Remembering Bill Mauldin of ‘Willie & Joe’
This year marks a resurgence of interest in the late Bill Mauldin, who started out as a soldier-cartoonist in the U.S. Army during World War II. This revival is thanks largely to Todd DePastino, author of the new Mauldin biography A Life Up Front and editor of Fantagraphics’ new collection of Mauldin’s cartoons, Willie & Joe: The War Years.
Look for reviews of both of those right here on ComicMix in the coming days. Seen at right is one of Mauldin’s favorite war-time cartoons, of a soldier "putting down" a cherished Jeep.
In the meanwhile, Slate.com has a great primer on Mauldin in slideshow form. The piece also compares Mauldin’s point blank vantage of warfare to the removed way our current cartoonists are covering conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
America’s newspapers are famous all over town for yearning to become relevant again, so here’s a free suggestion: Send some of your extremely talented cartoonists to Iraq, embed their butts, and direct them to draw what they see. I’ll wager that what they produce will enlighten readers and move us, too, in ways that words and video cannot. That’s what Bill Mauldin did in another war more than six decades ago; there’s no reason why it can’t happen again.
I'm not about to step on anybody's review, so here's merely my two cents: Bill Mauldin was one of the absolute all-time greats, and this hefty tome is worthy of the challenge of representing merely a small fraction of the cartoonist's awe-inspiring work.
The reak underlying joke of the cartoon you show is that the soldier is a long-service cavalry soldier – probably served when they actually had horses…
Or perhaps the joke is that a jeep, whatever your equestrian experience, could be loved as much as any horse and, when it was suffering from a mortal injury, induce you, a compassionate being, to end that suffering. Metaphorically speaking. The switch is that the other half of our brain knows cars don't suffer and if they did, a bullet wouldn't end their non-existent consciousness. Another switch is that compassion exists in the middle of the worst war in human history.
No, in "Up Front", Mauldin makes a specific point about the sergeant being an old Cavalry sergeant.Remember – despite the image that we have of WW2 as a mechanised war, both the Germans and the Russians were still using a fair amount of horse-drawn transport, the US had relatively recently retired the horse cavalry – and the Poles actually made at least one cavalry charge against German tanks. (This is not a Polish joke – it was what was there, and, given the relative strengths of the Poles and the Germans, anything they might have done against the Wehrmacht was pretty well a futile but gallant gesture…)
There were Cavalry Devisions in the Army long after the Cavalry stopped using horses. The front of the jeep says "CAVALRY" on it. Yes, the joke is about putting down an injured jeep like an injured horse. But there is nothing in this cartoon that implies this old Cavalry Sergeant ever rode on horseback. I would pity the horse that would have had to carry him.Part of the joke is in that the military still designated it's jeeps as Cavalry. The term was archaic and so dealing with a broken jeep in an archaic Cavalry manor may be part of why it's funny. The cartoon may be a very subtle commentary on Army Bureaucracy; saying, "Why do we call jeeps 'cavalry'?"The fact is, the joke is simple, but it works on many levels. There is irony, pathos and absurdity. It's funny and touching.There have even been Air Cavalry Devisions of the U.S. Air Force. I imagine those were made up of Valkyrie WACS on Pegasus-steeds.