The redoubtable World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle once wrote that Bill Mauldin was "the finest cartoonist the war has produced, ...not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real." Mauldin, an infantryman turned frontline cartoonist, would go on to win fame, the Legion of Merit, and a Pulitzer Prize for his darkly comic portrayal of Willie and Joe, two unshaven, mud-soaked, and battle-weary G.I.s rendered in stark, boldly hatched ink drawings. Historian Todd DePastino's Willie and Joe: The WWII Years (Fantagraphics) now brings together all of Mauldin's Army cartoons for the first time in a two-volume, slipcased boxed set, while his biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front (Norton), gives us the driven young man who went into the brutal killing fields of Anzio and Cassino armed with only a sketchbook.
Mauldin's depiction of the miserable conditions of combat made him a hero to enlisted men. And his reputation in the foxholes grew further after a well-publicized tangle with the ultimate spit-and-polish general, George S. Patton, who declared Mauldin's characters "unsoldierly" and threatened to "throw his ass in jail." For the grunts, the fact that Mauldin earned a Purple Heart for a shoulder wound made him the real deal. As one veteran summed it up, and as these still-fresh drawings make clear: "He was one of us."
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