Saturday 17 May 2008

the story in the newspaper cutting at left would have been perfect for a scene in The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard. I found it while perusing Dan McFan's blog.
**********

Meanwhile,
Dr Jon directs me to Boing Boing, (a directory of wonderful things), where there is a link to COMICS WITH PROBLEMS, which has posted an entire Will Eisner M-16 U.S. Army rifle maintenance booklet (1968). Blog comments at the end give us this observation, interesting in view of the fact that Eisner invented the PS army mag at the time of the Korean conflict eithteen years earlier and it hadn't changed its style much in the interim:

"A friend of mine brought one of these home from the Army way back when. He said it didn't actually help with the training because it was so lunatic. We all thought of it as being on the pathetic side of funny. The military was a sexist institution then and so remains. I suppose it's better than a computer game."

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5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Hippo eats Dwarf thing whilst pretty funny, has been doing urban legend circuit for a while - ah, newspapers and their excellent fact checking.

Tonia

17 May 2008 at 23:15:00 GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Amazing training manual there. Everything I've read about the Vietnam War seems to point to the M-16 as being criminally awful in combat, so Eisner (and, you know, everyone who was issued one) had their work cut out for them...

- Brendan

18 May 2008 at 04:25:00 GMT-5  
Blogger lennardg said...

and it's still in use today

(the M-16, don't know about the manual...)

19 May 2008 at 04:05:00 GMT-5  
Blogger lennardg said...

The German Army of WWII also produced manuals using cartoons, for the Tiger and Panther tanks. They were called Tigerfibel and Pantherfibel ("Tiger bible" and "Panther bible") you can check them at the links below (Pantherfibel is the most interesting, in my opinion)

Pantherfibel

Tigerfibel

19 May 2008 at 04:21:00 GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Karl Pilkington's take on the hippo thingie: hippo-potta-news

20 May 2008 at 15:45:00 GMT-5  

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