 COMICS |  | WIZARD Q+A: TODD DEPASTINO | | The editor of 'Willie & Joe: The World War Two Years' chats about the life of cartoonist Bill Mauldin | | | By David Paggi | | Posted 4/18/2008 | |  | | | Academic historian Todd DePastino only knew about famed World War Two cartoonist Bill Mauldin from Peanuts strips until he starting researching his first book, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chance comments in an interview with a relative drove DePastino to further research Mauldin, and eventually settle on Mauldin’s life for the subject of his next book. In his research, Mauldin would team up with Fantagraphics to edit a collection of Mauldin's World War Two comic strips featuring his famed creations, Willie and Joe. Wizard sat down with DePastino recently to discuss Mauldin’s life and work...at LENGTH. | |  Tell me about how you got into this project
The Willie & Joe volume, for me, came out of my work on the biography [Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, W.W. Norton, 2008]. I started working on the biography first and I came across so many images that had not been reprinted since the 1940’s, since the war. Mauldin did his first army cartoons for the 45th Division News, a paper that began in 1940, and ran through World War Two. Only one run of the paper survived the war and it resides in a museum vault in Oklahoma City. It took me a long time to track it down and when I did find it, it was like finding Van Gogh’s in the attic. It was a treasure trove of hundreds of early cartoons that showed Mauldin’s development as an artist and a solider and then finally how his cartoons changed through the survival of combat.
What was your first experience with Mauldin’s work?
You know, it’s kind of embarrassing to say but Bill Mauldin was nothing more than an arcane reference in the Veteran’s Day Peanuts strip. That’s all I knew of him. Willie & Joe rang a very remote bell until about a year before I started working on the biography. You know Schultz would have Snoopy g “quaff a few root beers” with Bill Mauldin?
I actually do remember that from Peanuts, and I was surprised to see the connection when I was looking into your book.
Yeah! I remember as a kid reading that cartoon, not knowing who Bill Mauldin was, not having the intellectual curiosity as an eleven year old to look him up, but when I was working on my first book, which was the history of homelessness since the Civil War, it’s called Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, I remarked to several people, one of whom was an elderly relative and a combat veteran of World War Two, that I was fascinated by the fact that there was a huge floating kind of counter culture in this country of young men who roamed the country as tramps and hobos for 75 years, between the Civil War and World War Two, and then it vanished, in World War Two. And this relative of mine said, ‘Oh, they didn’t vanish. They went into the army like Willie and Joe.’ And I didn’t quite get the reference, and I finally went to the library and looked up Up Front, which is Mauldin’s 1945 books of texts and cartoons and I was just stunned by the comics. I couldn’t believe, first of all that I had never heard of him. I was a PhD in American Cultural History from Yale. I figured should have heard of this guy. And second, I was stunned at how these cartoons just shot through the candor. Just shot through the sanitized visual images of war that prevailed through the war years. Not only that, but these images, these cartoons were published in Stars and Stripes, which was an official publication of the United States Army. How did Mauldin pull that off? I was fascinated by that question. That was the first question I wanted to investigate. I thought I’d just write a scholarly article on it, and the more I found out about Mauldin, the more I learned that no scholars had ever written anything about him. Secondly, he led this swashbuckling and charismatic life that was almost too good to be true. I just became enchanted with the idea of writing a biography. And as I started writing it I discovered 1,700 original drawings at the Library of Congress, 250 original World War Two drawings in Oklahoma City, the 45th Division News run. There were these visual sources that had never been reprinted, and I realized that what we knew of Bill Mauldin was really a fraction of his output during the war years. I remarked to the attorney for the estate, of Bill Mauldin, ‘you guys should really think about putting out a complete collection of his cartoons.’ The attorney got back to me and said, ‘you know [Fantagraphics Publisher] Gary Groth was just in touch with us about that. Maybe you and Gary should work this out.’ So Gary and I did work it out and it was just a wonderful partnership. His commitment to doing this project was just unwavering. I would throw up all these obstacles at him, and tell him we’ve got to get inside that museum vault and get somebody to take these high-resolution pictures, and he was undaunted by it.
So Gary was pretty familiar with Mauldin’s work?
He was familiar with what everybody else was familiar with. He knew Bill Mauldin’s Army, which was a collection of ‘greatest hits’ of Mauldin’s World War Two cartoons that was first published in 1951, and that’s pretty much all the cartoons anybody has been familiar with of his World War Two output. But it turns out that ‘greatest hits’ represents maybe a third of what he did during the war. So Gary had no idea just how many there were, and how hard it was to get a hold of them, because when Mauldin first started cartooning he was an eighteen year old, you know, ‘desert rat’. He had joined the army because he was unemployed and underweight and needed clothing. He had been living on his own since age fourteen, and when he joined the Army, he joined the National Guard. It was four days before it was federalized as part of the United States Army so nobody gave him a physical. If he had gotten a physical he would have been rejected because he was underweight. But he did get in and he was eighteen years old and he managed to get a job one afternoon a week doing a cartoon for the newspaper. He was a poor kid. He was making twenty-one dollars a month, and most of that was going to his grandparents, so he just had enough money left over for cigarettes and candy. He needed more money so he was drawing ten original cartoons a night. He had an unbelievable work ethic. I don’t know if you’ve ever read about Jack London’s efforts to become a published author. London typed so much that his fingertips blistered and bled and calloused over. He just wouldn’t sleep. He just wrote, wrote, wrote and wrote. And that’s what Mauldin did during his youth. So he would send these things out to newspapers and magazines. He would never keep a record of who accepted them or not, and when the division moved around the country from base to base, the first thing he would do is go to the local newspaper office and present them with a portfolio. They would buy a few for five dollars a piece, and he never left a record of who bought what and it would be published once and that would be it. So our job was to track down all of these miscellaneous sources and find every cartoon that he did during World War Two. And we were pretty successful. We probably called ten different sources.
So he was producing cartoons before he went overseas?
Yeah, he was producing home front, kind of Army training cartoons between October 1940 and May 1943. Then he went overseas, and even when he was overseas in North Africa, Sicily and then Italy, even then he was sending stuff to newspapers back home and then also cartooning for the 45th Division News.
| |  All of this was before the Willie and Joe characters?
Yeah. Willie and Joe, you can see their development through the books, but what we know of as Willie & Joe really emerged in March 1944 when Mauldin made his first trip to Hell’s Half Acre, Anzio. That was a turning point for him and Willie and Joe emerged in, I think, their present form. Willie and Joe really emerged when he left the 45th Division. There were characters named Willie and Joe in the early cartoons and they were kind of prototypes. Actually Willie was Joe [laughs]. Joe was his first named character. He had the aquiline nose, and he was a Choctaw Indian. Mauldin joined the 45th Division, which was a National Guard unit of four states, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona. He was in the 180th Infantry Regiment, which was an overwhelmingly Choctaw Regiment. There were a lot of Native Americans in the Regiment and Mauldin worshiped them. Mauldin himself was part Native American, and these guys were the most educated people in the regiment, they had been to federally funded Indian schools. Many of them had been to university. They were in the infantry for a lot of reasons. One of them was to secure their claims to citizenship. They were excellent soldiers, and one of them, name Rayson Billey, was his bunkmate and a student of Du Maurier, Hogarth and pictorial satire. He would critique Mauldin’s cartoons and Mauldin was just amazed that this big, Native American solider knew so much about the humanities. Before Mauldin was put in the 180th regiment, he was in a quartermasters division that was probably the most chickens—t outfit in the United States Army. He hated it. He did not go through basic training. He was washing trucks, chopping wood, sorting socks—it was a nightmare for him. So he invented this character, Joe who was a dumb, dimwitted Indian, and just a month later when he joins the 180th Joe is completely transformed into a big, wry, smart, muscular, competent soldier who makes wisecracks about the army and hierarchy.
Did any of those [Army] comics that were produced overseas hit back in the States?
They were almost entirely aimed, targeted to an infantry audience. He had two features. Both titled “Star Spangled Banter." One appeared in the 45th Division News, the other appeared in the Daily Oklahoman, and they were two entirely different strips. He never repeated them, but they had to do with the intricacies of Army life in infantry training and maneuvers. Generally you didn’t get the joke unless you were an infantry soldier. These were infantry cartoons aimed at the infantry. He was in the pre-war Army so by the time Pearl Harbor happened and the draft started up in early 1942, and draftees started pouring into the Army, Mauldin had already had a year and a half of cartooning. So whereas most World War Two cartoonists, early in the War, were cartooning about bespectacled draftees from the middle class, who were overwhelmed by the hierarchy of Army life and by mean old drill Sergeants, Mauldin was so far beyond that. He was a competent soldier. The men he was with were competent soldiers. He and his comrades had kind of come up the hard way. They weren’t soft handed middle class people like Dave Breger or George Baker were cartooning about with Sad Sack and Private Breger. Mauldin’s soldiers were rough, ethnic, competent soldiers who had lived a harder life than Army life before. So consequently his cartoons were really not popular with editors at all. He tried to get a book of cartoons published in 1942 and 1943, and couldn’t get it published. Scribner’s, Simon and Schuster, all of them said, “We don’t get them. Our audience definitely won’t get them.” They preferred Sad Sack, the preferred Private Breger, the preferred relying on stereotypes of the effete draftee making his way through Army bureaucracy and that wasn’t Mauldin’s shtick at all. So Mauldin was really destined not to be popular on the home front, and he wouldn’t have been, but I think events took an unexpected turn in Europe that gave him an opening that he never expected.
And what was that?
Well, it’s truly the heart of the biography. The War never went as well as the war planners and the war department expected it would. The war department made a decision early on, and Franklin Roosevelt agreed, that we would not mobilize a large number of combat infantry soldiers for this war. Our resources were going to be put first into production of munitions and ships and plans at home, and secondly the air corps, with aerial bombardment, and thirdly with long range artillery and armor. And the humble foot soldier would be there just to mop up. But the war was going to be won with navel power, aerial bombardment, long-range artillery and swift and versatile armor. That was the expectation and it turns out it didn’t work. It took, really until Sicily and the early invasion of Italy in the summer and fall of 1943 for the war department to catch on that were desperately short of combat soldiers, that aerial bombardment and long range artillery was not going to evict the Germans from the peninsula and neither were they going to evict the Germans from occupied Europe. It was going to take the lowly footsloggers. The guys who carry the rifle and press themselves into the mud, fire, then get up and stagger forward. There were not that many in the US Army. Only about 5% of the sixteen million men and women who were in uniform during World War Two were combat infantry. We simply did not have enough men. Consequently, the rosy predictions that the war department had that we would win this war by Christmas, 1943, were not coming to pass. So the war department and Franklin Roosevelt needed two things. First they needed to present a new image of the American fighting man to the American people. Up until September 1943 the only images of America’s fighting man that American’s had were of the Marines, of the elite divisions and of the flyboys, especially. And they were always depicted as gung ho and clean cut and highly motivated and the best and the brightest, and they were. The ones who settled into the infantry tended to be draftees who were illiterate, unemployed, very poor or they were ethnic minorities. This was the gang that Mauldin as with. So they needed an image of American fighting man, but unfortunately Army combat infantry were probably the least motivated of all the branches. They really resisted image burnishing, because they weren’t glamorous and sexy. They were dirty and rugged and foul mouthed and alienated and cynical. They were Mauldin’s cartoon soldiers. Secondly, the war department also needed, in addition to this new heroic image, they needed to damp down expectations on the home front. The early years of American war propaganda were really crude. 1942 and most of 1943, the war department was saying that the Americans were winning every battle, that the enemy was cutting a running at every turn, that our soldiers were flushed with victory, high spirited, always on the advance and the American people bought it. Internal polls shows that the American people really did expect that the War would be over by Christmas, but Roosevelt knew better and the war department knew better. By the middle of 1943 they had this other problem—how do we damp down expectations, because we could have a revolt on our hands. People were really sacrificing at home during that war, unlike this war. There was gasoline rationing. There was rationing of rubber, appliances weren’t being built, there were wage and price controls. People were really being asked to sacrifice. So the Roosevelt administration needed to show the American people that actually the War was a difficult slog. That it was a tough grind and that there were people overseas sacrificing even more than they were and Mauldin’s cartoons fit the bill perfectly. There was a grimness. There was a rough grittiness. The enemy was depicted as lethal and effective. The men were depicted as exhausted and cynical, but they did their duty. He never depicted dead bodies. He never depicted soldiers deserting like they did, in massive numbers. He never depicted men taking shots at their officers or going AWOL. He depicted Willie and Joe exploited and exhausted, but nonetheless picking themselves up and marching forward.
| |  Now what was the public’s reaction Mauldin’s depiction of the soldier?
At first it was split. There were some who were mightily offended. They literally had never seen images like this before. They had never seen an American soldier with a five o’clock shadow let alone a full beard. They had never seen an American soldier with a muddy uniform or mud caked on their boots. They had never seen an American soldier talking back to an officer or expressing cynicism about the war. This was all completely new to them. In September of 1943, Life Magazine published the first image of a dead American soldier. And it was just a face down image of a marine on Buna Beach, New Guinea in the sand. It was a benign photo, but it was the first they had ever seen. The War Department has censored every such image, so Americans really knew nothing about combat. They knew nothing about the grimness of war. Mauldin’s cartoons were really some of the first images of the front that they had ever seen. And while some were offended by it, the vast majority, I think, had been hungry for a real taste of what the war was like. They were hungry for some truth.
Now at this point what kind of distribution did the cartoons get?
At this point he was syndicated widely throughout the United States, beginning in April 1944. He signed a contract with United Features Syndicate that immediately put him into one hundred papers across the country and then it built up from there. He had been discovered by Ernie Pyle, the great war correspondent, just a few months before, and even before that, editors on Stars and Stripes discovered Mauldin’s cartoons in the 45th Division News and had pressured him to move to Stars and Stripes. And he did, eventually. His first Stars and Stripes cartoons were December 1943 and then he was made a staff member there in February 1944. But it was in January of 1944 that Ernie Pyle, who was syndicated in three hundred newspapers on the home front. He was the most beloved and popular newspaper columnist in the country. He devoted a whole column to Bill Mauldin and his cartoons. This twenty-two year old, smart-alecky hillbilly from the mountains of New Mexico who was doing these unbelievable cartoons the likes of which, he said, you’ve never seen. He said Mauldin’s soldiers will look entirely unfamiliar to you if you ever get a chance to see the. They look more like hobos than they do your sons and your brothers. He teased the home front saying maybe some day you’ll be able to see these. Well within about twenty-four hours he was getting syndicate offers, pouring in from the United States.
Now at the same time, what was the military reaction?
Again, the reaction to Mauldin’s cartoon was always split among brass. There were always some brass who loved his cartoons and thought they were good for morale because they were speaking the truth, and allowing the men to blow off steam, to see their grievances aired and in a way that would defuse problems in the ranks. That was the theory, the safety valve theory of Mauldin’s cartoons. And Mauldin had a string of good luck in the 45th Division. The top generals in the 45th Division, they changed about three times while he was in the Division, and each one seemed to like his cartoon. This was originally a National Guard unit and they were liberal democrats, they were New Deal democrats who were in the reserves and they had commissions. So they understood the political benefit of Mauldin’s cartoons. However there were regular Army brass who hated his guts from the very beginning. When he was overseas he really got into hot water with some very powerful generals who could have easily ended his career. The generals in charge of the base section in Naples, Italy and in Paris, France, Arthur Wilson and John Lee respectively, they harassed editors on Stars and Stripes and the 45th Division News. They confiscated copies of the paper, they withheld supplies to the paper, newsprint and ink and they threatened to have Mauldin arrested and thrown in jail. All because of Mauldin’s subversive cartoons that they said were harming discipline. But nobody hated Mauldin worse than General George S. Patton, Jr. Mauldin was something of an obsession with Patton. He didn’t get the humor and her certainly didn’t like the insubordination but he couldn’t stand the disheveled state of the characters. He was a really spit and polish kind of guy and he insisted, even in the front lines, that soldiers have their shirts tucked in and shave every day and have their helmets polished. He absolutely couldn’t stand the look of Willie and Joe. When he first caught hold of Mauldin’s cartoons in Sicily, in August 1943 he immediately went to Troy Middleton, who was the general in charge of the 45th Division and said, “Get that punk kid off your paper.” Middleton liked Mauldin. He said, “George you’ve got to understand, my men love him. If I kick him off the paper there will be a revolt in the ranks.” Patton said, “I don’t care, get rid of him.” Middleton said, “George, please put the order in writing.” Patton said he would, and left. Before he could put the order in writing, Patton was embroiled in a controversy that you may remember learning about, where he slapped two battle-fatigued soldiers in a field hospital. The incident leaked to the press and he was kind of being brought up on charges in congress. There was going to be a special investigation about it. So the Mauldin issue had to be put aside for a while and Patton was eventually removed from that theatre of operations, but he was back in it in Europe in 1944. When he was back, once again he saw Mauldin’s cartoons and hit the roof. This time the cartoons were in Stars and Stripes. They were reaching his men! Mauldin eventually left Italy for France, in January 1945. It was the first time he went to France. By this time his cartoons are everywhere in the United States in every edition of Stars and Stripes, except I believe it never appeared in the Pacific Stars and Stripes because Douglas Macarthur hated him and kept him out. By this time Patton was in charge of the Third Army, which was occupying much of Belgium and Luxemburg and into part of Germany, and Patton’s headquarters was in the Ducal palace in Luxemburg. Mauldin made his way to Paris, and when he got to Paris he’s stopped a roadblock and he was immediately arrested. He was arrested for a number of reasons. He was out of uniform, which he always was. He was wearing a Russian style fur hat, which only the 10th Mountain Division wore. He was wearing a tankers jacket. He was wearing paratrooper jump boots. He was wearing big balloon pants with patch pockets on them for all his art supplies. He was driving his own Jeep, and the record said that the Jeep was assigned to him and that he was the driver and the passenger. No Jeep had ever been assigned to an enlisted man before. He was the only one, ever, to be assigned a Jeep for his own personal use but a general in Italy who liked him had arranged it for him. He had a stack of trip tickets. To drive anywhere in the European theatre of operations you had to go through a series of roadblocks and you needed authorization to get through the roadblock. He had blank authorization forms signed by Generals so he could fill in wherever he was going. Nobody had ever had this before. His hair was longer than regulation. He didn’t shave. He was immediately arrested and he talked the MP’s into taking him to the Paris Stars and Stripes office. He said they’ll explain everything. So they did. They dropped him off at Stars and Stripes, the officer there in charge said, “Yeah, this is Mauldin. You can let him go. We’ll take care of him.” It was like going from the frying pan into the fire. The editors of the Paris Stars and Stripes were really angry with Mauldin because the whole time he had been working his way up to Paris, he had been doing cartoons about the situation in France. He was doing cartoons that made fun of the French. Charles de Gaulle was pissed off. He was doing cartoons that made fun of the quartermasters in charge of Paris. American soldiers in France were stealing supplies and selling them to the French on the black market. It meant the combat soldiers weren’t getting the supplies they needed. So Mauldin was cartooning about this stuff and the Paris Stars and Stripes was besieged by complaints and threats. The editors there said, “You know Bill, why don’t you kind of lay off the quartermasters, lay off the French. Start doing more positive cartoons. Your cartoons are really getting George Patton irritated.” Patton was threatening to stop distributing Stars and Stripes to his soldiers, to the whole third army. The editors of Stars and Stripes but in some phone calls and Mauldin got word to meet with a guy named Harry Butcher, who is a Navel captain and he was also Dwight T. Eisenhower’s closest aid. Butcher said, “You know Bill. We’re having this problem with George and George is really distracted. We’re afraid he won’t actually be able to command soldiers because he’s so irritated and distracted by your annoying cartoons. How about if you just go meet with him and settle the whole thing?” Bill’s a twenty-three year old three-stripe sergeant, and he, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.” [LAUGHS] And Harry Butcher leaned back and said, “We think it’s an important thing for you to do.” And whenever Butcher used the first person plural you knew he was talking about Eisenhower, and it wasn’t up for debate. So sure enough, Mauldin got a new uniform, cleaned and pressed, shined his helmet, shined his boots, fixed his tie, drove two hundred miles to the ducal palace in Luxemburg to meet with George Patton. He was arrested, right when he entered Luxemburg, he talked his way out of that and was led to the ducal palace. He said he opened the door of the throne room and there across a football fields worth of brogue carpeting away was the man himself, kind of larger than life. His gray hair, as many stars and ribbons as you could imagine. His English Bull Terrier Willie, sitting on a chair. He said he was looking at the four meanest eyes he had ever seen. He marched into the room, gave his sharpest salute, Patton ordered him to sit down and Mauldin said it was very strange because this guy had such a reputation for being a tough guy and yet he had the softest, squeakiest upper crust southern accent he’d ever heard. He said it completely broke the spell. But Patton then proceeded to lecture Mauldin for forty-five minutes on the need for discipline in the army, with examples that reached back to antiquity through Napoleons army, the mistakes that the Bolsheviks made in World War One and then up to the present day and then he gave Mauldin two minutes to rebut. Mauldin said, “Well I think my cartoons are good for morale.” He gave the safety valve theory. Patton then opened his desk drawer, and Mauldin couldn’t believe what he saw. Patton had been clipping Mauldin cartoons he disliked and put them in this top drawer of his desk. Patton pulled out two of them and held them with his fingertip and his thumb as if they were contaminated and said, “What the hell does this cartoon mean! What are you trying to do with this cartoon if not cause insubordination in the ranks!” And Mauldin tried to explain what the cartoon meant [LAUGHS] and he said actually they were pretty bad examples because they were pretty insubordinate. Mauldin tried to explain who he thought these cartoons were good for morale, ultimately Patton had no idea what he was talking about, ordered him to be a good soldier and then shooed him out the door. Mauldin was very peppery. He could be quite nasty. Throughout his life he had a reputation for insisting on always getting the last word in any argument, and he engineered things so that he would have the last word with his confrontation with Patton. He did that in two ways. First, when he came to Luxemburg he brought along, probably the second most famous war correspondent during World War Two, Will Lang, who was the senior war correspondent for Time Life. Lang was a friend of Mauldin’s. When Mauldin went back to his Jeep Will Lang said, “So Bill, how did it go with Patton?” And Bill said, “Well, you know, he said his piece, I said mine. I don’t think we changed each others minds, but we parted good friends.” Lang quoted that verbatim in the next issue of Time magazine. Patton saw it and hit the roof. The second thing Mauldin did—it took me a while to figure this out—was four days before he met with Patton Mauldin drew a cartoon of Willie and Joe in a Jeep going to Patton’s Third Army. They come across a big billboard that says, “By order of Old Blood and Guts. You must follow these rules when you’re entering Third Army territory. Hair must be regulation. If not $25 fine. Tie must be straight, $10 fine. Must be shaved, $10 fine and on and on. Willie says, “Hey Joe. Radio the old man and tell him we’ll be late on account of a thousand mile detour. In other words they’re going to drive around Third Army territory so they don’t get arrested because they’re looking all disheveled. He drew that four days before he met with Patton and ordered it to be published on February 27th, the very day he met with Patton. So he ensured that after the meeting with Patton, he would leave and Patton would open up Stars and Stripes and see that cartoon [LAUGHS]. So Harry Butcher called Patton and said how did it go, and Patton said if that little son of a bi-h ever gets in my Third Army territory again I will throw his ass in jail. That was a very Mauldin thing to do. He was very personal and vindictive. He had very thin skin and his life long motto was, “If It’s Big, Hit It.”
Did anything change for Mauldin after that meeting? That seems like a huge turning point.
It was a huge turning point. Butcher forwarded Patton’s quotation to Ike and Ike immediately this time, personally intervened. He sent out an order to all commanding officers throughout Europe that Mauldin was untouchable. He said no commanding officer is allowed to edit or change or censor or ban any Mauldin cartoon nor any letter to the editor from a combat soldier. That was it, end of argument. Mauldin won. He won the “Battle of Patton.” It just raised his stature among combat soldier enormously. He was a hero. He had already been a hero to a whole generation of combat soldier who lived through that hell, but his willingness to stand up to Patton made him a legend. An absolute legend.
How do you think Mauldin, himself, changed as a soldier over the course of the War?
That is a complicated answer. Mauldin had a complicated relationship with both the Army and that war. The Army was like his second family, having lived on his own since age fourteen, having come from a highly dysfunctional and poor family. His relationship to the Army was very much like the relationship one has to ones family. They’re the people you feel closest with, they’re the people you love the most and they’re also the people who drive you the most crazy. They know how to push your buttons. Secondly was that war. As a poor kid form New Mexico, he was destined for the front lines. When you were sent into combat you were guaranteed to not leave it unless you were killed, captured or grievously wounded so badly that you couldn’t be sent back in. We were terribly undermanned in infantry during World War Two. Subsequently those guys were sent back in with grievous wounds. If you could walk and you could see you were ordered back into the lines. Every single person Mauldin went overseas with was either grievously wounded or killed. He knew that that was his destiny and he connived to get out of it by cartooning on the 45th Division News. He could have grabbed a gun and engaged in combat when he was sent overseas but he and three or four other guys decided, “Let’s try and keep this newspaper going overseas.” They did not have orders to keep it going. They didn’t have any budget. They stole paper they stole ink. They used their own money to pay printers in Sicily and Italy to keep the paper going and their main motivation was to keep themselves out of combat.
So did Mauldin see any combat?
Yeah. This is what happened. Mauldin then saw that everybody in his infantry regiment had been killed or wounded and it really shook him up. He knew what they were going through and he knew that he had connived to escape it. He had tremendous survivors guilt and one way he dealt with that guilt was he committed himself; he committed his whole career to documenting their experience. To documenting the experiences of these men he admired so much in training and maneuvers. And who he felt he had kind of betrayed by leaving them. He spoke for them. He was the only one speaking for these poor, unlucky men who had been selected to go through hell. The better he did that, the better he spoke for them, the more famous and successful he became the greater his guilt. So the very thing that he did to relive his guilt ended up producing more guilt. At the end of the war he wasn’t a happy man. He was angry and he was disillusioned. He said he had left that war feeling he had made something good out of it. The worst catastrophe in human history, he had borne witness to it and yet he came out of that war the biggest celebrity of any enlisted man in the United States Army. He was rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams of avarice and all his buddies were gone. That was not a good feeling for him and I think it haunted him his entire life. He never quite could escape the feeling that he had exploited the real Willies and Joes for the sake of his own career.
So would you say his later work was more dark?
There was a dark side to Maudlin that he couldn’t shake. It explains his lifelong alcoholism. He went to war a teatoller and came out an alcoholic. I think it explains his darkening mood in the later years of his life and his immediate postwar cartoons, which are utterly brilliant, from 1945-1949. They are very dark and express that film noir, late 1940’s disillusionment that Mauldin experienced first hand. By early 1949 he was so disillusioned and burnt out, he dropped out of cartooning for ten years. And that’s out next volume by the way, Willie & Joe: The Post-War Years. That will be through Fantagraphics and hopefully will be out in 2009.
So when did he stop cartooning? When did he stop Willie and Joe?
Well Willie and Joe, like Macarthur’s soldiers, they don’t die, they just kind of faded away. He came home and brought Willie and Joe home. They went back to their lives at home. Willie had a wife and Joe was single. They worked at a gas station, pumping gas. They had a variety of jobs. They were unemployed, they went to bars, they hung out, and they read newspapers, the talked about the Cold War. Those cartoons are incredible. Very dark. Just as grim as the wartime stuff. They’re dealing with post-traumatic stress. I mean REALLY. They’re facedown on a sidewalk when a car backfires. He continued intermittently to do Willie and Joe cartoons in ’47, ‘48 and early ‘49. Then when he got back into cartooning, every once in a while he would pull out Willie and Joe. Not often. But in the 50’s or 60’s even he would pull out Willie and Joe. He covered Korea and wrote a book about the Korean War and did it through Willie and Joe.
What happened to his popularity in the post-war years?
It suffered. He came home, again, very disillusioned but with a new set of radical ideals. He came home extremely committed to civil rights. Civil rights for African Americans, but also civil rights for Jewish Americans for Japanese American soldiers who he admired very much. He was shocked and outraged that Japanese Americas couldn’t buy land in California or couldn’t run shops in California, that African Americas couldn’t vote in the south. That completely outraged him, and he cartooned about it. Syndicated censored his cartoons. Changed captions, they changed drawings and they had the right to do it because that’s what the contract said. So he had this huge, very public syndicate battle. What we’re going to do in the next volume is put two cartoons side by side, the censored on and then the original one so that readers can see just what Mauldin intended and just what narrowing of speech that the Cold War caused and how Mauldin was really caught in that vice.
Do you think Mauldin’s work has any enduring themes or comments about war that would still be relevant in the current climate?
Oh, absolutely no doubt. The biggest theme, I think, is something that Maudlin said himself over the course of his pretty long life. It’s the same people who really do the suffering and fighting in our wars. It’s really the working class who go to war. It’s the privileged who get to command the men from the rear, or who get to follow the war on the home front. But the ones who do are on the front line suffering and dying, and that is certainly true of this war, this occupation in Iraq, are generally the poor and working class. We must never forget that. The second thing we must never forget, and I think this is implicit in his cartoons—he never said this explicitly—World War Two was the greatest catastrophe in human history. Estimates are that between 70-100 million people worldwide died. So many people died in that war that it was overwhelming to people and what Mauldin did was focus on the experiences of just two. I think by keeping the focus narrow, on the everyday struggles of frontline soldiers—the struggles just to keep warm, getting enough to eat, battling with trench foot, what his cartoons really did was just really, exquisitely expressed the value of the individual, the value of the individual life in the individual perspective. We must never lose sight, even when we’re talking about policies and abstractions like diplomacy and foreign policy, occupation and nation building…ALL those abstractions, we must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the individuals who are suffering.
I know in my experience through history, movies, books—World War Two, though devastating, was still portrayed as very black and white, good vs. evil. Will these strips flip people’s perspectives?
I hope it does, because it wasn’t black and white. Certainly there was no more evil regime on the face of the earth than the Third Reich. There was a lot of evil to go around on all sides in that war. We must never lose sight of that. Mauldin certainly believed this was not black and white. The cartoon that won him the Pulitzer Prize, made him the youngest Pulitzer Prize winner in history, he still is at age 23, showed that tremendously. You may have seen it. It’s the one where it says, “Fresh American troops flushed with victory are bringing in thousands of battle weary prisoners. News item.” And it’s a picture of Willie and Joe and German soldiers marching in the rain down a muddy street, and it’s really hard to tell the Germans from the Americans. That says it all. On the front lines there really was not that much of a difference between the good guys and the bad guys, the liberators and the evildoers. Everybody was in the much together. Willie and Joe had a lot in common with Fritz and Franz. Every once in a while Mauldin would cartoon about the German experience in the War, sympathetically. And that was incredible. They were suffering from trench foot and they were suffering from frostbite just as badly as the Americans. Mauldin was committed to that idea. He said, many times that he found it very hard to justify the suffering of the war. He came home from that war struggling with the question: was it worth it? He did not have a ready answer to that. He said much later in life, “Well, I guess we killed Hitler, and that was good.” But that was about all he would say. He was not a flag waver about this war at all. He didn’t like the idea of the Greatest Generation. He didn’t like the idea that we celebrate that war.
Was he very outspoken against films or other comics?
Yeah, he hated Hollywood. He hated Hollywood so much that when they bid for Up Front, they offered him the biggest book deal in Hollywood history for it, the film rights, he said, “I’ll sell it if there’s no romance, no comedy no happy ending.” They said, “Oh yeah, we’ll give you that,” then offered him a contract, and he did sign it. But he did hate Hollywood and Madison Ave., advertising. He thought that Americans really never got the full picture of the War.
Didn’t he have a small acting career? He had a small role in the Red Badge of Courage.
Yes he did. He was. With John Huston, who he admired very much. He believe that Huston produced the greatest war documentary ever made, The Battle of San Pietro which Huston filled with a hand held camera in battle. The War Department censored it at first, wouldn’t allow it to be shown. General George Marshall eventually ordered that it be shown to every recruit. Huston called Mauldin in 1950 and said, “Hey, I’m going to make Red Badge of Courage, I want you and Audie Murphey to be in it.” Mauldin agreed, for the money and I think he acquitted himself fairly well, both he and Audie Murphy.
What year did you start researching Mauldin?
I went to the Library of Congress in August 2003. I handed in my manuscript in September of 2006.
So you never met Mauldin?
No. He died in January 2003, just as I was getting interested in the subject. I said to his kids, several times, “Boy I wish he was here to talk to me,” or they would say, “Boy I wish he were here to talk to you.” And then they would stop and say, “Nah, he would have hated you.” [LAUGHS] He would have hated to talk about this stuff.
You talked to them a lot for the book? How did you find that?
It’s a complicated family situation. Eight different kids from three different wives, the third wife younger than three of the kids. I talked to the third wife and several of the kids. They were great. They were remarkable for a number of reasons. First they were very creative, intelligent, critical people themselves and they were absolutely insistent that I not do a whitewash job on their father. They wanted a warts and all biography, which is what I feel I gave them. They didn’t want me to pull any punches. They knew their father was a bad dad in a lot of ways. They knew he was an alcoholic, they knew he was a grumpy guy, but they simply wanted his work to be taken seriously. They wanted his cartoons to be critically analyzed. And that’s what I gave them.
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