21 - Army’s Grand 60th Birthday Party for PS: Part B

Come on in and meet the current PS Magazine Staff!

That’s what Joe and I did, down at Redstone Arsenal, following the impressive U.S. Army ceremony marking the 60th Anniversary of the trail-blazing sequential art success story that is internationally acclaimed for effectively communicating motivational and technical information.

The image above, presenting Master Sergeant Half-Mast and his mantra, is one of many life-size displays that spiced the setting of the celebration.

We were put to work the moment we stepped into the PS digs in the Sparkman Center at Redstone, signing over-sized posters related to the day’s festivities. The image below (that’s Joe, on the right) shows us in the Editor’s Corner, tackling the task under the watchful eye of this year’s PS Summer Intern, Ms. Eryn Patton.

Displays reflecting PS covers, characters and milestones were encountered at every turn. The two images below present some of the coverage provided by the post newspaper, the Redstone Rocket, in connection with publication of my Will Eisner and PS Magazine.

The treat of the trip came when Acting Editor (and Managing Editor) Jon Pierce invited Joe, Joe’s right-hand man Pete Carlsson, my son Clay, and me to join a staff meeting that involved a token brush-by acknowledgment of “back in the day” and then a big batch of looking down the road ahead.

Interactions involving totally credentialed professionals, displaying fully formed and widely disparate personalities, demonstrated both tenacity and reciprocal respect. I sat there with little doubt that a session involving today’s staffers in a meeting to resolve pencil-dummy differences would carry me back over six decades to recall some of the unrestrained enthusiasms of their predecessors.

The most enlightening of the exchanges were those involving Joe and the staffers, relating to the essentiality of accuracy and scale in visual reference materials provided to Joe’s shop. It had an old, familiar ring to it.

Not so familiar, though, was the demonstrated commitment to online availability and essence-of-the-moment use of electronic social media.

Clay took nearly 100 photos of the day’s events, including multiple views of the staff meeting. We’ve selected the four images displayed below to give you a visual introduction to every member of today’s PS staff, with a numeric-keyed link to names and assignments.

—p.e.f.

The warmth with which Pete and I were greeted was most gratifying. And getting together with Fitz and his son, Clay, was a great deal more than pleasurable.

Meeting and speaking directly to the PS Staff put the ribbon on the whole package. The session confirmed our dedication to produce our best efforts, knowing the benefits derived. Pete and I returned to New Jersey firm in our belief that our guys in the Army will continue to benefit from the info contained in every monthly issue of PS.

—j.k.

PS Staff Meeting

June 27, 2001

Numeric Key for Identifications

1 Adams, Glen—Senior Writer for Small Arms, Missiles and CBRN.

2 Andree, Dan—Senior Media Specialist.

3 Brent, Ms. Juanetta—Senior Writer for Wheeled Vehicles.

4 Carlsson, Pete—Joe Kubert’s Executive Officer

5 Chase, Frank—Senior Writer for Aviation articles.

6 Cotton, Bruce—Senior Writer for Combat Vehicles.

7 Fitzgerald, Paul E.—First Managing Editor of PS (1953-1963).

8 Franck, Michael—Tank-Automotive Command (TACOM) liaison and Senior Writer for Combat Engineering Equipment and MRAP/Route Clearance Vehicles.

9 Henderson, Ms. Mary Lou—Wife of Production Manager Stuart Henderson.

10 Henderson, Stuart—Production Manager.

11 Kubert, Joe—Current contractor for PS creative art, design, and pre-press production services.

12 McAllister, Ms. Patricia—Senior Writer for Logistics Management

13 Nickerson, Lynn C. ("L.C.") Nickerson—Senior Researcher and Reader Service Facilitator.

14 Pierce, Jonathan W.—Managing Editor and Acting Editor.

15 Stringfellow, Michael—Senior Writer for Commo and Soldier Support.

UPCOMING POSTINGS:

¶ A Covey of Connies: World War II to Today

¶ Eisner Saluted Gunsmoke in PS

¶ PS Sixtieth Anniversary Celebration

¶ Best of Zeke Zekely in PS

¶ PS Characters in Animation

16 - Warriors and Weather: Part D

We’ve uploaded fifteen graphic selections for this sixteenth BlogPost in our ongoing, year-long salute during this Sixtieth Anniversary Year of the U.S. Army’s internationally acclaimed preventive maintenance publication, PS Magazine. This presentation also is the final segment of a four-part series, Warriors and Weather, lifting up the singular adroitness developed by PS in its recognition and depiction of the challenges, conflicts, worries, and woes that inevitably occur when military tasks and operations are further confounded by the intrusion of season and climate.

Art and design by Murphy Anderson, Will Eisner, and Joe Kubert have been selected not only to exhibit true “weather” eyes and pens, but also to illustrate a discussion of some of the (then) innovative concepts and techniques, recognized and encouraged by the PS staff, and pursued, adapted, and expanded by the contract artists. The publication’s success derives from a delicate melding of mission objectives, technical accuracy, graphic possibilities, and artistic imaginations

One of the earlier issues fully dedicated to weather concerns, during the first decade of PS, was PS 120 which came off the presses in November of 1962, out of Will Eisner’s shop. Its focus was cold weather, and its mission was summarized in the main front-of-the-book spread, Inside Front Cover-Page 1, shown above.

You saw the PS 120 Front Cover, right, in full-size in our preceding BlogPost 15.

The planning for PS 120 began a year in advance. In mid-winter 1961-62, as Managing Editor, I found myself in Alaska and tasked with obtaining both climate and equipment photography for artists’ references, researching situational jargon, and developing a content wish-list from knowledgeable troops—on all rungs of the command-ladder. In the process, I also became aware of the ambiance in a tent at -45°.

Two more cold weather Front Covers by Will are shown below: PS 202 (September 1969) and PS 211 (June 1970), right.

Cold weather depictions by Joe Kubert, the current PS creative art and pre-press services contractor, as previously presented in this series, have displayed his utilization of the PS tradition of pushing the graphic envelope, plus an imaginative enhancement building on it. Joe marked his tenth anniversary with PS this past February.

Joe’s page design above is the Inside Front Cover from PS 627 (February 2005). The one below is Page 2 from PS 696 (November 2010).

Murphy Anderson is a seasoned veteran of PS artistic endeavors at many levels, stretching across two decades, from a hired-pen in Eisner’s shop, through the time of “The Eisner Alumni Group,” and his own nearly ten years as The Man. It has been said—purely in jest, I’m sure—that the only three people in the world who could distinguish between inking by Will Eisner, Mike Ploog, and Murphy Anderson were—Eisner, Ploog, and Anderson.

In our immediately preceding BlogPost 15, we introduced you to Murphy’s PS 323 (October 1979) as another example of a complete issue devoted to cold weather concerns. In that posting, we showed you the Front Cover and Continuity.

Our selection of Murphy’s art for this specific presentation consists solely of two-color, interior, pages from the same issue. The purpose is to display the presence of evolved graphic threads of two-color design, creative use of Ben-Day (benday, if you prefer) screen values, melding of text and art, utilization of every square-centimeter of “real estate,” and a pronounced aversion to templates. This discussion will be continued below.

From PS 323, they are: Pages 4-5, above; and, below, in this order, Pages 58-59, 60-61, 54-55, 10-11, and 6-7. BTW: The “yellow” on Pages 60-61 was not there when they came off the press, but probably were given this “authenticating enhancement” by some ranking NCO with a highlighter.

Beginning with the page displayed above, and continuing below, some less-frigid focus on weather is provided by this Continuity that Will Eisner did for PS 113 (April 1962). The two pages that are not shown here were used for the centerspread-miniposter that addressed an unrelated subject.

Considering the known lead-time involved in the four-color elements of PS, it is interesting to note the locale (Glob Island) involved in this sequence. Will probably started the roughs for it not too long after he and I returned from a PS research trip to Asia and the Pacific Basin.

In those days, PS managers were encouraging Eisner to bend and break graphic design barriers regarding PS as effectively as he had those in the world of comics. Unfortunately, technology and economics were the jokers in the deck.

“Typographic ingenuity” was an oxymoron when the Linotype operator was king, “hot” type was the only game in town, and choice of fonts was something of a “vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry” proposition. Ninety-degree angles ruled. Anything other than miles and miles of rigid, straight columns was a stab in the wallet. Irregular measures and wraparounds were fantasies.

Color was something else, again. There was no arguing with the limitations codified by the formulaic charts of the “bogus” four-color separation system based on three fixed values each for C, M, and Y, and you had best stick to plain "solid" for K.

For spot color, which was the purely manual world of the PS two-color interior pages, it all came down to acetate overlays and hand-painted areas. Which meant multiple film shots, agonizing stripping, and multiple burns to plates. It was no wonder that Eisner approached apoplexy when we introduced the idea of duotone mixes of Ben-Day values

He came to like it.

I discussed several aspects of this evolution in my Will Eisner and PS Magazine.

—p.e.f.

Having worked in the medium of comic book reproduction, color and otherwise, no one can appreciate the sweat and vicissitudes Will Eisner, et al, experienced more than I.

Before the advent of the computer, if the components of green (yellow and blue) met less than a quarter of an inch apart, the color print was considered a success. Art corrections were done with razors, scissors and rubber cement. Balloons and sound effects were done by hand with pen, brush and ink. On top of all that, deadlines had to be met.

Gone are the rubber cement and the cut-out corrections. But Will cut a clear path that we can all follow!

—j.k.

UPCOMING BLOG POSTS—

¶ Early Covers Put Eisner, PS in Hot Water

¶ The Best of Zeke Zekely in PS

¶ A Covey of Connie Covers

¶ Perspective Instructional Communications' Best in PS

¶ PS Art Contractors—60 Years of Dedication