AAEC - Editorial Cartoon News
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February 6, 2003
'Like nobody else ...'
Bill Mauldin died Wednesday. He was a tough man who flew his own airplane and ran for Congress and could draw editorial cartoons like nobody else.
If not the best and most important cartoonist of the 20th century, then he was among a handful at the top of the craft.
Mauldin did more with an ink pen to help the morale of our soldiers in World War II than 100 USO shows. Wet and cold infantrymen looked at Mauldin?s Willie and Joe and saw themselves: unshaven, exhausted, heroic in their scorn for heroism, hungry for grub, not glory, all too happy to trade a medal for a pair of dry socks.They saw themselves and laughed, and the world saw them, and both laughed and understood, a little, about the war.
Mauldin had so much heart that even the Germans looked human when he drew them, not the evil would-be master race of the Nazi propaganda films, but brokendown boys, equally tired and dirty, almost indistinguishable from our own troops.
After the war, Mauldin took on the Soviets and segregation, turning out great cartoons and winning his second Pulitzer Prize.There?s a prescient cartoon framed in the hallway of the editorial offices at the Sun-Times, which proudly employed Mauldin for 30 years. The cartoon shows a belt fed machine-gun labeled "Vietnam." In the place of bullets are soldiers. The caption reads "Live ammunition."?
The date is 1962. That was a year before he captured the grief of a nation and set it in ink for all time, in his November 22, 1963, drawing, dashed off quickly on deadline, of the statue of Abraham Lincoln from the Lincoln Memorial, bent forward in grief, his face buried in his hands. We grieve now, too, at the passing of a great cartoonist, a gutsy man and a friend.
Chicago Sun-Times, January 23, 2003