Beginning his life’s work for the Army and some civilian publications, he created the characters Willie and Joe to portray what seemingly no other medium was able to capture: the daily lives of infantry grunts in combat zones. Mauldin, who had a long and fruitful career as a political cartoonist (If it’s big, he used to say, hit it.), collecting two Pulitzer Prizes along the way, was well accounted for in Todd DePastino’s biography Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front. There were exceptions to the rule: cartoonists such as those found on the op-ed pages of then-flourishing daily newspapers such as the inimitable Herblock and Bill Mauldin. Back in the mid-20th century, parents who were even more clueless (but less lethally so) than today’s breeders scorned DC and Marvel comics and reviled Mad magazine some even theorized that the books were contributors to the big scare of the ’50s: juvenile delinquency. Cartoonists have struggled in the American culture for their rightful seat at the big arts banquet of popular culturethe big shift in their legitimacy can probably be pegged to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus in the late ’80s.
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