I always wanted to be a cartoonist. As a child, I spent many hours painstakingly copying the simple lines and flourishes of the illustrators I admired the most: Al Hirschfeld, Jules Feiffer, and Charles Schultz. It was in Peanuts that I first heard the name Bill Mauldin; every year on Veteran’s Day, Schultz would do a Mauldin tribute. As I explored his work, I too became a fan.
For a generation of men who fought in WWII, Bill Mauldin’s cartoons in Stars & Stripes — particularly Willie and Joe, the immortal infantrymen — depicted their own soldiering experience: downtrodden, grubby, often dazed, but always ready to hike into the mud and do their job. Mauldin’s seemingly anti-authoritarian views often got him in trouble with the Army brass. At one point, he was called into a private meeting with General Patton, who is reported to have yelled “What are you trying to do, incite a goddamn mutiny?” Mauldin wrote that he marched out of the room feeling like he had an agreement with the General, and he went right on creating his cartoons his own way. In 1945, he published a collection of his WWII cartoons, Up Front With Mauldin, which garnered him the Pulitzer prize.
After the war, he returned home and created more cartoons attacking the issues that moved him the most, particularly racism and McCarthyism. At the time, his views were too radical for many papers, and he retired from cartooning for nearly ten years. Eventually, the rest of the country caught up with him and he picked up his pen again, going on to win a second Pulitzer prize. He continued his work as a political cartoonist until 1992. Bill Maudlin died of respiratory failure at a nursing home in California on January 22nd. He was 81 years old.