(5 of 9)
Searing Defiance. Mauldin has been a stirrer-upper—and an artist—all his life. At three he was sketching on the inside walls of a bordello in Parral, a Mexican town to which Sidney Albert Mauldin. Bill's peripatetic father, had taken his family to try his hand at mining. Bill soon showed evidence of another indispensable ingredient of the good cartoonist: a low boiling point. When he was a spindly eight (the result of rickets) with a head too big for his body, he overheard a New Mexico rancher say to a crony: "If that was my son, I'd drown him." Says Mauldin, who never forgot or forgave the insult: "I could picture that bastard holding me under water for no reason. I had a searing feeling of defiance. I'd show that big son of a bitch."
Eventually, he did—in the only way that he knew. Sent to Chicago in 1939 for a year at the Academy of Fine Arts with $500 from his maternal grandmother, he learned editorial cartooning by day and spent each night drawing ten gag cartoons. Of some 3,000 submitted to 20 magazines, he sold about 50 specimens at $2 each—all to Arizona Highways magazine. He did better at political cartooning. Working both sides of the political street in Phoenix a year later, he drew campaign art not only for Arizona's incumbent Governor but for his opponent as well. When this double-dealing was exposed, Mauldin joined the Arizona National Guard.
The Washing War. What could have been a digression in uniform developed into a career. With neither the physique nor the temperament for soldiering—during one four-month stretch he stood 64 days of K.P.—Private Mauldin was assigned to truck driving. After the scrawny chauffeur had stripped more than his share of gears, the motor pool captain gladly gave him permission to try out as cartoonist for the division newspaper.
"The kid was a strike," recalls the paper's founder, Walter ("Skipper") Harrison, then on leave from his duties as managing editor of the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman. Mauldin's early work, much of it in the area of latrine humor, soon made him the best-known dogface in the division. But after his outfit moved to Italy, Mauldin began toying with something bigger than barracks jokes.
Instinctively sympathetic to the gripes, fears and frustrations of the civilian suddenly converted to fighting man, Mauldin guided his pen toward some permanent cartoon characters who would express what he felt. In 1943, already appearing regularly in Stars and Stripes, he introduced Willie and Joe. "I just stumbled on the right device for portraying war," Mauldin says. "I never once drew a dead soldier. I gave the impression of death and tragedy just offstage. I thrived on boredom. Ninety percent of the war I saw was the quiet war, the housekeeping war, the washing war."