well known comics artists did supply the covers, as they do today today and PS is still found on almost every American military base in the world.
The title PS referred to “postscript” in that the magazine was just a helper to, and not a replacement for regulation Army manuals.
PS Published 229 issues with Will Eisner as main artist.
Today Joe Kubert handles that job and in March 2011 the magazine reached it's 700th number.
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