When I was a girl, Snoopy was my favorite. I had the biggest stuffed Snoopy every. It was about 4 feet tall. I wish I still had it.
Good post. I cried when Schulz died. I felt like a really nice part of history had died with him. There was always the Peanuts. I had Snoopy sheets, Snoopy alarm clock and the Snoopy Toothbrush when I was a kid. The Peanuts were a huge part of Americana. I always liked Snoopy on his doghouse fighter plane.
Mauldin cartoons timeless
http://63.147.65.175/books/mauldin1224.htm
By Roger K. Miller
Special to The Denver Post
Up Front
By Bill Mauldin
Norton, 228 pages, $24.95
Dec. 24, 2000 - For years Charles Schulz, the late creator of the comic strip "Peanuts," used to pay annual tribute to political cartoonist Bill F. Mauldin. Every Veterans Day, Snoopy the dog, assuming the role of World War II veteran, would jauntily declare that he was going over to Mauldin's house to quaff a root beer in honor of the day.
This was more than just collegial recognition, a professional nod from one great pen-and-ink artist to another. Schulz, who made other occasional references to the war in his strip, was intimating through Snoopy that he and Mauldin shared something special by having shared that war.
What they shared was an esprit, a comradeship, and - no offense - you had to have been there to really understand it. This was Schulz's typically warm-hearted way of wanting to give others a glimpse behind the curtain.
It is just the sort of esprit and comradeship that, among other things, Mauldin tried to explain to the home front in "Up Front," the classic collection of his wartime cartoons. When it was first published in 1945, both Schulz and Mauldin were Army sergeants in Europe. But while Schulz toiled obscurely in a machine gun squad, Mauldin was already famous for the cartoons he drew for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize that same year.
Mauldin, now close to 80, won a second Pulitzer in 1959 as an editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He later moved to the Chicago Sun-Times.
In an introduction to this edition, historian Stephen Ambrose says of Mauldin, "More than anyone else, save only Ernie Pyle, he caught the trials and travails of the GI." So he did, and like Pyle, our most famous and gifted war correspondent, he favored the infantry, because it has more trials and travails than anyone. Six days a week, often under arduous conditions, he drew the hard and perilous lives of the dogface, and won the admiration of nearly every enlisted man.
But not every officer. In one of those annual tributes Snoopy said of himself and Mauldin, "We were both close friends with General Patton." Patton hardly friendly
This was an in-joke. Ambrose explains that Gen. George S. Patton, commander of the Third Army, was no friend to Sgt. Mauldin or his creations and would have silenced him if he could. Mauldin disliked Patton's insistence on battlefield spit and polish and what he regarded as his treatment of GIs as peasants.
Mauldin's two chief characters are Willie and Joe, who, Mauldin admits, are all but indistinguishable from each other. And why not? They are Everydogface -- dirty, grizzled, tired, baggy pantsed, hungry. And indispensable.
Mauldin's drawing style is something to admire in itself - swift, sure, bold strokes in black and white, with no gray. (Schulz once said he liked the way Mauldin drew mud.) Equally admirable are his wisdom and depth of understanding, in both the cartoons and accompanying text.
Armed with talent
Armed with this talent and understanding, he drew Willie and Joe fighting the enemy: the cold, the wet, the pomposities and privilege of rank - and, of course, the Germans. He catches war's eternal grubbiness and absurdity. The cartoons not only hold up well, they are timeless.
Each reader will have his or her favorite. Anyone who has occupied a low rung on the military ladder will appreciate the one in which two officers are gazing at spectacular mountain scenery, and one turns to the other and says, "Beautiful view. Is there one for the enlisted men?"
In another, Willie and Joe are ducking shot and shell, and Willie says, "I feel like a fugitive from th' law of averages."
Another expresses a universal urge amid the wreckage of war. Standing in a bombed-out house and staring at the lone pane of unbroken glass in a window frame, Willie says, "Go ahead, Joe. If ya don't bust it ya'll worry about it all night."
"Up Front" was a great success in its first edition. Ambrose says it sold 3 million copies and was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list "an astonishing 18 months." (Indeed, that is astonishing. A history of the Times best-seller list shows that it was at No. 1 for 19 weeks and on the list as a whole for 41 weeks.)
After the war Willie and Joe went home and, like the other dogfaces, disappeared into the anonymity of civilian life. (The cartoonist told one interviewer that he planned to have them killed on the last day of the war, but the Stars and Stripes editor said he wouldn't print it.) Ambrose says Mauldin brought them back into cartoon life only twice, for the funerals of Gens. George C. Marshall in 1959 and Omar Bradley in 1983.
That is technically right, though they did make postwar appearances, as in Mauldin's 1947 book, "Back Home." But it's true that Mauldin pretty much retired them, which was wise to do. As the periodic reissues of "Up Front" show, old soldiers never die, especially if they fade away.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for almost 30 years, is a freelance writer and editor in Janesville, Wis.
