Reactions to our recent Blogpost 36 regarding new offices
for the PS Magazine staff included this from Erwin K. Roberts: “Thank
you for the update. It got me curious. Obviously Joe's [Joe Kubert’s] organization
is carrying on, and very well, I'm sure. But, who, if anyone yet, is the new
cover artist?”
Roberts is a life-long comics fan who joined the U.S. Army in
September, 1969. A week or so later he saw Will Eisner's familiar signature on
an issue of PS. With the exception of a few breaks, he followed PS until he retired
from the Missouri Army National Guard in 1996. When his son prepared to deploy
to Iraq in 2004, Roberts was relieved to find PS still going strong
with Joe Kubert as the signature artist. Following Will Eisner’s death, Roberts
founded a Yahoo group devoted to PS. These days Roberts writes thrillers
in several genres. Several of Erwin K. Roberts’s works are available on Amazon.
Questions
regarding the absence of an artist’s signature on Front Covers of PS are not new, but they have been
heard with increasing frequency since the death of Joe Kubert last year.
The
image displayed above (a repeat from our Blogpost 35), the Front Cover of PS
Magazine Issue
719 (October 2012), is the last PS cover that is attributable to Joe, even though it
does not bear his iconic sig. He penciled the entire piece and inked the
principal foreground character in what turned out to be his last session at the
drawing board before he went into the hospital.
This
discussion is accompanied by displays of the Front Covers of the first six PS
Magazine
issues of 2013, all unsigned.
Beginning
late last year, I’ve had several conversations regarding this subject with Stuart
Henderson, the PS Production Manager, and Pete Carlsson, Senior Art Director for
Tell-A-Graphics, the Kubert business entity that has held the PS contract for creative art,
design, and pre-press services since PS 579 in February of 2001.
Pete
says that the presence of Joe’s signature on PS covers indicated, as it should,
that Joe was an overarching presence who was involved to some degree in every
production aspect involving a cover. “Following Joe’s death, a more pronounced
division of labor has evolved that results in team-effort covers for which a
single signature would be inappropriate,” Pete said.
“For
that reason, and with the concurrence of the PS leadership, our decision for now
is that the covers will not be signed,” Pete said.
Henderson
points out that this is not unprecedented. “Backes Graphic Productions, which
produced Issues 429 through 578, from August 1988 through January of 2001, did
so with unsigned covers,” Stuart said.
At this
point in time, the 150 issues produced by Jack and Diane Backes represent the
second longest period of PS production. Will Eisner’s 227 issues still stand at the
top of the stack.
In two
months, with PS 729 (August), the Kubert shop will have equaled the Backes Graphic
Productions record and in September (PS 730) will move into the
second-to-Eisner spot. That will still be 76 issues short of Maestro Eisner’s
tally.
The
historic information provided here is derived from a time-line graphic that
includes PS Editors,
Artists, and U.S. Army Duty Stations, and is available in Appendix A of Will Eisner and PS Magazine.
—Fitz
UPCOMING
POSTINGS:
¶
Master Sergeant Bull Dozer Revisited
¶ PS
Magazine's Immediate Military Commander
¶ A
View of PS
at the Four-Star Level
¶ Best
of PS by
Perspective Instructional
Communications
¶ A
Covey of Connies—World War II to Today
