He relied a lot on certain ethnic stereotypes, especially Native Americans. His career began in earnest in 1940 when he was just 19 years old, and much of his pre-war work was visually clever but crude. Most of the first volume finds Mauldin developing as an artist. It's an added flourish that helps tie the project together, as though it were a military dossier of some kind. The type for the notes is done in what looks like a Pica font, the sort that would have been used on a manual typewriter in the 1940's to write military documents. The design of the collection is icing on the cake, done in camo-green with a heavy cardboard slipcase. Most of the strips in this book have never been reprinted. Editor and Mauldin biographer Todd DePastino provides a wealth of historical context without overwhelming the cartoons themselves, and as a bonus presents a trove of variant strips, unpublished cartoons and other Mauldin material. It is as thorough and painstaking a document about a cartoonist and their career as I've ever seen. Willie & Joe: The World War II Years, the 600+ page retrospective of cartoons from the beginning of his career through the end of World War II is a remarkable record of not just the development of an artist and his craft, but how a war was fought. He was just a kid when he entered the army, just starting to learn his craft yet by the end he became one of the most accomplished and famous cartoonists in the world. The amazing thing about his strips is how quickly this crucible of a comics laboratory turned him from a raw artist to an absolute master within the span of three years.

He was obsessed with accuracy and verisimilitude, feeling that he'd be letting down his fellow soldiers if he got any details wrong. He didn't see active combat, but he did travel to every front with the infantry and even received a purple heart after being hit by shrapnel. Mauldin was an infantryman himself who was part of the army press corps. His ability to understand their lives and frustrations and produce humor from it was tolerated because many members of the top brass thought it was actually a morale booster, helping the dogfaces blow off steam as they faced horrible conditions. Patton), his cartoons were insanely popular among the grunts-the army infantrymen. While he certainly had his share of detractors (including General George S. The fact that a cartoonist of his skill was able to craft barbed, pointed cartoons that criticized officers in wartime that were printed in military newspapers is almost impossible to imagine today. This review was originally published at in 2008.īill Mauldin was the right man with the right attitude at the right place at the right time.

Willie and joe ww2