It's Always Something

Every once in a while when I'm cyberleafing through old newspapers in search of a topic for these Saturday posts, I run across a cartoon that makes me stop and wonder what could possibly have been in the cartoonist's mind.

"Jimmy Earl Carter's Camp David Quiz Show" by Pat Oliphant in Denver (D.C.) Star, April 1, 1978 

Well, this is not a post about that. (It's April Fools' Day. What did you expect?)

This is, instead, a book report on the latest addition to my library.

I found this 2020 book in the U.S. History section of my local Barnes & Noble. Liberally illustrated with Bill Mauldin's original artwork, pencil edits and all, from the Pritzger Military Museum and Library, the first half of the book consists of separate essays about Mauldin's life and work.

There is some overlap in subject matter in these essays, although each approaches the subject from a different angle.

Taken together, the essays take you from Mauldin's hard-scrabble youth in a classically dysfunctional family and his early attempts to sell his cartoons, through parlaying his fame and fortune drawing for Stars and Stripes into a storied career in St. Louis and Chicago. 

Many of the cartoons in this book are taken from the original drawings rather than the published product, so you get to see the edits and compositors' markings along the way. Some captions got tweaked here and there; at least one was changed completely from the original concept.

Awarded the Pulitzer at the age of 23 for his cartoons of infantry men in World War II (the youngest Pulitzer winner ever), Mauldin risked peaking early and fizzling out. Retooling his Willie and Joe grunts for a postwar gag panel lacked the qualities that made the characters so special. But he rediscovered his passion in politics, returning to cartooning after an unsuccessful run for Congress.

His cartoons argued forcibly for the rights of Japanese-Americans, Black Americans, and women (also gay rights, although that is missing from this book), earning him his second Pulitzer in 1958. The Chicago Sun-Times gave the cartoon he drew immediately after Kennedy's assassination the entire back page of the Extra edition, and many outlets sold that paper with the back page up instead of the front page.

His later years are more tragic; an essay by Charles Schulz's widow, Jean, describes how his fellow cartoonists stepped forward when, as featured speaker at the 2003 National Cartoonist Society convention, he was too drunk to take the podium. Hers is a sympathetic account; colleagues I've spoken to who were there recall the episode with some sadness.

(Many of us at last year's convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists were brought to tears watching the 2021 documentary about Bill Mauldin's life and work, If It's Big, Hit It. Alcoholism and Alzheimer's Disease in his last years should have been awful enough, but having a jeep fall on his drawing hand and his later suffering third degree burns from his habit of relaxing in a hot bath left him withdrawn and uncommunicative. The film doesn't end with that, so neither will I.)

One chapter that stands out from the typical book of any given cartoonist's work is Christina Knopf's "Bill Mauldin's Legacy in Military Cartooning," which profiles soldier/sailor cartoonists from the Vietnam War to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some of the cartoonists in this chapter were inspired by Mauldin; one admitted never having heard of him. The works illustrating the chapter include one direct reference to one of Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons.

Mauldin's classic cartoon shows a cavalry sergeant about to shoot his own jeep to put it out of its misery because it has a flat tire. The tribute cartoon by Steve Opet depicts a soldier about to do the same to a computer because it's showing an "access denied" screen.

by Mill Bauldin in St. Louis Sun-Times, Sept., 2002

The same cartoon inspired one of mine occasioned by the financial controversies that terminated Palotta Works "AIDS Ride" fund raising bicycle marathon. I kind of screwed up, however, by drawing Mr. Palotta on the left side of the cartoon and his bike on the right — and the western garb took the whole idea back to the practice Mauldin was riffing on of shooting a wounded horse.

The other two times that I've referenced Mauldin's cartoons, I made more of an effort to mimic the source material.

by Dan Liliblum in Chicago Highways Stripes, November, 2016

So when the 2016 election inexplicably went to Donald Berzelius Trump, my cartoon based on the one Mauldin drew after JFK's assassination was in grayscale except for the barf bag and my signature, two items that didn't belong in the original. My medium was india ink rather than charcoal and grease pencil, but I deliberately tried to draw every line just the way Mauldin had.

The only other major difference was that his cartoon was portrait oriented whereas mine had to be landscape oriented.

by Ludmilla Nib in Arizona Post-Dispatch, March, 2021 

I decided to go ahead and add color to this 2021 cartoon. The Mauldin cartoon I based this one on is not in Drawing Fire; the original had the crow perched atop the flagpole and the eagle demanding his "seat back."

Using landscape orientation afforded me plenty of room to add the elephant to the scene. It did, however, force me to draw the eagle smaller than I would have liked.

Well, it wouldn't be fair of me to tease you with my own cartoons and not include any of Mauldin's, so I want to leave you with this one from toward the end of his career. He drew it at the outset of Bush the Elder's Iraq War, and although the book doesn't say so one way or the other, I think this is how Mauldin imagined Willie and Joe would look 45 years after returning stateside.

"Inside It Says the Pentagon Doesn't Want a Lot of Fuss" by Bill Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Times, January, 1991