Going Back Up Front with Bill Mauldin

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on June 10, 2008 Sign up now!

by Van Jensen -- Publishers Weekly, 6/9/2008 5:53:00 PM

PWCW: How did you decide to write about Bill Mauldin?

Todd DePastino: My fascination with Mauldin awoke in 2002, precisely when he was dying. I was completing my first book, on the history of homelessness (Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America), and commented to several people how such a far-flung counterculture of homeless men had vanished during World War II. “Hoboes didn’t disappear," said a few. "They went into the army. Just like Willie and Joe!”I had only a dim knowledge of Willie and Joe and Bill Mauldin. So I went to the library, pulled out a yellowed copy of Up Front and was stunned by what I saw: fiercely sardonic cartoons rendered in exquisite detail. The humor was fresh, and you could almost feel the exhaustion of the characters. But what intrigued me the most was that I didn't get all the jokes. They were inside jokes, hermetic humor, crafted for an exclusive fraternity, a counterculture of combat soldiers that roughly paralleled the counterculture of the road I had examined in Citizen Hobo. I wanted to get inside that subculture.

Just as I was beginning to think about a serious Mauldin project, he was in the news again. Some veterans had become aware of his decline [living in a nursing home] and were sending him cards and letters by the hundreds a day The man was an icon to a generation of combat vets. One normally doesn't associate cartoons with such reverence. I knew there was something very special about this body of work, work I had yet to understand.It was only after he died in January of 2003 that I made my first trip to the Bill Mauldin Papers at the Library of Congress and began work on his biography.

PWCW: How surprised were you that no previous biographies had been written on Mauldin?

TD: Plenty of editors pointed out what I myself saw as a narrative problem. The story seemed to peak so early, when Mauldin was 23 years old. He had another 58 years to live after that. But I kept finding out fascinating turns in his life story—his Hollywood experiences, his civil rights activism, his run for Congress, his trips to Korea and Vietnam, his celebrated return to cartooning after a 10-year hiatus. I also discovered that his postwar cartoons were often just as insightful and compelling as his wartime work, so the reasons for not writing a full-scale biography kept falling away.In the end, I was left with the realization that one of the most important artists of the 20th century had no biography.

PWCW: What was it about his military experience that helped shape him into a challenger of the establishment? And how important was his military experience to his later fights for civil rights and tolerance?

TD: The army drove him crazy and enraged him, but also made him who he was and claimed a big section of his heart. He had lived on his own since age 14 and had joined the 45th Division when he was 18, so in many ways, the army was his second family. It provided food, clothing, shelter and a sliver of an opportunity for advancement. But for Mauldin, that opportunity was never going to come through being mentored for command. Instead, just like some kids have to rebel against family authority to individuate and develop, Mauldin could only gain his voice and his authority by bucking the military establishment. Every time he tried to shine, his light was extinguished. One month after enlisting, the army issued its first IQ test, and Mauldin scored second highest in the division of 12,000 men. He was put on KP duty for the next 64 days.

All he saw in the 45th Division was petty harassment and sadism—what military folks call chickenshit.

Mauldin requested a transfer from his chickenshit quartermaster regiment to the infantry, the 180th Regiment. The 180th was a mainly Native American outfit with a huge contingent of Choctows. Mauldin worshipped these men. They were tough, self-respecting and highly educated. Yet they were disparaged and relegated to the least respected branch of the military. They reminded Mauldin of himself: underrated, imbued with hidden talent and possessing an outsider's insight into the corruption and hypocrisies of the mainstream. At this time, in 1940, Mauldin might not have known what the term "civil rights" meant. But he knew five years later when he returned from war having witnessed the valor of the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the African-American 92nd Infantry Division, men who fought in a segregated army and then returned to a segregated home front that denied these combat soldiers the very rights for which they had supposedly fought. It outraged Mauldin, and he leaped into the nascent civil rights movement with both feet after his discharge from the army.

PWCW: How did the Fantagraphics collection develop? Did you have any experience with comic book publishing before that?

TD: I happened to mention to the attorney for the Mauldin estate, Jon Gordon, that a complete collection of Mauldin’s cartoons would be a good idea. I had discovered that less than half of Mauldin’s wartime cartoons had ever been reprinted. Many of them had only appeared once in one newspaper, the 45th Division News. I saw a great need to bring all these together. Gordon and the family had just been approached by Gary Groth at Fantagraphics about just such a project. Gary didn't know the extent of Mauldin’s wartime production, but he hired me as editor, and I worked on both the biography and the cartoon collection at the same time. PWCW: How much work was it tracking down all of the cartoons?

TD: Tracking down the cartoons and then getting high-resolution images of them was an enormous undertaking. Mauldin had a strange career: in the early war years he had two entirely separate army cartoon features—both titled Star Spangled Banter—running concurrently in only two newspapers.

He also published two books, one in 1941 and one in 1944 (titled–what else?–Star Spangled Banter) that contained new, previously unpublished cartoons, and most of those were never printed elsewhere. Finally, there are original drawings in the Library of Congress and at the 45th Division Museum in Oklahoma City that appear never to have been published. So the challenge was to collect all of these drawings and bring them together so that the reader could trace Mauldin’s development as an artist, a soldier and a survivor of combat.

Fantagraphics and I plan to publish all of Mauldin’s cartoons done over his 50-year career. The next volume in the series will be his wonderful postwar work, from 1945 to 1949. I find this body of work as compelling as the wartime stuff. It's full of Mauldin's profound sense of isolation and confusion, betrayal and disillusion. These cartoons trace the nation’s descent from the idealism brought about by victory to the fear and paranoia of an emerging Cold War. His syndicate censored his cartoons, changing captions and whiting out offending symbols in his drawings. The FBI started investigating him, even trailing him on some of his trips to military bases. This is the Mauldin that few people know about, but it’s as fascinating a saga as his wartime career.