Book-It 'o11! Book #41
The Fifty Books Challenge, year three! (Years one and two, just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: Willie & Joe: The WWII Years, Volume II by Bill Mauldin, edited by Todd DePastino
Details: Copyright 2008, Fantagraphics Books
Synopsis (By Way of Publisher's Website): ""The real war," said Walt Whitman, "will never get in the books." During World War II, the closest most Americans ever came to the "real war" was through the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the most beloved enlisted man in the U.S. Army.
Here, for the first time, Fantagraphics Books brings together Mauldin's complete works from 1940 through the end of the war. This collection of over 600 cartoons, most never before reprinted, is more than the record of a great artist: it is an essential chronicle of America's citizen-soldiers from peace through war to victory.
Bill Mauldin knew war because he was in it. He had created his characters, Willie and Joe, at age 18, before Pearl Harbor, while training with the 45th Infantry Division and cartooning part-time for the camp newspaper. His brilliant send-ups of officers were pure infantry, and the men loved it.
After wading ashore with his division on the first of its four beach invasions in July 1943, Mauldin and his men changed - and Mauldin's cartoons changed accordingly. Months of miserable weather, bad food, and tedium interrupted by the terror of intense bombing and artillery fire took its toll. By the year's end, virtually every man in Mauldin's original rifle company was killed, wounded, or captured.
The wrinkles in Willie and Joe's uniforms deepened, the bristle on their faces grew, and the eyes - "too old for those young bodies," as Mauldin put it - betrayed a weariness that would remain the entire war. With their heavy brush lines, detailed battlescapes, and pidgin of army slang and slum dialect, Mauldin's cartoons and captions recreated on paper the fully realized world of the American combat soldier. Their dark, often insubordinate humor sparked controversy among army brass and incensed General George S. Patton, Jr.
This is the first of several volumes publishing the best of Bill Mauldin's single panel strips from 1940 to 1991 (when he stopped drawing). His Willie & Joe cartoons will be presented in a deluxe, beautifully designed two-volume slipcased edition of over 600 pages. The series is edited by Todd DePastino, whose Mauldin scholarship will be on full display in a biography of the artist coming in February 2008 from W.W. Norton. Willie & Joe will contain an introduction and running commentary by DePastino, providing context for the drawings, pertinent biographical details of Mauldin's life, and occasional background on specific cartoons (such as the ones that made Patton howl)."
Why I Wanted to Read It: It was actually a later volume of Mauldin's work I was after, that the Onion AV Club Comics Panel had reviewed favorably. I stumbled across both this and Volume I and happened to get this one first.
How I Liked It: Firstly, I have to say the packaging of this set is nothing short of ingenious. When I received this book with no dust jacket, I assumed (rather annoyed) that it had been removed for some reason. Both books actually come without jackets in a handy, very military dual box. "Official" stamps of "DECLASSIFIED", "TOP SECRET", and "EYES ONLY" along with both stencil lettering and a font that looks like an old Underwood (including faux mistakes "struck out" here and there) frame the meat of the books (the original Mauldin cartoons) themselves in the most appropriate way.
These are best read as a whole (unlike how I and the publisher have divided them: into two separate books) as the first volume provides biographical information about Mauldin that prefaces the work itself.
But the cartoons themselves: in this volume especially, Mauldin portrays a very real sense of the tedium, discomfort, and drain of war in a way so seldom seen. The petty politics of the upper ranks (cartoons which thrilled the lower ranks and, as described, infuriated General Patton), the deprivation of wartime, the utterly undramatic makes up the subject of the cartoons. Given continuing censorship from the US Army, Mauldlin's cartoons never depict the violence or gore he himself saw on a daily basis. In an interview quoted in Volume I, he said he merely tried to suggest "that there were bodies just offstage."
Mauldin conveyed the horror and trauma by the sad, exhausted semi-vacant stares of his characters, a choice that somehow seems more fittingly descriptive.
Most of the jokes are, as one can imagine, fairly esoteric even to a historian of this period. Frequently, they are starred and a backstory of sorts is offered in the back of the book to make the cartoon "make sense" (one cartoon depicts an American inquiring of a captured Nazi "You mind if I take a look at one of them leaflets?" to which the book offers Mauldin's commentary: "Soldiers are avid readers, some because they like to read and others because there is nothing else to do." The book also notes the constant shortage of reading material at the front). In this, they manage to be a fantastically vivid snapshot of history without being overly didactic.
Mauldin's style improved and sharpened as the war wore on, as did his wit (particularly his word economy). Some of the shadow work (the folds of the uniforms, the slope of jaw and brow structure) is nothing short of genius.
This stands as a valuable testament to history and to the gritty reality of war.
Notable: No cartoon appears on June 6th, 1944 (D-Day) although cartoons for June 5th and June 7th, respectively, appear.
Title: Willie & Joe: The WWII Years, Volume II by Bill Mauldin, edited by Todd DePastino
Details: Copyright 2008, Fantagraphics Books
Synopsis (By Way of Publisher's Website): ""The real war," said Walt Whitman, "will never get in the books." During World War II, the closest most Americans ever came to the "real war" was through the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the most beloved enlisted man in the U.S. Army.
Here, for the first time, Fantagraphics Books brings together Mauldin's complete works from 1940 through the end of the war. This collection of over 600 cartoons, most never before reprinted, is more than the record of a great artist: it is an essential chronicle of America's citizen-soldiers from peace through war to victory.
Bill Mauldin knew war because he was in it. He had created his characters, Willie and Joe, at age 18, before Pearl Harbor, while training with the 45th Infantry Division and cartooning part-time for the camp newspaper. His brilliant send-ups of officers were pure infantry, and the men loved it.
After wading ashore with his division on the first of its four beach invasions in July 1943, Mauldin and his men changed - and Mauldin's cartoons changed accordingly. Months of miserable weather, bad food, and tedium interrupted by the terror of intense bombing and artillery fire took its toll. By the year's end, virtually every man in Mauldin's original rifle company was killed, wounded, or captured.
The wrinkles in Willie and Joe's uniforms deepened, the bristle on their faces grew, and the eyes - "too old for those young bodies," as Mauldin put it - betrayed a weariness that would remain the entire war. With their heavy brush lines, detailed battlescapes, and pidgin of army slang and slum dialect, Mauldin's cartoons and captions recreated on paper the fully realized world of the American combat soldier. Their dark, often insubordinate humor sparked controversy among army brass and incensed General George S. Patton, Jr.
This is the first of several volumes publishing the best of Bill Mauldin's single panel strips from 1940 to 1991 (when he stopped drawing). His Willie & Joe cartoons will be presented in a deluxe, beautifully designed two-volume slipcased edition of over 600 pages. The series is edited by Todd DePastino, whose Mauldin scholarship will be on full display in a biography of the artist coming in February 2008 from W.W. Norton. Willie & Joe will contain an introduction and running commentary by DePastino, providing context for the drawings, pertinent biographical details of Mauldin's life, and occasional background on specific cartoons (such as the ones that made Patton howl)."
Why I Wanted to Read It: It was actually a later volume of Mauldin's work I was after, that the Onion AV Club Comics Panel had reviewed favorably. I stumbled across both this and Volume I and happened to get this one first.
How I Liked It: Firstly, I have to say the packaging of this set is nothing short of ingenious. When I received this book with no dust jacket, I assumed (rather annoyed) that it had been removed for some reason. Both books actually come without jackets in a handy, very military dual box. "Official" stamps of "DECLASSIFIED", "TOP SECRET", and "EYES ONLY" along with both stencil lettering and a font that looks like an old Underwood (including faux mistakes "struck out" here and there) frame the meat of the books (the original Mauldin cartoons) themselves in the most appropriate way.
These are best read as a whole (unlike how I and the publisher have divided them: into two separate books) as the first volume provides biographical information about Mauldin that prefaces the work itself.
But the cartoons themselves: in this volume especially, Mauldin portrays a very real sense of the tedium, discomfort, and drain of war in a way so seldom seen. The petty politics of the upper ranks (cartoons which thrilled the lower ranks and, as described, infuriated General Patton), the deprivation of wartime, the utterly undramatic makes up the subject of the cartoons. Given continuing censorship from the US Army, Mauldlin's cartoons never depict the violence or gore he himself saw on a daily basis. In an interview quoted in Volume I, he said he merely tried to suggest "that there were bodies just offstage."
Mauldin conveyed the horror and trauma by the sad, exhausted semi-vacant stares of his characters, a choice that somehow seems more fittingly descriptive.
Most of the jokes are, as one can imagine, fairly esoteric even to a historian of this period. Frequently, they are starred and a backstory of sorts is offered in the back of the book to make the cartoon "make sense" (one cartoon depicts an American inquiring of a captured Nazi "You mind if I take a look at one of them leaflets?" to which the book offers Mauldin's commentary: "Soldiers are avid readers, some because they like to read and others because there is nothing else to do." The book also notes the constant shortage of reading material at the front). In this, they manage to be a fantastically vivid snapshot of history without being overly didactic.
Mauldin's style improved and sharpened as the war wore on, as did his wit (particularly his word economy). Some of the shadow work (the folds of the uniforms, the slope of jaw and brow structure) is nothing short of genius.
This stands as a valuable testament to history and to the gritty reality of war.
Notable: No cartoon appears on June 6th, 1944 (D-Day) although cartoons for June 5th and June 7th, respectively, appear.