Sometimes, the best way to buck the system is to be a part of it.
Bill Mauldin served with the U.S. Army in North Africa and Europe during World War II, and through his unconventional cartoon characters Willie and Joe, he chronicled the ups and downs, the tedium and exhaustion, of the enlisted man on the field.
Born in October 1921, Mauldin showed his artistry early — even enrolling in a cartooning correspondence course at age 14. He later enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts before being swept up in the beginning of World War II.
On the field, his cartoons soon appeared in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. His unshaven Willie and Joe elicited sympathy for the ordinary soldier and drew ire from some officers, including Gen. George S. Patton, who publicly questioned Mauldin’s patriotism.
“Patton wanted people to idealize soldiers, and Mauldin’s work made that difficult,” explains Greg Varner, who explored the artist extensively for the Postal Service’s research firm, PhotoAssist. “Mauldin demystified the American soldier for civilian audiences, and he needled the establishment in a way that pleased his enlisted readers.”
So well known were Mauldin’s two unshaven, unlikely heroes that they appeared in one of a five-part, five-year series of stamps commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II.
Controversy erupted even then because the art director, Howard Paine, chose one artist to create all 50 stamps in the five-year series. That meant redrawing Mauldin’s own work. When it was sent to the then-72-year-old Mauldin for approval, he responded in typical anti-establishment pattern: “It’s the government at work, man. It’s the good old bureaucracy at play.”
After the war, Mauldin tried his hand at editorial cartooning, acting, memoir-writing, and an unsuccessful run for Congress. He won his second Pulitzer Prize for a 1959 editorial cartoon. Perhaps his single most famous cartoon was published in the Chicago Sun-Times after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: the Lincoln Memorial statue, holding his head in grief.
Mauldin died at age 81 on January 22, 2003, in California. But Willie and Joe live on in the realism and encouragement they brought to a watching world at war.
Mauldin's characters Willie and Joe won him a Pulitzer Prize “for distinguished service as a cartoonist."
"Willie & Joe" Keep Spirits High was one of 10 stamps featured in the World War II, 1943: Turning the Tide miniature sheet.
This famous Mauldin cartoon was published after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Mauldin the stamp
If Bill Mauldin himself was a noncomformist who wasn’t afraid to challenge the system, then it’s only fitting that creating his stamp turned out to be challenging as well.
The design team wanted to incorporate both Mauldin and the cartoon characters for which he was most famous. The photo chosen was of a young Mauldin on the field in World War II, actually sketching. But showing the photo and the cartoon became a compositional problem: “The shape of the photo and of the art were similar, which created two equally weighted things rather than one focus,” says Bill Gicker, creative director for Stamp Services.
After numerous iterations, the design was eventually simplified by enlarging Mauldin and replacing the photo’s background with a simple color field of distressed khaki green and tan. As a finishing touch, art director Terry McCaffrey suggested a World War II-era font reminiscent of the stenciling seen on a jeep or military vehicle.
Mauldin the artist bucked the system by breathing life into two simple soldiers, Willie and Joe. In so doing, he’s honored for bringing realism and humor to a grim nation at war.
View the Bill Mauldin black-and-white First Day of Issue cancellation as well as the Digital Color Postmark.