(8 of 9)
Mauldin's originality hatches only after the most stringent of professional routines, of which the morning parboil is but a part. Four hours of preparation, four hours of execution go into each cartoon. Arriving at his cluttered Post-Dispatch office about 10 in the morning, Mauldin reads the freshly printed city edition for the current news. Within the hour, he has submitted, half anxiously, half belligerently, a rough pencil sketch of his idea to Editorial Page Editor Robert Lasch. The two have a smooth working relation. "Bob," says Mauldin, "is like a good cop, there to protect you, not to arrest you." Mauldin is given unusual leeway in his work; the paper has never asked him to come out for or against anyone. On the other hand, says Lasch, "there have never been any serious disagreements. Mauldin does not consider himself bigger than the Post-Dispatch"
Once Lasch approves, Mauldin works up half a dozen crude, matchbook-sized "spots"—samples that vary widely in composition and approach. These spots play an important role in giving his idea different settings: "You've got to be suspicious if anything satisfies you right off." After a quick lunch, Mauldin grids his drawingboard work area into nine squares and begins drafting the cartoon, first in pencil and then in ink. A stickler for just the right detail, he frequently consults his favorite reference, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, or poses before a Polaroid Land camera (with a self-tripping shutter) to get the authentic look of a clenched fist, a tyrant's sneer, a trouser seat viewed from the rear.
A left-hander who works carefully up from the lower right-hand corner so as not to smear his work, Mauldin generally has finished next day's cartoon by 6, personally escorts it to the engraving department ("I would never trust a copy boy with it") before "heading out for the Bismarck, a Post-Dispatch hangout, for a relaxing martini or two with friends. But his thoughts are never far from the job. His second wife Natalie, a Sarah Lawrence graduate whom Mauldin met at a Manhattan party after the war, has learned not to talk to Bill at bedtime, when his glazed eyes tell her he has fallen into an inspirational mood. The neighbors are used to the predawn roar of Mauldin's 14-year-old Jeep; he is off to the paper to make some suddenly visualized change in his cartoon.
Outdistancing the Field. In a profession by no means overcrowded with talent, Editorial Cartoonist Bill Mauldin has outdistanced the field. There are a few strong pens still around, but not many.
The best of these is the Washington Post and Times Herald's liberal Herbert Block (Herblock), 51, an implacable, fire-breathing enemy of all conservatives; he once drew Richard M. Nixon climbing out of a sewer. Herblock was slowed down by a 1959 heart attack, and later by his respect for John F. Kennedy. But the Herblock brickbats still land with thudding regularity—even if they rarely hit the Administration. England's David Low, whose brilliant wartime cartoons nominated him as the greatest cartoonist of the century, is far off form at 70. "The war," observed a Low friend recently, "stole the fire from his belly."