Most folks know the late Will Eisner for his work on The Spirit, a legendary comic strip/book soon to be a Major Motion Picture. But from 1951 'til 1972, Eisner's big project was PS Magazine, the Preventive Maintenance Monthly. It was a magazine he did for the Army that basically taught soldiers how to care for their equipment, with a special emphasis on the Motor Pool. It included a comic section and the mildest of pin-up girl drawings and is interesting primarily for Eisner's skill in using comics to educate. You can get a look at this work at a new website that has scans of many issues.
Something worth noting: This magazine represented a heckuva lot of work. Each month, Eisner had to take technical notes written by experts, distill it all down to comic and visual format, then take the layouts in for severe scrutiny. Army officials would go over every millimeter of every page and demand numerous corrections…and to hear Eisner or his successors describe the process, it sounds like every freelance artist's idea of Hell. Still, Will felt it was a better existence than doing conventional comics for DC or Marvel. That should tell you a lot about the comic book industry of the fifties and sixties.
I have one semi-correction. The website lists some of the artists who worked on PS and makes it sound like my frequent collaborator Dan Spiegle worked for Eisner on it. Not so, and it's kind of interesting what happened. PS was a government contract, back when the bureaucracy used to insist that companies bid on such projects instead of just awarding them as lucrative no-bid deals to Halliburton. Every few years, the contract was up for bids and Eisner had to compete with any other party who was interested.
In '72, Will decided to give it up and let someone else have it — Murphy Anderson, the fine artist who'd been doing a lot of the drawing for him in the previous few years. Murphy set up a whole studio to produce the magazine and did it for a time…but in the late seventies, he lost the contract to a man named Zeke Zekley. Zeke, whose obit you read on this site some time ago, was an old hand in comics — a one-time assistant to George McManus on Bringing Up Father. He had a company called Sponsored Comics that designed comics for advertising purposes, and he went after the PS contract and managed to underbid Murphy and wrest it away.
So Zeke set up an operation to produce it. To draw the bulk of the book, he sponsored the immigration of Alfredo Alcala, the gifted Filipino comic book artist. To draw the color comic sections in the center, he hired Spiegle. (He offered me the job of writing 'em but when I saw what it involved, I passed. I think Don R. Christensen wound up with the job.) Zeke and his crew did PS for several months of what he described as "doing every issue over and over a dozen times until the Army would give approval." He finally called Murphy Anderson and talked him into buying the contract from him and taking PS back.
Anyway, the point is that Spiegle didn't work for Eisner. I guess I could have just told you that but I find it fascinating that the magazine involved so much labor and so many corrections. And that for twenty years, Will Eisner managed to produce a monthly book that, no matter how well it paid, was just plain too much work for some other folks.