PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly

This representative cover marks the historical place of PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly and closes our gallery. Will Eisner worked on the title for roughly two decades, from 1951 into the early 1970s, producing one of the longest and most distinctive bodies of instructional comics ever made. Its very existence is a milestone: definitive evidence that the comic-book form, born as disposable newsstand entertainment, had become a trusted tool for serious communication.

There is a fitting coda in its legal status. As a work produced by the United States government, PS Magazine is in the public domain—free for anyone to read, share, and preserve. That places it, from a different direction, alongside the lapsed-copyright Golden Age books throughout this exhibition: a large and important slice of American comics history that belongs to everyone.

That shared public-domain status is the throughline of our mission. Whether a defunct publisher's superhero from 1940 or a government maintenance comic drawn by a master, these works survive only if they are actively preserved before fragile newsprint and fading memory erase them. Restoring them, and making the verified ones freely readable, is the work comicbooks.com exists to do—so the birth and flourishing of the American comic book stays open to all.