Below: The second page of Mike’s piece for PS. Next Page: Mike’s character, The Artfull Dodger, introducing The Spirit. The Artfull Dodger ™ and © Mike Ploog. Connie Rodd, PS ™ and ©2008 Department of the Army. The Spirit ™ and ©2008 Will Eisner estate.
that was helping the average GI or Marine to understand what this vehicle that he was responsible for, or this weapon that he was responsible for, was really all about. How to take care of it. How to repair it. How to maintain it. That’s what PS Magazine was about. It was done in a cartoon form, but it was done in a Will Eisner cartoon form which meant that the GIs you saw working on these things were real GIs. The GIs
could relate to them. They could recognize themselves in the characters. They understood the humor because it wasn’t putting the guy down. It was more aimed at the establishment. “They say it’s a smoo.” “No! It’s not a smoo, it’s a smerack! Don’t they know their smoos from their smeracks?” [laughter] And a lot of times, if they wrote those manuals, it was a smoo but, six months later, they realized a smoo didn’t work so they replaced it with a smerack, but they didn’t bother to tell the poor guy. It was our job to keep up to date and to portray this information to the lowest common denominator, the guy that really didn’t want to read the manual and didn’t really totally want to understand his machine. Suddenly, this cartoon would get him interested. And it worked. It’s still running, I think. MM: Did you do any writing for the magazine or were you strictly doing art? MIKE: The only writing I would do for it was the gags. I would be given a list of different assignments in the book, and I would have to come up with a gag that would fit the situation. How to keep sand out of an M-16, or how to check the oil pressure, things like that. What’s the pressure of the tires on your jeep whether you’re on a hard road or a dirt road? You’d have to come up with a gag that would lead you into that particular situation. Let’s just say the tires on a jeep. You let some of the air out if you’re in sand. You pump the tires up if you’re back onto a hard road. So you’d have a GI standing there next to an Arab on a camel. He’s asking the Arab, “What can you do to get this camel moving faster across the sand?” Well, obviously, he’s got to have bigger feet, so you have to have bigger tires and more surface. It was goofy things like that. I don’t know how goofy that was. [laughter]
14