Word: mauldin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time. "I had no idea what an editorial cartoonist was or what he was supposed to do," says Wright, "except that he was supposed to have an opinion." Having few firm views on current affairs, he was forced to educate himself rapidly. Wright also faced tough competition from Bill Mauldin and Herblock, whose syndicated work was available to News editors. Wright proceeded to mimic their styles "because they were supposed to be the best." Looking back on his early efforts, Wright wonders "why the hell the paper ever stuck with...
...reason occurred three years after his debut, when Wright was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; the winning cartoon showed two survivors of a nuclear holocaust in a bomb-pocked landscape and was captioned: "You mean you were blurring?" Since then, Wright has abandoned the pencil-and-charcoal effects favored by Mauldin and Herblock. He has developed his own pen-and-ink style, in which faces and forms are distorted past realistic limits. His decisive lines and elongated figures are reminiscent of the technique of British Caricaturist Ronald Searle. Wright's characters, with their ballooning eyeballs, pinprick pupils and ramshackle poses...
General George Patton, among others, thought that Mauldin's attitude toward discipline and authority was subversive. The funniest scene in this often funny book-which Mauldin calls "a sort of a memoir"-is the confrontation between the 23-year-old cartoonist and the famous general. "Now then, sergeant," Patton says in his most tolerant tone, "about those god-awful things you call soldiers. You know goddamn well you're not drawing an accurate representation of the American soldier. You make them look like goddamn bums. No respect for the army, their officers, or themselves. You know as well...
...Mauldin continued to lampoon the brass. The top command thought, correctly as it happened, that Willie and Joe were morale boosters, and even Patton could not touch them. Far from being incitements to mutiny, they were escape valves for the frustrations of the ordinary soldier. Mauldin's humor was often biting, but it was never mean...
...decades, Mauldin has been one of America's better-known political cartoonists. Yet his approach to his own story, which he carries only up to his mustering-out day in 1945, is one of embarrassed wonder and unembarrassed pride. His boyhood had been spent well below the poverty line. Yet just ten years after he started cartooning from a correspondence course, Willie, his best-known creation, was on the cover of TIME, a book of his cartoons was No. 1 on the bestseller list, and 200 newspapers had signed up for his future output. He was still only...