" "The real war," said Walt Whitman, "will never
get in the books." During World War II, the closest most Americans
ever came to the "real war" was through the cartoons of Bill
Mauldin, the most beloved enlisted man in the U.S. Army.
Here, for the first time, Fantagraphics Books brings together
Mauldin's complete works from 1940 through the end of the war. This
collection of over 600 cartoons, most never before reprinted, is more than
the record of a great artist: it is an essential chronicle of America's
citizen-soldiers from peace through war to victory.
Bill Mauldin knew war because he was in it. He had created his
characters, Willie and Joe, at age 18, before Pearl Harbor, while training
with the 45th Infantry Division and cartooning part-time for the camp
newspaper. His brilliant send-ups of officers were pure infantry, and the
men loved it.
After wading ashore with his division on the first of its four beach
invasions in July 1943, Mauldin and his men changed — and Mauldin's
cartoons changed accordingly. Months of miserable weather, bad food, and
tedium interrupted by the terror of intense bombing and artillery fire took
its toll. By the year's end, virtually every man in Mauldin's original
rifle company was killed, wounded, or captured.
The wrinkles in Willie and Joe's uniforms deepened, the bristle on
their faces grew, and the eyes — "too old for those young
bodies," as Mauldin put it — betrayed a weariness that would
remain the entire war. With their heavy brush lines, detailed battlescapes,
and pidgin of army slang and slum dialect, Mauldin's cartoons and captions
recreated on paper the fully realized world of the American combat soldier.
Their dark, often insubordinate humor sparked controversy among army brass
and incensed General George S. Patton, Jr." -Fantagraphics
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