The Press: Mouldin Reconverts

Like other G.I.s, famed Soldier Cartoonist Bill Mauldin has found the transition to civilian life hard. So have his once begrimed subjects, Willie and Joe. In uniform, their moods and deeds had authority because thousands shared them. In civvies, they were on their own.

The result has been sadly apparent in Mauldin’s daily cartoons. Some have fallen woefully flat (Willie and Joe worrying about getting their feet wet in the rain). Others have gotten by because they were just gags (a staff officer consoling a four-star general: “There’s always politics, sir —or a South American revolution. . . .”).

Starting out far better staked than most of the veterans he wants to draw (his Up Front, a Book-of-the-Month, has sold 783,000 copies), Mauldin has consciously gone slumming. Digging for ideas, he haunts the bars along Los Angeles’ tawdry Main Street, hangs around the veterans’ service centers, employment agencies. In desperation he decided to take a job in a shipyard to pick up color, but V-J day virtually put the yard out of business.

The one place he is most a typical veteran is in his home. He and his wife Jeanie bought a little five-room house in West Los Angeles, invested in wartime furniture. Little rubs of the Mauldins’ own domestic life sometimes show in his cartoons. Explains Bill: “It’s just because we have been apart so long. Besides we never really lived a family life. It’s new and kinda tough. But we’ll work it out.”

Last week, for perhaps the first time since he left the Army, Bill Mauldin hit upon a cartoon idea that had the impact of his best G.I. cartoons. The subject:

West Coast anti-Nisei prejudice (see cut). It gave promise that in peace, as in war, young Bill Mauldin might be something better than a gag man.