Vintage Poster Archives
The Sound That Kills 1942 | Eric Ericson WW2 Poster
The Sound That Kills 1942 | Eric Ericson WW2 Poster
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A factory worker at Al's Diner mentions that the Exeter loads in six hours and sails at noon. Six panels later, the ship is gone. Eric Ericson's 1942 comic strip poster traces the chain from casual remark to torpedo strike with the economy and pace of a seasoned newspaper cartoonist, closing on a bold red footer that functions less as warning than verdict: DON'T MURDER MEN WITH IDLE WORDS.
Designed by Eric Ericson, a cartoonist trained at the Art Students League of New York and a New Yorker illustrator, this was OWI Poster No. 1: the first home-front poster issued by the United States Office of War Information and printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1942. Ericson's choice of the comic strip format was pointed. The six-panel sequence was the most widely read visual grammar in America at the time, found in every daily newspaper. The OWI distributed it to post offices, schools, and railroad stations as part of the careless-talk campaign that ran alongside better-known slogans of the era. The Ericson signature, visible in panel six above the explosion, is one of the few clear artist attributions in the OWI poster run.
This archival print is reproduced using pigment-based inks on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. The flat, saturated palette of the original offset lithograph, with its cream ground, red-and-black bold type, and vivid orange blast in the final panel, reproduces with precision in the matte finish that suits the poster's no-nonsense register.
The poster sits in the mainstream of American wartime graphic communication and appeals equally to students of WW2 home-front design, collectors of OWI material, and anyone interested in the comic strip as a vehicle for public information.
