The M-16 U.S. Army Rifle Maintenance Booklet was distributed to every U.S. soldier from 1968-1972 during the Vietnam war. Originally sealed in plastic to accommodate weather concerns, and for jungle distribution, the 32 page M-16 booklet featured art by Will Eisner Studios. The comic books aimed to minimise the M16 rifle’s notorious early reliability problems through proper maintenance.
William Eisner (March 6, 1917 – January 3, 2005) was an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur. In 1978, he popularised the term “graphic novel” with the publication of his book A Contract with God. He was an early contributor to formal comics studies with his book Comics and Sequential Art (1985).
In World War 2, he was assigned to the camp newspaper at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where “there was also a big training program there, so I got involved in the use of comics for training.”
Worked on the publication Army Motors meant “fashioning a magazine that had the ability to talk to the G.I.s in their language. So I began to use comics as a teaching tool, and when I got to Washington, they assigned me to the business of teaching – or selling – preventive maintenance.” He created the educational comic strip and titular character Joe Dope for Army Motors, and spent four years working in The Pentagon editing the ordnance magazine Firepower and doing “all the general illustrations – that is, cartoons” for Army Motors. He continued to work on that and its 1950 successor magazine, PS, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, until 1971.
Via: Comics With Problems
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