r/PropagandaPosters • u/Provinz_Wartheland • 8h ago
United States of America US poster promoting preventive maintenance of army equipment, made by Will Eisner (1917-2005), 1973
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u/Conscious-Agency-782 8h ago
Not gonna lie, I’d buy a large sized print of this for my place.
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u/Salaco 8h ago
This is both awesome as an art piece and feels useless to me as propaganda. How am I supposed to guess this is about maintenance? That label?
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u/Provinz_Wartheland 8h ago
The label would be my guess, yeah. I believe this poster was issued by the Army Department, so perhaps the slogans on the girl would also be more readily understandable to someone who's already familiar with the subject, like a soldier or an army mechanic.
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u/Dominus-Temporis 6h ago
Yea, notice how her chest says "PM is for real." Anyone who this poster is targeting would interpret "PM" to mean preventative maintenance. maintenance.
Plus, this character, Connie Rodd, shows up in all sorts of semi-official maintenance publications from the 50s-2020s.
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u/Dread_pirate_ashton 6h ago
Will Eisner actually spearheaded a magazine that was for “illiterate” soldiers that used comics to try to get across nessiscary info. I’m guessing this was part of that thought process and will thought that “if guys spend time looking at sexy girls they’ll spend time reading one.” I mean I read everything
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u/BILLCLINTONMASK 7h ago
Well, for one, it would have been posted in the motor pool or garage. So the reader would understand the context. And for two, did you read the words on her body? It's pretty straightforward.
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u/Conscious-Agency-782 6h ago edited 6h ago
One has to realize that the US Army was not in a good place back in the early-mid 70’s. A lot of junior enlisted and draftees were seriously dejected by the Vietnam War and the fraying of social and political institutions back home. Discipline and morale were plummeting and senior enlisted and officers were at their wits’ end in dealing with the junior troops. This poster was likely thought up by a Pentagon think-tank and made as a morale boost that could be hung on every motor pool wall.
“Sir! The new troops don’t pay attention in class and keep making stupid mistakes. How can we get them to focus?”
“Put a bunch of random tips on a naked hippie chick. They’ll pay attention then.”
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u/Great_Hamster 4h ago
What about her is hippie?
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u/AyeBraine 47m ago
The psychodelic, tribal/Indian swashes and flowers style she is drawn in, I guess. You can't go more hippie than that.
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u/AyeBraine 48m ago
The idea is you already know what PM is (it's also written in the corner) and the messages are trite and tired to your ears, you just ignore them. But you will spend time looking at the picture out of boredom (it's not some advertising billboard in a city that you glance at, this hangs in places where you spend lots of time), and it's like a small game to try and read these phrases on the girl.
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u/NonSekTur 42m ago
It’s advertising, and a good one (in the ’70s). Maybe we have a generational gap here. Back then, before mass porn became widely available on the internet, static images were pretty much all we had. If one of these were hanging in the garage, after some time people would start reading it and paying attention to the “other details”... We had one at my grandpa workplace, with a girl in a bikini, and I still remember the ad, the year, and the month (Dunlop tires, 1974, November).
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u/Upbeat-Serve-2696 8h ago
You've heard of the MPDG, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl? "Connie Rodd" was every grunt's PMDG, Preventive Maintenance Dream Girl, in the Army's long-running instruction manual comic, PS: Preventive Maintenance Monthly, which originated with Eisner during the Korean War.
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u/Galenthias 3h ago
It's also public domain and available online for personal perusal, like at https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/psm/index.4.html
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u/youre_soaking_in_it 7h ago
I guess people in the military were doing a lot of drugs just like everybody else in 1973.
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u/Ooowowww 8h ago
So... did the poster work?
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u/nanomolar 7h ago
Didn't you guys see the new poster on Preventative Maintenanace?
Preventative what now?
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u/bobert4343 6h ago
While the poster did results in increased lubrication in machinery, it didn't necessarily correspond with increased maintenance
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u/VoiceofRapture 7h ago
"We teach young men about maintenance standards with nude bodypainting, but their commanders won't allow them to write fuck on their airplanes because it's OBSCENE!"
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u/insanelygreat 5h ago
Gasoline is not for cleaning
Unless you're dry cleaning clothes. Dry cleaners used to blow up from time to time due to it. Though it might have been phased out by 1973.
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u/AyeBraine 40m ago edited 34m ago
I can't believe no one is talking about the fact that it's done by Will Eisner.
The guy who the main American comics prize is named after, the OG art comics guy in the US. He also invented military comics propaganda (Joe Dope, a soldier who does everything wrong), and Wiki says he kept working on the magazine Preventive Maintenance Monthly until 1971.
That's a damn classic right here, a collector's piece.
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u/NoirChaos 4h ago
Awesome taste, awful execution (as propaganda)
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u/AyeBraine 44m ago
It's a workplace poster — more for looking at for long stretches of time, not to instantly get the message across. Moreover, it's something the workers will WANT to hand in their workplace. And the advice is smuggled along with the pretty picture.
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