WILLIE AND JOE

The best book about war, Up Front, was written by cartoonist Bill Mauldin as padding for a collection of his cartoons about life in the trenches during World War II in Europe. What few of us realized upon first opening that volume is that Mauldin’s oeuvre of army life cartoons is much larger than the contents of Up Front suggest. The book culls Mauldin’s cartoons about hook-nosed Willie and pudding-faced Joe from Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper, but Mauldin wasn’t on the staff of S&S until February 1944. Mauldin enlisted in September 1940, long before the U.S. joined the hostilities in Europe, and he carrtooned for his unit’s newspaper, the 45^th Division News, for three years, most of it while the 45^th was bivouacking its way around the U.S. Fantagraphics’ two-volume 716-page slipcased Willie & Joe (hardcover, $65) sets the record straight: virtually all of Volume I's 325 8x11-inch pages are devoted to cartoons Mauldin produced before going overseas in July 1943. The eponymous Willie and Joe, as a familiar pair, don’t show up until Volume II’s September 26, 1943 cartoon.

Mauldin initially entitled his cartoon The Star Spangled Banter, and it carried that name as long as it appeared in the 45^th Division News and in civilian newspapers like the Oklahoma City Times and the Daily Oklahoman, to which Mauldin occasionally contributed freelance; his cartoons acquired the title Up Front when they began appearing in S&S in late 1943.

This handsomely designed and presented brace of books is worthy of its subject, one of the nation’s greatest opinion mongers in cartoons. For the whole Mauldin story, visit Harv’s Hindsight for February 2003, which is accessible through RCHarvey.com.